Crusade, Culture, and Conflict: The Evidence of Monastic Miscellanies

Abstract

“Later” crusading has become a vibrant field in recent years, with a concern for our core theme, “patterns of conflict and negotiation,” at its center. Often, and rightly enough, those patterns have been focused on matters of high politics and diplomacy, military affairs, papal propaganda, and more. The approach adopted here complements these efforts by modulating their perspectives. This article explores patterns of conflict and negotiation as they played out in the realms of crusading experience, culture, and memory in the wake of the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the siege of Belgrade (1456). It does so through the lens of those particularly rich, but also challenging, fifteenth-century manuscript sources known as “miscellanies.”