The Problem with Defeat

When authors such as Robert the Monk wrote of miracles like that of the celestial knights charging into battle against the Turks at Antioch on 28 June 1098, they were integrating evidence of divine agency into their narratives. This was crucially important for authors who sought to emphasise the sacred significance of a crusade and draw attention to God's very literal involvement in that enterprise. As we have seen, texts like Robert's offer a version of the First Crusade in which that campaign, its victories included, represents an itinerant miracle, the status of which was demonstrated through associated, constituent miracles, like that at the battle of Antioch. Victories were further proofs of divine approbation, especially in cases where the conditions were unfavourable, or the odds ostensibly insurmountable. However, authors who sought to record subsequent crusades, the events of which included setbacks, disappointments, defeats and controversies, could not apply the abovementioned narrative logic so easily. Despite this, narratives of later crusades do continue to discuss miraculous themes, and to draw upon manifestations of divine mercy in the support of their narrative agendas. Thus, and as this chapter argues, while the overarching rationale that the crusade was itself a miracle – what we might call the miraculous metanarrative – disintegrates, the constituent miracles that would have supported it remain, and continue to function as indicators of divine agency, approbation or, in some instances, wrath.

The narratives of the 1145–9 crusade to the Levant, also known as the Second Crusade, contain illustrative examples of the miraculous working in this reduced capacity, and even discuss the challenges that failure posed to the logic of crusade. The Second Crusade campaign to Asia Minor and Syria failed in its goal of recapturing Edessa after its loss to Zengi in 1144, and culminated in an ignominious retreat from a failed siege at Damascus in 1148. Unlike the First Crusade, Latin contemporaries did not herald the Second Crusade as a miracle. Far from it. Looking back on that expedition from the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in the late twelfth century, a typically gloomy William of Tyre commented that the crusaders ‘started on the way as if contrary to the will of an angry God, and, in punishment for the sins of man, they accomplished nothing pleasing to Him on that entire pilgrimage.