The Holy Beach-Towel hypothesis
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1183496,00.html
Diarmaid MacCulloch finds the shabby reality of the Crusades in
accounts from Thomas Asbridge and Jonathan Phillips
Saturday April 3, 2004
The Guardian
The First Crusade: A New History
by Thomas Asbridge
408pp, Free Press, £20
The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople
by Jonathan Phillips
371pp, Jonathan Cape, £20
A distinguished medieval historian, who has become rather bored with
the Crusades, once sketched me a pleasing theory. Some 11th-century
French noblemen, tiring of family life and the tedious round of
endowing monasteries and oppressing peasants, hatched a plot to
escape. In 1095 they persuaded Pope Urban II to call a church council
to Clermont, at which he appealed for the recapture of the Holy Land
from Islam. The noblemen duly rallied enthusiastically to the cause,
set out with much fanfare and then retired en masse to a beach in the
Adriatic. There they would all stay, enjoying the sunshine and getting
their stories straight, until their money ran out or they became
homesick. At this point, Crusaders would retrace their steps, pausing
only to stock up with various local souvenirs which they proceeded to
relabel as the Holy Beach-Towel of Antioch and the like - back in
western Europe these relics provided impressive evidence of their
martial feats, and became the object of much devout pilgrimage.
Crusades Crusade
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20Crusades%20OR%20Crusade&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=Crusades+OR+Crusade&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_oq=Crusades%20Crusade&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
.
|
