CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE *

In the 1260s the French poet Rutebeuf, lamenting the failure of his countrymen to move themselves to recapture Jerusalem, exclaimed that ‘the fire of charity is cold in every Christian heart’? These writers used the theological word curitas, charitei for Christian love, heightened it in a traditional Christian way with the words ‘fired,’ ‘fire’, and linked it to the crusades. Since love has always been held to be fundamental to all Christian ethics, including the ethics of violence, it is worth asking how representative they were of the apologists for the crusading movement. I hope to show that the idea of the crusader expressing love through his participation in acts of armed force was an element in the thinking of senior churchmen in the central Middle Ages. An understanding of this can help us place the crusades in the context of the spiritual reawakening of western Europe that accompanied the eleventh-century reform movement. Christian love, however, was presented to the faithful in a way that they would understand, rather than in the form that would have reflected the complexities of the relationship between violence and charity as understood by theologians and canon lawyers. My discussion is limited to the justification of crusades to the East, although crusaders were not by any means only to be found in expeditions launched to recover or aid the Holy Land; they also campaigned in Spain, along the shores of the Baltic and even in the interior of western Europe: Christian charity encompasses love of God and love of one’s neighbour, and both these expressions of love were touched on by apologists for the crusades: in September 1096 Pope Urban I1 promised the indulgence to those Bolognese who joined the First Crusade, ‘seeing that they have committed their property and their persons out of love of God and their neighbour’;5 and St Bernard, writing in the 1140s of news of Muslim vic-