A bit less-hostile tiles
New research focuses on the 13th century English crusader “combat series,” which reflects influences from the Arab world.
History is sometimes written by those who decide to cast a crusade in the Holy Land, which ended in a draw, as a medieval English victory.
Richard the Lionheart was not a winner of the Third Crusade, though he traveled home with certain concessions from Saladin, but when Henry III and Eleanor of Provence commissioned tiles depicting Richard and Saladin, the artist (or artists) portrayed the Christian monarch spearing the Muslim one with a lance.
The English king and queen’s hope, says Amanda Luyster, of College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., was propaganda. To drum up support for another crusade, they sought to convince the public that Richard’s crusade was more successful than it had been.
Luyster’s research on the tiles, discovered (in ruins) at Chertsey Abbey in England, underpins a forthcoming exhibition at the college. It reveals that the crusaders—who traveled long distances, at great expense and jeopardy to their longevity to fight Muslims and displace them from power in the Holy Land—came back with an affinity for the culture of those opponents.
My article “A restored medieval depiction of the Crusades shows how England embraced Islamic culture” appears in the wire Religion News Service. (So far, the Australian Sight magazine has reprinted it, as have Microsoft site MSN.com, ChurchLeaders.com, and Word & Way.)
I will deliver an online talk next Tuesday on “Visual Illiteracy: How Museums Neglect and Distort Jewish and Catholic Material Culture,” through Catholic Theological Union’s Catholic-Jewish Studies Program. Those who are interested can register here.