ABSTRACT
Orderic Vitalis wrote of Raymond of St. Gilles that on the way to Jerusalem from Antioch "in no way giving way to laziness or indolence, rather he was continuously hostile to the gentiles owing to zeal". Crusading texts in the mid-twelfth century revealed more frequent connections between zeal, crusading and vengeance. In late twelfth-century crusading texts, references to zeal and vengeance with regard to crusading substantially increased in number. At Damascus the army of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem was described as "having zeal for the faith, immediately they all strove to avenge their injuries. Appropriately then, zelare was to burn or be fervent. Indeed, images of fire surrounded zelus in the primary source passages. The concept of zeal as Christian love desirous of doing God's purpose was linked to crusading in now-obvious ways, as Jonathan Riley-Smith's previous work on the matter has shown, and also to the ideology of crusading as vengeance.
