Warring at the End of Times: Religious violence in Timothy La Haye's "Babylon Rising" and medieval crusade sources 

I announced a title, "Warring at the End of Times, religious violence in Timothy LaHaye's Babylon Rising and medieval crusade sources". I shall not quite keep to it, although I can address (if so desired) at length in the discussion the commonalities and differences . Rather, I shall develop a comparison between the two genres of literary fiction -- turn of the millenium fundamentalist evangelical novels and high medieval crusade romances or epics (Romans de croisade, épopées de croisade). Present-day audience response, known for the former genre, can (cautiously) teach us something about the High medieval reception of crusade novels, and in particular, about the novels' régime de croyance. This question will be the focus of the first part of the lecture. In the second part, I shall leave aside LaHaye's novels and focus on what the crusade epics' theology can (cautiously again) tell us about the manner in which the High and Late Middle Ages understood the relationship between retributive violence and Sacred History, Vergeltung and Heilsgeschichte. 

The Old French Crusade Cycle, and in particular its earliest three books, the Cycle de la Croisade proper, has long interested, but also baffled, historians and literary scholars. First, there are the classic questions of authorship and dating. Was the tripartite Cycle de la Croisade -- the Song of Antioch, the Captives, and the Song of Jerusalem -- composed close to the European crusaders' conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099 -- so in the early twelfth century? or was it penned much later, perhaps circa 1200? The Chanson d'Antioche, best known, has been the most debated. If its composition is late, was there a now lost primitive song in circulation around 1100? Was its author to be identified with the Ricars li pelerins, Richard the Pilgrim, mentioned once in the text? Or was this person a fiction? And was the real author, then, Grainsdor de Douai, named only once and not in all manuscripts? The current, cautious orthodoxy places the main redaction of the Chanson after Saladin's victory at Hattin, 1187. Second, there is the issue of genre, in particular, the relationship between these versified epics and the First Crusade chronicles. Historians are not fully at ease with the first genre, epic poetry. At least chronicles sometimes assert their veracity, label some of their information as eyesight, or related by trustworthy witnesses. But the boundaries between these two genres -- chronicles and epics or romances -- are hazy. It has been for the past decades the dominant position that reconstructions of the First Crusade have to address the versified histories of Gilo of Pairis or Ralph of Caen. And it has been argued by Jean Flori, the most authoritative French expert on the First Crusade, that the Song of Antioch and Albert von Aachen used a common source. In Flori's wake the same has been said of The Song of Jerusalem: It too is a cousin of Albert von Aachen. 
Yet despite this genealogy, a substantial gulf separates the Song of Antioch from the chronicles written in 1099 and shortly after -- in particular from the Liber penned by Raimond d'Aguilers. Raymond believed that he stood at the End of Times and that the crusade was the Last War announced by John's Revelation; his work is rich in visions and shot through with quasi-communist ideology. No such egalitarianism in the Song of Antioch. Its listeners and readers were aristocrats, and it caters to this audience's tastes. Sticking close to the actual course of the First Crusade as we know it from chronicles, the plot of the Chanson d'Antioche did not meander as epics often do. It took its audience all the way from the departure of the expedition to the crusaders' major victory before the walls of the great regional capital. Before this triumph against the relief army led by Corbaran (Kerbogha to the chronicles), the Chanson described the long siege of Antioch, and its capture thanks to the providential conversion to Christianity of a Turkish lord. The Song of Antioch, as an epic should, provided much spectacular swordplay and feats of prowess with lances. The apex in warrior exploit is -- by historiographic consent -- Godfrey of Bouillon's splitting in half a Muslim knight, with a single sword-blow. One part fell on the battlefield, the other half rigidly clung to the horse, which took it back into the city, spraying the streets with blood along the course of its frantic gallop. Knightly prowess, but holy war reactions: "The Franks cavorted with delight as they saw this, screaming, `Montjoie' at the top of their voices (...) the race of the Devil was terrified at the sight" and lamented. Throughout the Cycle, chivalric prowess leaves grass, sand, and streets splattered with brain and blood. To cite just two representative doublets of verses: Del sanc as Sarrasins font corre grant ruisel, Tout li pré sont couvert d'entraille et de boisel (They made run out a great brook of Saracen blood; all the meadows were covered with guts and innards). And: As espees trençans font tele occisïon, Li sans e li cervelle en gist sor le sablon (Shearing with swords, they made such a great slaughter that blood and brains covered the sand). 
For its aristocratic audiences, the cycle also provided comic entertainment. But entertainment was of a gruesome sort. It developed the figures of the so-called Tafurs, a group of poor soldiers within God's Army, attested for the first time in Guibert of Nogent's Gesta Dei per Francos (circa 1108). One is far here from the exaltation of the poor characteristic of Raymond d'Aguilers' apocalyptic chronicle; the downtrodden kept their fanatical cruelty but became burlesque. In particular, these barefoot, half-naked men, armed with cudgels and Danish axes, along with their king, le roi Tafur, engaged in demonstrative acts of cannibalism. The Tafurs skinned dead Muslims and roasted or boiled them. This to the amusement of the aristocratic leaders of the army, who provided these proletarian cannibals with wine to wash down Turkish flesh, and claimed lack of authority over them when Turkish envoys protested about these inhuman feasts. 
Finally, as in the French Song of Roland, the Chanson d'Antioche contains visions, sermons, prayers, and theological declarations. It is these religious statements that, given my current research, I find particularly interesting. The longest prayer is a Credo of sorts, adapted to the crusaders' need for divine protection. It is uttered by one Fulcher l'Orphelin, the first man to ascend into Antioch on the ladder provided by the Turkish convert Daciens:
"Lord God, Lord the Father, by Your most holy name, [protect me], You Who took birth from the Holy Virgin, and saved Jonah from the stomach of the fish, resurrected bodily from the dead Saint Lazar. You pardoned Mary Magdalen, when in Simon's dwelling she cried at your feet; She poured out her heart's tears to such a point that she washed them all and around, and then anointed them with myrrh with good intention [motion of the soul]. She did something quite wise, and obtained a good reward. God, You suffered the passion on the holy Cross, and Longinus struck You with the lance with force. He had never had sight, as we well know this truth. The blood came to him through the shaft with impetuous gushing all the way to his fists; he splashed his eyes with it, and obtained sight. "Lord, have mercy", Longinus shouted out, with good intention. You granted him pardon and great remission [for his sins]. You were put in the tomb and treated as if a thief; the third day afterwards there was the resurrection; You went to Hell, which could not defend itself, and You threw out from it Your friends, Noah and Aaron; then ascended to Heaven on Ascension day (...) There, above, in Your holy place, there is not any traitor (felon). God! Just as this is the Truth -- and so we do indeed well believe -- let me ascend and be safe, and do You protect the French from death and prison, that we may conquer the city and its keep". 
"Then", continues the poet, Fulcher "raised his hand, made a blessing [sign of the cross]; and grabbing the ladder, he went up". This prayer weaves together motifs of pardon, salvation from death, victory and vengeance (given the role of Longinus' Lance during the First Crusade). Other prayers, shorter, take up the core of Fulcher's Credo. Godfrey of Bouillon, when pressing hard Corbaran's fleeing Turks in the great battle before Antioch, finds himself ahead of the others and cornered. He too invokes Lazar and Mary the sinner. And before the Antioch ladder, Godfrey too uses the formula professing the truth of the Gospels and his belief in it -- "God, just as this is the Truth, and just as I believe it without doubting, give us tonight that we may conquer the city". Commonly in the Chanson's sermons or in its moments of need, a Frank will invoke Christ's torments on the Cross at the fetid Jews' hands, and Christ's sufferings to save His people, the Christians. The Christians should in return be willing to suffer martyrdom to avenge Him. 
Another figure who speaks theology is Daciens, the Turkish turncoat and convert who delivers his six towers to Bohemond of Tarento. Repeatedly, as this "blessed Turk" anxiously waits for his allies, he confesses  "Christ the Savior". At another point Daciens exclaims "I truly believe in Christ, Mary's son". Belief in the Virgin Birth marks the convert as a convert. To encourage the French, the traitor Daciens clamors, "By the God who was born from a virgin in Bethlehem, I shall not betray you even should I lose my head". [In the Babylon Rising series, conversion implies recognizing Christ with a formulaic expression of desire to have Him enter one's life]. Daciens (known to other sources as Pirrus or Fairouz) demonstrates his Christian leanings in the most gruesome way. While he prays Jesus that his wife may convert to his desired "law", while he adjures her to "believe in Jesus who was tortured on the cross and in the Holy Virgin who bore Him (...)", he does not hesitate to throw her from the battlements, to her death and damnation. Her body was shattered in more than twenty places; and "devils took her soul". The same alternative, conversion or death, awaits Daciens' brother. Hardened in paganism, he loses his head.  

Is theology in the Chanson d'Antioche an ornament or a semi-foreign body which pops here and there between battle-scenes, battle-scenes that are the text's actual essence? or is it an integral and integrated part of the epic? From the answer to this question depends the evaluation of the longest theological section of the work, located at the begining of the poem (and echoed at its end). Rather than what the Chanson could add to the reconstruction of the crusade of 1095-1099, it was this famous passage that brought my attention to this work. To it I now turn. 
The Chanson d'Antioche's laisses 1 to 7 summarize very briefly the crusade, recall, intertwined with this summary, how Jesus suffered for the Christians on the Cross, and exhort its French audience that it is therefore its duty to take (like the First Crusaders of 1096-1099) the cross. The poet's listeners and readers too should "take revenge on the lineage of Antichrist". In laisses 8-13, the Song of Antioch gives a fabulous version of the crucifixion. Challenged on the cross by the bad thief, Christ explains to the good thief that in a thousand years a "new people" (novele gent), a "gent [which] is not yet born" will come to wipe out paganism from these lands and "take revenge for the death of their Father". Christ names them. They are the French. And He announces the rewards for martyrdom. The poet then recounts in two laisses Titus and Vespasian's destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.. It will be a first retaliation for Jesus' death. And the Chanson comments: "Thus was Our Lord avenged, and so will He be again. Whomsoever will go avenge Him will receive good reward, for he will wear a crown in the heavenly paradise". One should take good note at this point of the medieval meaning of venjeance, Latin vindicta -- it means righteous retribution, and is synonymous with ultio and justitia. 
The passage dramatizes a commonplace of medieval theology. Mid-ninth century, commenting Isaiah 63, Haymo of Auxerre had placed on the cross Christ's decision to avenge Himself from the reprobate Jews and the demons, and from all unbelievers. Haymo also assumed that this vengeance would take place twice (in 70 C.E. and at EndTimes). This duality of the Lord's vengeance was traditional since at least Augustine of Hippo. Christ had wept over Jerusalem, predicting two great catastrophes for the city. The first would take place in 70 CE with the Jewish Temple's destruction by the Romans (whose emperors the early middle ages later turned into Christians). The other would take place at the End of times; by the early Middle Ages, it was identified with the final battles pitting Christendom against Antichrist. Interestingly, Augustine also said that the tears announced the Church's travails against heretics between 70 CE and the End of History -- so a long series of conflicts. This dual realization is what exegetes called the partial fulfillment and the total fulfillment of a type or prophecy. A type or prophecy is realized at least once, partially, within the time of the Church, and for good and totally in the Last Days of Sacred History. Furthermore, the partial fulfillment is itself a type of the total fulfillment. For many participants in the First Crusade's storming of Jerusalem in July 1099, the expedition was this last war at the End of Times. And still between 1099 and at least 1108, many understood the crusade to be the total fulfillment of Christ's tearful prophecy. Traces of these expectations are visible in the Crusade Cycle, including several mentions of the lineage of Antichrist and a peculiar version of Godfrey's rulership over Jerusalem. But Christ did not return in glory; and Antichrist did not manifest himself. Within a few decades, the July 1099 conquest lost this apocalyptic status. Yet the First Crusade was not rejected into the category of profane history, and reduced to an event without meaning in Heilsgeschichte. The demotion was relative. The Song of Antioch testifies to the re-evaluation of the First Crusade from total fulfillment to the status of partial fulfillment. To cite anew the poem: "Thus was Our Lord avenged, and so will He be again". The crusade was, like Titus and Vespasian's Vengeance of the Lord, a partial fulfillment, and as such both an example and a type for the final war still to come. 
You may by now understand the interest of the question: Was this  theological formula a foreign body in the epic, and as such easily bypassed, dismissed, or forgotten by its audience? Otherwise put, what was -- to use Paul Veyne's concept -- the régime de croyance here at play? The Song of Antioch itself provokes the scholar to this question with its own self-evaluation <I cite>: "My lords, there is no fiction (fable) in our song: nothing but pure truth (pure verité) and the holiest account (saintissime sermon)". This assertion claims for the Chanson d'Antioche as a whole the status that its characters, for instance Fulcher l'Orphelin, attribute to their summary of the Christ Story. I cite Fulcher's prayer again: "God! Just as this is the Truth -- and so we do indeed well believe, etc"? Is the Chanson's Theology of History, then, a truth that must be believed, like Holy Scripture? How to check whether the audience accepted this claim, and how can we surmise the causes of this acceptance, if any? 
A tentative -- I insist on tentative and add in conditional -- answer can be found by turning to a much more recent literary genre, the American Protestant evangelical novel, and in particular to the two series authored by Timothy LaHaye, Left Behind and Babylon Rising. The genealogical metaphor (used in all earnest by the Chanson for the lineage of Antichrist) is dangerous, but LaHaye's novels and the 3-part crusade cycle are relatives in the grand genre of eschatological literature. In the late 1990, Tim LaHaye, a fundamentalist pastor, self-styled prophecy scholar, and professor at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, penned with the professional writer Jerry Jenkins what soon became an absolute best-seller. Between 1995 and 2000, twenty million of the volumes thus far published had been bought; by the beginning of 2002, 32 million copies. By the same year, 9% of Americans had read at least one volume. This impact (along with the impact of other fundamentalist novels) has led Crawford Gribben to state that evangelicalism can no longer be seen as a sub-culture; evangelicalism is at the center of American culture. Left Behind is the story of the survival, combats, and martyrdoms of men and women after the Rapture. Unlike true Christians predestined to salvation and taken bodily out of this world to heaven, the "left behind" are people who have to endure the Great Tribulation perpetrated by Antichrist and his minions. Left behind (not taken up in the Rapture), some of these men and women have found Christ -- the Christ of Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. But these elect at the End of Times do not merely endure the Tribulation; they also fight with arms and ruse Antichrist's religious and political tyranny. They are both martyrs and crusaders. The series' final book, Glorious Appearing, the End of Days (2004), features the return of Christ, His victory over Antichrist, and the Last Judgment, ushering in the millennial kingdom of peace. But between the first volume and the last, violent action couples itself with prayer and professions of faith. 
Babylon Rising, a four-book series published between 2003 and 2006, is located in time right before the Rapture. Its hero, Michael Murphy, a muscular professor of Biblical Archeology and Christian Prophecy, fights a conspiracy of European and Asian elites in alliance with Muslim Jihadis. The plot aims at weakening America, at creating a world tyranny based on the European Union and a United Nations moved to Babylon, at subverting True (understand, evangelical) Christianity, and at giving birth to Antichrist, who will take the reins of world-government and false Christianity. Like Left Behind, Babylon Rising admixes entertainment (here, romance), violent action, and religious passages. The latter comprise chapter-length flashbacks to Old Testament moments, like the building of Noah's Ark (a type for the Rapture), or the life of the Prophet Daniel (typologically tied through the vision of Nabuchodonosor to the rise of the evil empire of Antichrist, but also to deliverance through faith in Christ). Evangelical beliefs are also expounded in conversations between Murphy and his pastor, or in discussions with people whom Murphy is trying to counsel to find Christ, or in Murphy's university classroom lessons. There one learns, for instance, the meaning of the opposition between Babylon and Jerusalem -- a pair of cities fundamental for crusading ideology. The novels also contain their moments of Credo. Finally, as in the Left Behind series, no volume is without an episode of, to cite Jenkins, "believable [and] reproducible" conversion experience. The Crusade cycle and the LaHaye novels are thus comparable in their components -- entertainment, action, and theology. One could push the analogies deeper. There are, for instance, fantasies of conversion of Muslims (and Jews), the asymmetric pairing of Babylon and Jerusalem, and the constant reference to Antichrist. The analogies are actually even more striking when one compares, on the one hand, the LaHaye novels and, on the other hand, the early First Crusade chronicles that convey the chilliast or apocalyptic atmosphere that many participants breathed. No wonder, since like Raymond d'Aguilers, Ekkehard of Aura, and Guibert de Nogent, LaHaye is a chiliast, and a firm believer that Christ's return is right around the corner. But the time imparted to this talk does not allow an in-depth discussion of these parallels.
Unlike in the case of the Crusade Cycle, one knows much about the reception of LaHaye's fictions. Paul Gutjahr's 2002 quantitative and qualitative study of reader response to the first six volumes of the Left Behind series has yielded instructive results. Gutjahr mined 1700 amazon.com reviews of the books, and obtained detailed answers to a questionnaire sent to those reviewers whose email addresses he had. Both sets were overwhelmingly made up of Christians, principally evangelicals -- the largest religious constellation in contemporary America. The readership liked the action-oriented stories. But fully one-tenth of the 1700 reviews saw and/or used the books as tools for evangelization. 15% of the 1700 considered the volumes to be "biblical interpretive assets" -- aids in their understanding of Scripture, and in particular of John's Revelation. It motivated them to read, and cleared up confusing passages. Of the 83 people who filled surveys, 70% said that the books had influenced their understanding of various passages of the Bible. They understood better the materiality of biblical symbolism -- its literalness -- and all the same that a sword in Revelation would be a modern warfare weapon at Endtimes. For 11%, it was clear that the novels were not just stories, but were quasi-scriptural themselves. One exclaimed: "I believe that these books are not just great fiction, but PROPHETIC fiction. This stuff WILL happen!". The books were true. Gutjahr comments: "their novel readings and Bible readings are not hermetically sealed activities (...) Such a connection [between readings in different genres] forces one to reconsider how best to define the term sacred text". Another, more qualitative study, confirms the role of the books as a go-between object, serving discussions among evangelicals and missionizing attempts, but also self-definition as a born-again. One read the volumes; one also employed them to shape the self and one's environment. This is what LaHaye and Jenkins wanted, and they documented their first series' impact in their 2003 These Will not be Left Behind: True Stories of Changed Lives.

West European culture circa 1200 is obviously different from North American culture circa 2000. Yet one can cautiously advance that it is possible, and even likely, one, that the consumption of the Crusade Cycle followed analogous patterns; two, that the military action and the religious teachings worked together; and three, that the stories were seen by many readers or listeners as true, and even as possessing the grade of truth that one accorded to the Scriptures. It is thus possible and even likely that the knightly audiences took as quasi-Scripture the message of the Chanson d'Antioche's opening stanzas: Sacred History was punctuated by a limited number of gleeful acts of righteous violence perpetrated at God's command. Each of these moments was related to the others in a deeply meaningful way. Each was an example for all those that followed. But each was more than an example; it was a type. Holy wars for Christendom were, to use the Old French term, "estoires" within a chain of estoires announcing the Final Battles. Vespasian's sword materialized this chain between past and present histories. It was in Godfrey of Bouillon's hands as he purged Jerusalem from the blasphemous Muslims. The Chanson d'Antioche informs us that the sword had once belonged to Alexander, had passed on to Antiochus, then to Judas Maccabeus -- the righteous Jew who had purified Jerusalem and its Temple from pagan idolatry and Jewish collaboration with the Greeks -- and then to Vespasian, who had used it to execute vengeful justice against the Jews of the Holy City.   
The cycle's diffusion of this typological formula is contemporary of a major turning point for biblical exegesis, the moment when the Bible and in particular John's Revelation began to be interpreted historically. It is in the twelfth century that the different seals, plagues, and trumpets of John's vision began to be associated with key events in the history of Christendom, most of them in the past, some yet to come. In most of these schemes, the 1099 Conquest of Jerusalem constituted one of these special moments. For instance, in his commentary of Revelation 17-19, Peter Aureol (d. 1322) summarized in detail the First Crusade proper and the reign of Baldwin, second Christian ruler of Jerusalem (1100-1118).  Here is again a hypothesis impossible to prove, to wit, that episodes in history that were seen in their own times as apocalyptic could transmute themselves, precisely because of their apocalyptic charge, into special nodes of sacred history. The hypothesis is impossible to prove, and I do not mean to say that each historical moment featured in, for example, Pierre Auriol's interpretation of Revelation was generated by this mechanism. But the hypothesis is strengthened by two odd details, one from the eleventh century, and one from the sixteenth. 
A decade before the crusade's departure, in 1084, Bishop Benzo of Alba had made Charlemagne a type for his own emperor, Henry IV. Henry was, in Charlemagne's words, his "image", imago; they were linked together through a misterium, a sacrament. Henry would complete as Last World Emperor what Charlemagne had foreshadowed; Charlemagne had received the keys to the Holy Sepulcher and a banner; Henry would recover the shrine as "standard-bearer of the Christian religion in that task". Charlemagne could present Henry as Last World Emperor because the eleventh century had placed him, Charlemagne, in this role, as hinted by a number of converging sources, and especially by Otto III's opening of Charlemagne's Aachen grave at Pentecost 1000 -- an apocalyptic date if any. This in turn may have owed something to the apocalyptic date on which Charlemagne himself had been crowned emperor -- the year 6000 since creation according to the year-count based on the Septuaginta, the so-called "Greek Old Testament". 
The other detail comes from the tragic Anabaptist kingdom of Münster. After a long siege, this chiliast New Jerusalem fell to the bishop's mercenaries in June 1535. Its King, Jan of Leyden, was taken alive. A Lutheran Pastor, Anton Corvinus, interrogated him in his prison, and tried to convince him of his errors prior to his execution. Against the Lutheran position that Christ had allowed only a spiritual kingdom, King Jan stood firm. It was for the previous "age of suffering", and only for it, that the Holy Scriptures demonstrated a pure spiritual nature for the Kingdom. But the Prophets and Revelation announced a material kingdom (leiblich Reich) "in the age of glory and splendor, which Christ and His people" will enjoy. Defeat did mean that Münster had not been that kingdom. The King had realized in prison that his belief that "our Kingdom would last until the arrival of Christ (zukunfft Christi)" was an error. But it still belonged to sacred history. For Jan concluded: "And it is of this [final] Kingdom that our Kingdom of Münster became a figure (bild), for as you know, God shows (anzeigt, prefigures) and intimated many things through figures". The King, however, was unable to maintain long this noble interpretation. In his final, signed confession, Jan conceded definitely. He used a negative semantic field reserved for the Old Testament ceremonial observances that had been superseded: "the Kingdom launched in Münster was only a vain and dead figure (eitel tod bilde); thus, given its abuses, it necessarily had had to go to ruin". It prefigured nothing. 
In his first concession, therefore, just as the Chanson d'Antioche had re-interpreted the initially apocalyptic First Crusade, King Jan relocated and historicized (as it were) his Münster realm. It was not part of History's Endgame or seamlessly on a temporal continuum with it, lasting (to cite the King again) "until the zukunfft Christi". Jan of Leyden demoted the Münsterite Kingdom to a type for the eschatological Jerusalem on Earth. But unlike in the case of the First Crusade, commemorated by the elites of the West, and which in conformity with the Chanson's position entered commentaries on John's Apocalypse as a waystation of sacred history, the upstart Jan, soon gruesomely tortured with red-hot tongues and executed, was unable to impose his typology. The Kingdom of Münster lapsed from being a partial fulfillment and real type of the Heavenly Realm into a "vain and dead figure". 
King Jan's failure is a chance for the historian. Like many a modern-day American faithful, he likely drew his understanding of theology and sacred history from the interplay between religious fictions like the Chanson d'Antioche, the Bible, and learned discussions. The Chanson called on the audience to journey, again, to avenge Christ from "Antichrist's lineage". Here was a history that would meaningfully reiterate itself until the End. In passing, it may be that Augustine's position -- that Christ's tears announced 70 CE, travails at Endtimes, but also in between the constant struggles of the Church against heretics -- helped create this semi-continuum. History's meaningfulness was imparted by the performance of violent justice -- vengeance. Singing for a new crusade, the poet Rutebeuf fictionalized an advent of Christ, but in this ordinary earthly historical time of the Church, prior to the eschaton. I cite: 
See now the time has come when God comes to seek you, / His arms stretched out, stained with His blood / Through which He will extinguish the fire / both of Hell and Purgatory /. 
Start anew a new history (recommenciez novele estoire) / Serve God with an entire heart. / For God shows you the path / Of His land and of His steps / (...) / For this reason you should have the understanding / To vindicate and defend / The Promised Land. 
Crusade literature, thus, was (evidently) a crucial component in the education of the Latin West into the crusade's theological significance. At the same time, it educated this public in a notion of History that reminds one of Hegel -- a history moved forward by violence, here vindictive retribution, Vergeltung. Jan Assmann has written of "Recht und Gerechtigkeit als Generatoren von Geschichte". So entitled, his article proposes that the Ancient Near-East developed the notion of divine retribution for injustice, thus a notion of historical causality and linearity that accompanied the dominant cyclical notion of time. Gods intervened to punish, through natural catastrophes, wars, and bloody massacres, breaches of pacts and contract, especially between states. Because kings and nations would be judged on their deeds, they developed a historical record to plead for these deeds. In this Mesopotamia-centered cultural ensemble emerged Ancient Israel, which put at the center of its religion a covenant with God involving retribution and vengeance, Vergeltung. After a detailed analysis of these early religious systems, Assmann travels quickly from Israel to Hegel, with only Moses Maimonides as an intermediary. I am equally incapable of reconstructing a full chain between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth. But I hope to have at least suggested how the First Crusade, in being a retributive apocalyptic event, generated a broadly received conception of Heilsgeschichte in which successive acts of just retribution paved the road to the End. Die Weltgeschichte als Weltgericht.