ABSTRACT
The extent, or even existence, of Irish involvement in the early crusades has been largely unexplored in both Irish and crusader historiography. Historians of medieval Ireland who study the period prior to the English invasion (traditionally dated to 1169), have mainly investigated late eleventh-and twelfth-century contacts between Ireland and continental Europe in terms of Irish Church reform
and its international contexts.1 Source-based reasons may partially account for the avoidance of Ireland in studies of the early crusades and of the early crusades in Irish studies. The principal records of political events in eleventh-and twelfthcentury Ireland are found in collections of annals and not narrative histories and chronicles. The Irish annalists were not given to discursiveness and were largely introspective, dealing primarily with the careers of important Irish ecclesiastical and secular figures within Ireland. Consequently, when searching for evidence of Irish involvement in the crusades, scholars have generally looked to texts written outside of Ireland. Two of the few (and most recent) attempts to probe the question of Irish involvement in the early crusades by looking at such external evidence were undertaken by Con Costello, published in The Irish Sword (the journal of the Military History Society of Ireland) in 1970, and Conor Kostick, in History Ireland in 2003.2
Costello focused his study primarily on the period after the English invasion (1169), which is unsurprising as it is only from that period that evidence for Irish (both Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish) participation in the crusades survives in any appreciable quantity.3 In his article, Costello posed the question: “Were the people of Ireland aware of what was happening in the East at this time, or were they surrounded by an impenetrable Irish mist, totally ignorant of Continental affairs?”4 In answer to his own question, Costello provided a brief catalogue of evidence for Irish participation in the crusades prior to 1169; unfortunately, this evidence does not stand up to close scrutiny. In support of his argument he drew upon works by the medieval chroniclers Guibert of Nogent and Robert of Gloucester, the Renaissance/ early modern writers Torquato Tasso and Thomas Fuller, and two modern writers, John Campion and Edward Doherty. As Costello’s article is the only detailed point of reference for scholars interested in Irish involvement in the early crusades, I have considered it necessary to engage with his arguments in detail, in order to
demonstrate the unsustainability of his thesis. In this article, each of Costello’s sources will be examined in turn and it will be demonstrated that there is actually little or nothing to substantiate his claims that these sources support his theory of Irish involvement in the early crusades. Kostick’s short article (approximately 1,400 words), in which he drew on different annalistic and chronicle sources, also answered the same question in the affirmative. Each of the sources upon which he drew will also be investigated, and it will be argued that these, too, cannot be depended upon to provide reliable evidence for Irish involvement in the crusades.
