Crusading as a Family: A Study of the County of Champagne, 1179 to 1226

Abstract

Crusading as a Family examines the myriad social effects of crusading on the county of Champagne and the interrelated families within it. It addresses five questions: How did the crusading movement affect the institutional and economic development of Champagne itself? How often did married men with children take the cross and journey to the East? How did families, particularly women and children, manage in the absence of their crusading relatives and cope in the event of their deaths? How did families of varied means meet the human and economic costs of crusading in the short-term and over several generations? What opportunities did continual holy war present to the men, women, and children of crusading families?

The difficulties that military families face on the home front, the struggles of veterans to reintegrate into society, the fate of military widows and orphans, and the emergence of family traditions of military service were as vitally-important issues in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France as they are in twenty-first-century America. The impact of the crusades on the families that supported the movement is a significant subject in the history of Europe more broadly that has only become viable in recent decades due to changes in our understanding of the medieval family, introduction of prosopographical methods, and greater access to non-narrative, administrative sources. Crusading as a Family enters a wider debate about the impact of religious violence within societies, its influence on social values, family practices, and mentalités, and the development of the political, administrative, and economic institutions which sustain them. It is also part of an ongoing effort to better integrate the crusades and religious violence into mainstream social and economic studies of western Europe. Traditionally, the crusades occupied a distinct and segregated subfield within the historiography of the Middle Ages. However, increasingly medievalists have recognized that it is impossible to write accurate social histories of western Europe without accounting for the important role of religious violence in shaping society. This dissertation does that.