Medical Knowledge in the Crusading Armies: the Evidence of Albert of Aachen and Others

My object in this paper is to establish the ideas about illness and treatment that the crusaders brought with them from the West. There is a tendency, illustrated in the later sources, ¹ to assume that they acquired such worthwhile practices from natives in the East. It is of particular interest whether magico-religious beliefs, such as in relics and miracles – a feature of European medicine at this exact time – also dominated medical practice on the First Crusade, which was after all a pilgrimage of unprecedented size to a land whose very earth was a relic. ²