Interpreting the Crusades: 'Jerusalem Delivered' in 440 Years of Art & Opera

• In Event: The History of Fiction and the Fiction of History

Abstract

In describing the Donald Trump Presidency or his current election campaign, his ardent supporters and fierce critics often reference the Crusades, the Christian wars against Islamic occupation of the ‘Holy Lands’ starting in 1095 and continuing until 1492. The Washington Post often critiques Trump’s bid to question or overturn the 2020 election results as a crusade. Among the insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2020 were Christian-right supporters carrying flags with images of the five-fold Jerusalem Cross, symbolic of liberating Jerusalem from Islamic occupation. Beyond Trump, crusading imagery is often located in foreign policies and international development.

Despite the enduring legacy of the crusades, there is surprisingly little scholarship on this subject in political thought. Ionnis Evriginnis’ “Fear of Enemies and Collective Action” tracing Western political thought from Greek antiquity to the present hardly references the Crusades. There’s no exhumation of historical references to Crusades in Edward Said’s monumental genealogy “Orientalism” that deconstructs stereotypical Western worldviews of the Muslim Mediterranean and East.

In analyzing the crusades, the paper turns to historians, literature, and art. The paper offers a close reading of the 1581 epic poem “Jerusalem Delivered” from Renaissance Italian poet Torquato Tasso as a text for understanding the endurance and reconstitution of the meaning of Crusades in the cultural and political imagination of Europe. Tasso’s poem, one of the most widely read in European history, inspired several art works, literature, and over 100 operas. Its heroic knights such as Rinaldo or the fictive Saracen sorceress Armida became well-known. For analyzing the ‘popular culture’ around Tasso’s texts, this paper accords special attention to operas and their performance histories.

Pluralistic interpretations of the Crusades result from the text being circulated among a variety of groups. The paper identifies three periods with different interpretations of Tasso. Tasso-inspired operas until the early 19th century presented the text as a victory of Christianity over Islam. The music played to sentiment and the softer delicate parts were often assigned to the Christian soldiers. Castrati sang the heroic male parts. However, late-18th century texts starting with Voltaire and the English Romantic writers began to treat the Crusades differently with a greater appreciation of the East along with rising cosmopolitanism in Europe. By the mid-19th century, anti-imperialists began to argue against the Crusades. Verdi’s I Lombardi (1843) while drawing upon Tasso’s poem is mostly about Austrian occupation of Lombardy. Dvorak’s 1904 opera Armida was a failure both because the Crusades story did not fit Slavic metaphors and audiences were not that interested in Dvorak’s religiosity. Current interpretations, limited to a small group of artists, decry the violence in the texts. Judith Weir’s 2005 opera Armida presents Rinaldo as an American soldier stationed in Iraq, and Armida is a TV journalist. Rindalo and the American soldiers become peaceful gardeners at the opera’s end. From Monteverdi to Weir, current performances of Tasso-inspired operas seldom present the spectacle as a triumph of Christianity.

What then explains the resurgence of the Crusades metaphor in American political imagination, especially amidst the far-right? First, using Ann Swidler’s terms, texts about the crusades are part of Western ‘cultural repertoires’, differentially recalled across time. A reading of Tasso’s text shows how the meaning of the poem changed from fears of Ottoman rule in the 16th century to addressing imperialism in the 19th. Religiosity in America now attempts to change the meaning from occupation of Holy Lands to anyone perceived as an “infidel”. In large part, this has to do with Evangelical support for the Trump Presidency. Second, the Crusades are largely forgotten in political thought, providing the far-right an opportunity to reconstruct monistic meanings such as equating Trump’s bid to overturn elections as a Holy War. Finally, one of the enduring legacies of Tasso’s poem is the internal battle in the heroic characters. Opera’s treatment of the furies, that can be traced to Aristotelian thought, is notable in this regard. The operatic resolution often lies in the Enlightenment awakening of reason and responsibility among the characters. The 21st century crusaders view themselves as victims who must externalize their fury. As dramaturgical texts, heroes who fight no internal battles and refuse to take any responsibility may not survive. Nevertheless, the paper ends on a normative note to urge pluralistic counter-narratives of the Crusades.

Note: This paper was accepted to the 2021 APSA Convention but I couldn’t make it due to a Covid diagnosis. My scholarship often addresses issue in arts and culture. My book “Globalized Arts” won an APSA ITP Section best book award & I edited the journal Arts & International Affairs.

Author

• J.P. Singh, George Mason University