the pre-battle processions of the first crusade and the creation of militant christian communitas

Abstract

During the First Crusade warriors and retainers participated with clergy in a series of liturgically prescribed penitential processions to demonstrate worthiness to God and achieve military victory. This embodied participation in liturgical supplication, usually reserved for clergy, bound the crusaders together in a sacred community predicated on fighting God’s war against God’s enemies, who were, in this liturgical framework, defined as non-Christians. Further, participation in these rituals – routine in the West – necessarily took on new meaning when enacted in the Holy Land, thus endowing participation in the procession, and in the crusade, with greater devotional meaning. These ritualized processions thus materialized the ideological premises of crusade as a form of devotion melding penance and sacred violence.

Keywords:

• first crusade
• processions
• liturgy
• Rogations
• ritual
• holy war
• embodiment

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by Dartmouth College.

Notes on contributors

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. She is a medieval religious and cultural historian with particular interests in France, kingship, saints and sanctity, liturgy, art and ideology, and the crusades. She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (2008) and Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (2017), along with several other co-edited or authored books and collections.