Acesse a tradução “Cruzada Grimdark: Warhammer 40.000 e o movimento da cruzada medieval” de Luiz Guerra.
Rory MacLellan[1]
In the forty-second millennium of the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000, almost all of humanity lives under the rule of the Imperium of Man, a hideously oppressive regime locked in an endless battle for survival against aliens and daemonic forces, where no resistance is tolerated and no scientific advancement or progress exists. A shadowy Inquisition roots out heresy and mutation, sentencing entire armies to death for the slightest infraction, while ten thousand souls are sacrificed each day to sustain the mortally wounded Emperor, godlike founder of the Imperium. Everything about the setting is an exaggeration, a caricature for effect. The game’s tagline, ‘In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war’, has given rise to the term grimdark as a byword for the especially bleak or dystopian.
The largest of the Imperium’s countless military campaigns are known as crusades and are launched only by the Imperium’s highest authorities, the High Lords of Terra (Ultramarines 2nd ed, p. 59). From the Great Crusade ten thousand years earlier which established the Imperium, to the Indomitus Crusade of the setting’s ‘present day’, these campaigns can be directed against any and all foes across the galaxy, are massive in scale, and last for decades or more. Some groups within the Imperium take crusading even further, like the Black Templars Chapter of Space Marines. These genetically engineered supersoldiers have been fighting an endless crusade since their foundation ten thousand years earlier.
Fans of the game and its world could think that this depiction of crusading was unique to Warhammer 40,000, endless holy wars just another invention of the game’s grimdark future, an exaggeration of history. While this does describe the centuries-long Great Crusade and the sheer scale of these wars, the Imperium’s wide-ranging and constant crusading does have a historical basis in the medieval crusade movement.
Beyond Jerusalem
Popular views of the crusades still interpret these wars as being aimed primarily at the Holy Land. They take in the nine numbered crusades from the First Crusade in 1096, which ended in 1099 with the capture of Jerusalem and the establishment of four Crusader States in Palestine and Syria, through to the Ninth Crusade in 1271-72, and end in 1291, when Acre, the last crusader stronghold, fell to the Mamluk Sultanate. But crusade scholars have long since expanded the scope of the crusade movement both geographically and chronologically.
The historian Giles Constable proposed that there were four main schools of crusade historiography, of ways of defining what were the crusades. The four schools identified by Constable were the Traditionalists, Pluralists, Generalists, and Popularists. The Traditionalist definition of crusading is very much this 1096 to 1291 view. Jerusalem and the Holy Land hold a special status within crusading and only those expeditions directed there truly count as ‘real’ crusades. The Pluralist view is much more expansive, it holds that whatever expedition was carried out with special religious privileges from the Pope, a crusade bull granting a full remission of sins committed by those who undertake the crusade, and with participants swearing penitential vows, was a crusade. Generalists hold that crusading was merely part of a much wider tradition of Christian warfare, and rejecting defining crusade as a separate entity. Finally, Popularists see the crusades as mass popular movements fuelled by prophetic and apocalyptic beliefs, with the First Crusade the strongest example of this (Riley-Smith, 2009, p. xi-xii).
As with any strict division, there are nuances and intricacies that are smoothed out by these four schools and most crusade historians would see strengths and weaknesses in each of them. Today, the mainstream position is largely Pluralist, taking in the broad chronology and geography of that definition, while acknowledging the Traditionalists’ emphasis on the special status of Jerusalem, the Popularists’ highlighting of millenarianism and the participation of the masses, and the Generalists’ stance of seeing crusading within a wider context of Christian holy war and ecclesiastical violence.
Under this dominant Pluralist definition, crusading expands from a small number of campaigns to the Near East, to take in North Africa, Northern Europe, Spain, France, and Eastern Europe. The so-called Reconquista in Spain and Portugal, which saw Christian states conquer the Muslim rulers of southern Spain, were treated as crusades. They were backed by crusade bulls and some Popes even extolled Spanish knights to remain at home and fight there rather than go to Jerusalem. Urban II, whose speech at Clermont in 1095 led to the First Crusade, offered the same remission of sins to those fighting in Spain as those going to Palestine. His successor Paschal II tried to ban Spanish knights from travelling to the East as it could harm the war effort in Iberia (Riley-Smith, 2009, p. 16). In Northern Europe, the pagan peoples of the Baltic were targeted by crusades from the late 1140s. Over three centuries, the pagan Prussians, Livonians, Estonians, and Lithuanians would be Christianised at the point of a sword by men receiving crusade indulgences (Riley-Smith, 2009, p. 17). The conquest of the Canary Islands begun by two Norman knights in 1402 was backed by a crusade bull and the chronicle of their campaign presents the war as a crusade (Jensen, 2007, 182 fn. 103 for source). Portugal’s conquest of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415 was also treated as a crusade. It was not only non-Christians who were targets. The Cathars of southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Hussites of Bohemia in the fifteenth were both Christian groups which the Pope deemed heretical, launching several crusade expeditions against them. Before the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, then ruled by the Orthodox Christians, some of the crusaders argued that they were a legitimate crusade target as they rejected the Pope (Riley-Smith, 2009, p. 18). In the 1290s, when the Pope struggled against his political enemies in Rome, the Colonna family, he called a crusade against them (Riley-Smith, 2009, p. 20). In 1421, the English Parliament asked Henry V to petition the Pope for a crusade against the Irish because of their resistance to English rule.
The shift from the medieval period to the early modern around the start of the sixteenth century sees crusading continue in the Mediterranean and expand well beyond, carried by European colonisation in all directions. Portugal’s invasion of Morocco in 1578 was backed by crusade bulls, as was the Spanish Armada sent against Protestant England in 1588. Crusade leagues battled the Ottoman Empire for control of the Mediterranean as late as 1697. Christopher Columbus’ diaries show that he hoped a western route to India and the wealth it would bring would lead to the recapture of Jerusalem (Hamdani, 1979). In 1514, Christian II of Denmark and Norway, received a crusade bull from the Pope for an expedition to India via the Arctic Ocean (Jensen, 2007, p. 195). In Africa, the kingdom of Kongo, converted to Christianity by the Portuguese, took on the trappings of crusaders, including bearing a flag with a cross that had been blessed by the Pope against their enemies. In 1509, King Afonso I of Kongo claimed that a cross and St James appeared in the sky before he battled against his pagan brother for the throne, an incident that would not be out of place in a chronicle of the Third Crusade (Simmons, 2022). James had long been considered a crusading saint, eventually becoming known in Spain as Santiago Matamoros, ‘Moor slayer’. As Spain began its conquest of the Americas, a new variant emerged, Santiago Mataindios, ‘Indian slayer’. Though these campaigns were not backed by papal bulls, the rhetoric and imagery of crusading continued, and Spain’s new colonies would pay crusade taxes to support campaigns back in Europe (Tyerman, 2019, p. 431).
The Imperium’s crusading in all directions against heretics and aliens, or directed inward to settle political scores, is little different from this deployment by medieval and early modern Europe of crusades against targets far beyond the Near East. One of the game’s source books from the 1990s, Codex Ultramarines, is one of the few sources to offer a direct definition of a crusade in Warhammer 40,000, and it sounds much like this pluralist interpretation:
‘Only the High Lords of Terra themselves can declare a Crusade […] When a Crusade is declared it is likely to be against heretic Lords, rebellious planetary governments which have turned against the Imperium for their own selfish reasons. A Crusade can also be declared against alien worlds, or newly discovered planets that lie beyond the Emperor’s light’ (Ultramarines 2nd ed,1993, p. 59).
Like medieval Europe, the launching of a Imperial Crusade is authorised by a supreme authority, one with an religious component as among the High Lords is the Ecclesiarch, head of the Adeptus Ministorum, the Imperium’s state church, and these campaigns can be directed against any and all opponents.
A society built on crusade
Crusading is a pervasive throughout Imperial society, it is the default method of waging large campaigns, while individuals may undertake a crusade vow or have one forced upon them as punishment or penitence. The preaching and massive taxation used to recruit and fund crusades would mean that even non-combatants would be affected.
Crusading was similarly entrenched in medieval society. It became a core part of ideas of chivalry and kingship, with going on crusade the sign of a good knight or ruler. In the Baltic, knights from all over Europe could join the Teutonic Knights on their summer reisen, a sort of medieval package holiday with the visiting knights attending feasts and tournaments before raiding pagan Lithuania. Crusade taxes were raised all over Europe and even beyond. Collection chests would be placed in parish churches, supported by public preaching. Beginning with the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, crusade taxes were raised as far away as the Norse colonies on Greenland. In 1327, they paid this in the form of walrus teeth (Jensen, 2007, p. 161-162). Even in death, crusading continued, with people leaving bequests towards the Holy Land. In her will of 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster, left 100 marks for five armed men to go to the East ‘in God’s service and the destruction of his enemies’ (Nichols, 1780, p. 30).
Lands that were not on a crusade frontier even invented or exaggerated the existence of non-Christian neighbours to claim their place in the wider crusade movement. Several Danish and Norwegian sources in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries claim that they faced their own frontier zone to rival that which lay across the Mediterranean. Maps and chroniclers depict Scandinavia as being bordered to the north by fictional pagans including Amazons, giants, Unipeds, and Pygmies, as well as misplaced real cultures like Tartars, Cumans, and Karelians, all living far to the north and ever ready to attack (Jensen, 2007, p. 180, 190-191).
Professional crusaders
Warhammer 40,000’s professional, lifelong crusaders the Black Templars also have medieval counterparts, most obviously the military-religious orders that they are named for. Arising in the early twelfth century, the military orders combined the life of a monk with that of a knight. The most famous of these were the Knights Templar, who give the Black Templars their name, though the chapter’s Maltese cross symbol and black and white uniform are taken from another military order, the Knights Hospitaller, while their Germanic names are a reference to yet another order, the Teutonic Knights. These three medieval orders did carry out something like the eternal crusade of the Black Templars. Though not technically crusaders themselves, as members of the military orders did not usually swear crusade vows, they continued to fight on the frontiers of Europe long after the major crusade expeditions had returned home or ceased altogether. They were originally created in response to a manpower shortage in the Crusader States which needed a permanent military force there, one that would not come and go with each crusade expedition. Their military role did not end with the loss of Acre in 1291. The Hospitallers moved first to Cyprus, then Rhodes, and then Malta, where they remained until its conquest by Napoleon in 1798. All the while, they fought a naval war against the Ottoman Empire and their allies the Barbary Corsairs. The Teutonic Knights established themselves in the Baltic in the early thirteenth century, ruling their own state there for over three hundred years, during which they warred against pagan Lithuania. Even after the Reformation saw them expelled from the Baltic, the order continued to field a regiment in the Austro-Hungarian army until 1918. These were just the three largest military orders, but others proliferated across Europe, particularly in Spain and Portugal and proposals for new military orders were made throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the last one being founded in 1891. Like the Imperium, this was a society permeated with the idea of holy war.
In terms of their scope, by targeting any and all enemies across the galaxy, and pervasiveness, whether it be crusading as an act of penitence or the existence of permanent crusaders like the Black Templars, Imperial crusading shares much in common with that of the medieval and early modern world. While it may have been intended as a caricature of medieval fanaticism, it is actually surprisingly close to the real past.
Select bibliography:
CONSTABLE, Giles. Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.
HAMDANI, Abbas. Columbus and the Recovery of Jerusalem. Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 99, no. 1, 1979, p. 39-48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/598947. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.
JOHNSON, Jervis; MERETT, Alan; PRIESTLEY, Rick. Ultramarines. Games Workshop; Nottingham: Reino Unido, 1993.
JENSEN, Janus Møller. Denmark and the Crusades, 1400–1650. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007.
NICHOLS, John (ed.). A Collection of all the Wills, Now Known to be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England, Princes and Princesses of Wales, and Every Branch of the Blood Royal, from the Reign of William the Conqueror, to That of Henry the Seventh Exclusive. London: J. Nichols, 1780.
RILEY-SMITH, Jonathan. What Were the Crusades? London: Ignatius Press, 2009.
SIMMONS, Adam. The African Adoption of the Portuguese Crusade during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. The Historical Journal, v. 65, n. 3, p. 571-590, 2022.
TYERMAN, Christopher. World of the Crusades. Yale: Yale University Press, 2019
Recordings of panels from the inaugural Warhammer Conference at the University of Heidelberg, Sept. 2024: https://www.youtube.com/@WarhammerConference
[1] PhD in Medieval History, University of St Andrews rafmaclellan@gmail.com.
Publicado em 08 de Outubro de 2024.
Como citar: MACLELLAN, Rory. Grimdark Crusading: Warhammer 40,000 and the medieval crusade movement. Blog do POIEMA. Pelotas: 08 out. 2024. Disponível em: https://wp.ufpel.edu.br/poiema/grimdark-crusading-warhammer-40000-and-the-medieval-crusade-movement. Acesso em: data em que você acessou o artigo.
