SOURCE: “Picturing the Crusades: The Uses of Visual Propaganda, c. 1095–1250” in The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, edited by John France and William G. Zajac, Ashgate, 1998, pp. 195–209.

In the following essay, Morris examines the types of “visual propaganda”—such as placards and the windows and architecture of churches and halls—used to keep the crusading spirit alive.

Pictures, commented Gratian, are the ‘literature of the laity’.¹ The idea had received its classic statement long before, in Gregory the Great's ruling to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles: ‘pictures of images … were made for the instruction of the simple people, that those who do not know letters may understand the history’. Gregory's words provided the starting-point of medieval discussion of the use of images, and much modern commentary has followed the supposition that religious art was designed as a simple language for the laity.² Crusading was not...