Myth of the Crusades: The Construction of the Nation and Europe in the Discourse of History between 1780-1918

• Investigation of the continuities and discontinuities of historical interpretations of the Crusades in German states and the Empire on the one hand and France on the other.
• Investigation of interconnections and cultural translations on two levels: on the one hand between the different history-forming medial arenas (the historical research and textbook narratives) and on the other hand between the two countries.

Political and Cultural Background: Rise of Nationalism

• The first impetus for a broad historiographical preoccupation with the Crusades came from Napoleon's expeditions to Egypt and Palestine. They marked the beginning of a new era of euphoric European perception of the Crusades. It was typical for secular as well as for Christian conservative historians.
• The thesis that modern historiography is closely connected with the emergence of nationalism in the history of science has been confirmed.
• The connection between nationalism and crusade narratives can be seen in the nationalistically encoded goals and values, the patterns of thought as well as argumentation and action that were conveyed through the crusade narratives of the period under study.
• The significance of the medieval crusades for Europe, the development of its nations, and the Mediterranean region was grossly overestimated in both scholarly literature and textbooks throughout the 19th century.
• Representations of the Crusades can be understood for the 19th century as a discursive space of contemporary historians in which conceptions and patterns of meaning of European Orientalism were narratively reproduced or incorporated in order to historico-politically legitimize current events of European colonialism from a Christian perspective.

(Supra- and sub-) national crusade narrative.

• Nineteenth-century representations of the crusades proved to be distinctly mutable narratives that could integrate secular and Christian concepts as well as European, colonial, or national notions of order into a historical master narrative.
• The new dichotomy of Orient and Occident opened up the possibility of tying into both Christian and secular crusade narratives and the colonialist argumentations intertwined with them. Thus, distinct contributions to the European crusade narratives emerged from different political, confessional, national, or regional perspectives.
• The critique of the crusades that culminated in the Enlightenment from the late 17th century onward was not shared by historians, intellectuals, and rulers of the 19th century; rather, they saw the topos of the crusades as an appropriate symbol for the contemporary political landscape in historical discourse.

Christian Crusade Narrative

• At the beginning of the 19th century, the neo-Crusade ideology was coupled with a historical-theological zeal that viewed the Crusades as works of God. Proponents of this Christian narrative fought secularization and crafted Christian European rather than national crusade narratives.
• Despite significant changes in historical conceptions, Christianity functioned almost universally in the 19th century as a unifying value for concepts of nationhood and Europe.

Colonial concept of the Crusades

• With the turn to historicism, however, predominantly theological interpretations received interpretational competition: the originally Christian crusade idea was secularized, historicized and integrated into colonial concepts.
• Secularly oriented historians deconstructed Christian crusade myths with scientific-rational analysis, but further sharpened the colonialist perspectives to be found in them.
• The new secular interpretation differed from Christian interpretations in particular in that the violent interventions were no longer legitimized by Christianity's historical claim to Palestine, but by Europe's "moral right" to civilize the "others."
• The nationalization of crusade narratives can be traced in both countries under study, but each with different connotations: In France, the secular concept of the civilizing mission dominated, while in German historiography the concept of a medieval, nationally organized world domination formed the central interpretive framework.

Persistence of Christian-National Crusade Narratives in Textbooks

• These developments were only partially reflected in history textbooks; here, even at the end of the 19th century, largely unbroken religious crusade semantics can be found alongside national and imperial argumentations.
• The crusade narratives of French textbooks and historiographical literature corresponded to the prevailing 19th-century historical images of the "deux France," which juxtaposed royalist-conservative supporters of the ancien régime and republican-progressive defenders of the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789.
• These imaginaries of the French nation can be subordinated to the Christian and secular interpretive patterns of the Crusades in that they presented France, on the one hand, as the "eldest daughter" of the Catholic Church and a missionary to Europe as well as the rest of the world and, on the other hand, as the cradle of civilization, heiress and preserver of the great Greek and Roman cultures.

The images of the "other"

• Basic descriptions of a "non-European Other" were generated in the crusade narratives of the 19th century. The constructions of "the" Arabs, Turks or Greeks also made use of such elements that belonged to the cultural knowledge of the Middle Ages as well as of the Renaissance or Enlightenment.
• For the German textbooks, a radicalization can be recognized in the second half of the 19th century; increasingly, a holy struggle against the "barbarians of the Orient" was anticipated with Christian enthusiasm.
• In the scholarly works, on the other hand, contrary tendencies can be seen. Here we find evaluations of Muslims and the Orient that can be interpreted as attempts to present the cultural significance of Islam for Mediterranean societies more adequately than was still the case in the first half of the 19th century.
• French history textbooks, when viewed as a whole, are not as extensively interspersed with radical Christian narratives as German ones. There are certainly weighty voices that must be read as a moderate critique of the image of the "barbarian Orient." They pay tribute to the civilizing achievements of the Arab or Muslim world in contact with the weaker Christian culture of the European Middle Ages.
• In the majority of texts about the Crusades, however, Christianity as the inheritor of antiquity is declared to be the bearer of civilization, to which Islam would be opposed as the embodiment of oriental despotism and as an anti-civilizing principle. In the logic of this argumentation, the Crusades become the crystallization point of the confrontation of civilized Europe with the violent forces of Islam.