The Baron’s Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences

The Baron’s Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences

Michael Lower

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

What Lower has attempted in this short monograph is extraordinary for its goal and simple delivery: the utilization of a historical event and its varied responses to argue for comparative analysis versus totalizing generalities that many historians utilize for narrative and explanatory constructs.  In essence, Lower presents a case for examining closely long held ‘truisms’ that are immensely popular in modern society, and gives credit to the people actually involved in the historical events for having personality, reasons that made sense to them, and their own opinions.

Lower begins his examination of the Baron’s Crusade (1234-1241), but outlining several key factors for his history.  The first is that the long held view that all of European Christianity felt the same about the crusades, should be challenged as a generality that perceives all Christians as coming from the same mold.  The response of the barons involved in this event (Thibaut IV of Champagne, Peter of Brittany, Earl Richard of Cornwall to name a few), were predicated not only by their own agendas, but by what was beneficial in each case to them, thinking no less that they were still indeed Christian and acting on behalf of God.  Lower goes on to challenge the assumption that the papacy of Rome held sweeping control, by utilizing the failed attempt of Gregory IX to direct the crusade to the aid of Constantinople.  At the height of its power, Lower argues that the Church itself and its head bishop could not ultimately control all who pledged allegiance to her.  In addition, the examination of each baron’s native location and the response towards ‘other’ in their midst (heretics and Jews), found greater impetuous in politic and situational expediencies, rather than as sweeping policies of the Church’s hierarchy.

While Lower does not provide as much detail as the reader might like about the actual chronological events of the crusade once it got under way, the purpose of the work becomes clear if one only glances through the introduction and the conclusion.  The complexities and shifting positions of individuals are best studied in comparative light with all the equations taken into account, and the scholar is better served by giving up archetypical crutches of identity based solely on affiliation.  The modern individual demands facts and quantitative details that form the basis for a conclusion in the medical and judicial world, why not in the study of history and the questioning of historical ‘truths’?

John Lowe (J. Sharp)