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Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Bernard McGinnReviewed work(s):

The Powers of Prophecy. The 'Cedar of Lebanon' Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to theDawn of the Enlightenment by Robert E. Lerner

Source: The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), pp. 640-641Published by: Catholic University of America PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25022168Accessed: 08/09/2009 08:52

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640 BOOK REVIEWS

The Powers of Prophecy. The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaughtto the Dawn of the Enlightenment. By Robert E. Lerner. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1983. Pp. xiii, 249. $32.50.)

R. G Collingwood in his famous The Idea of History contrasted good and badhistory in terms of the difference between the "scissors and paste" approach andthe good detective work that hunts out and discerns the meaning of clues to

uncover the intentions of the criminal. The image is an apt one to describe RobertLerner's new book, which is an exercise in some deft and original detective work onthe "mentality" of prophecy in the Middle Ages and beyond. Lerner's clues are

principally brief and sometimes fragmentary texts in scores of widely scatteredmanuscripts; the mystery he seeks

to castlight

on is the social andreligiousfunction of apocalyptic prophecy.

The short and obscure prophecy which in most versions begins with the words"Cedrus alta Libani succidetur" ("The high cedar of Lebanon will be felled") haslong been known to the students of medieval apocalyptic literature, though consid

erable confusion has existed about its original time of composition and context. Onthe basis of a manuscript from Ottobeuren now in Innsbruck, Lerner shows thatthe original version, like many other medieval prophecies, was intended as a

message of consolation in a crisis-situation, in this case the Mongol onslaughtagainst central Europe. The time of composition was shortly before 1240; the place

most likely Hungary. The real originality of Lerners book, however, is that he hasnot been content in ferreting out the meaning of the original version (a task initself not worthy of more than an article), but that he has taken on the moreambitious labor of following all the twists and turns of this short but long-livedprophecy down through the seventeenth century.

The original prophecy was reworked about 1290 to fit a new situation, theMameluke pressure on the last Crusader toehold in Palestine. Tripoli had fallen in

1289 (a vaticinium ex eventu duly recorded in the new version), and in 1291 the fallof Acre spelled the end of Christian presence on the mainland. This version, the"Tripoli Prophecy" proper, was widely known; it was revised, edited, and com

mented upon for the next two centuries to fit varying crises, mostly in terms of thethreat of Islam. The prophecy continued to find an audience in the sixteenthcentury, when no less a figure than Martin Luther made comments upon it.Professor Lerner pursues his manuscript clues with "Sherlockian" persistence andinsight before bringing his case to its conclusion with an all-too-brief summary onthe uses of such prophecies in medieval and early modern religion.

Not all of Lerner's interpretations of these vatic pronouncements are equallyconvincing. His identification of the "lion who arises out of mountain caverns" ofthe 1290 Tripoli text with the returning Frederick II is possible, though by no

means as certain as he claims (e.g., pp. 52-53, 73). A more serious criticismconcerns the difference between a good piece of detective work and a good detectivestory. Despite Lerner's frequently engaging style, the detailed reconstructions ofpossible texts and the lengthy footnotes devoted to various manuscript collections,while valuable to the specialist, make this at times a tedious book, especially in the

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later chapters. A chart depicting the complex stemma of the many versions of theTripoli prophecy would have been a welcome addition.

Bernard McGinnDivinity School, University of Chicago

The Italian Crusades: The Papal-Angevin Alliance and the Crusades againstChristian L\ay Powers, 1254-1343. By Norman Housley. (New York: OxfordUniversity Press/Clarendon Press. 1982. Pp. xii, 293. $44.00.)

In this book Dr. Housley seeks to persuade historians that they have beenmistaken in tending to see the "political" Crusades in Italy and elsewhere as a merepolitical and financial device which the Holy See used for short-term ends, andwhich amounted to a perversion of the crusading ideal. In his view they were, on

the contrary, a consistent and statesmanlike application of legal principles established early in the thirteenth century, and used by the popes in legitimate self

defense against aggressive and sometimes heretical secular rulers. In proclaimingsuch Crusades the popes were not debasing the ideals of the Crusade as they hadbeen hitherto understood, but were defending their own political authority, especially in Italy and the Papal State, in the general interests of Christendom.

Moreover, the Italian Crusades were, he argues, a necessary political preconditionwhich had to be fulfilled before the Crusade against the Muslims in the East couldbe properly effected. The "political" Crusades exerted considerable influence onpublic opinion in favor of the popes, arousing substantial support in some countries. Though he acknowledges that there were irregularities in the way in which

Crusading funds and supplies intended for the East were diverted by the "political"Crusades to the West, and allows also that contemporaries criticized the "political"Crusades on these grounds, Dr. Housley does not consider them to have affectedadversely the course of events in the Latin East.

The reviewer does not feel Dr. Housley's discussion of the nature of the Crusadeto be thorough enough to give full support to his main hypothesis. For example,although he admits that in the Later Middle Ages the Curia very often treatedpolitical resistance to the Roman Church as heresy, he is unwilling to entertain theobvious corollary, that the political Crusade is as much a part of the history of therepression of heresy as it is of the Crusade. Cardinal Gil Albornoz, the great paladinof the Papal State in the mid-fourteenth century, was typical of a certain curialattitude in treating all those who resisted his authority as "patarini." Housley isalso very sparing in his discussion (p. 66) of Innocent Ill's threatened crusadeagainst Markward of Anweiler (which probably never took place), which is by hisadmission the prototype of the thirteenth-century curial theory of the "political"Crusade. It is not at all clear to me that Innocent chose to mention a possiblecrusading indulgence against Markward simply (as Housley says) because the latter

was impeding the launch of an Eastern Crusade from Sicily: this was not theconclusion reached by Elizabeth Kennan (inTraditio, XXVII [1971], 231-249).