by the severe defeat of Conzer Brück (1675) and the surrender of Trier and his own captivity which followed. But in the later campaigns of this war (see Dutch Wars) he showed himself again a cool, daring and successful commander, and, carrying on the tradition of Turenne and Condé, he was in his turn the pattern of the younger generals of the stamp of Luxembourg and Villars. He died in Paris on the 3rd of February 1687.
Alphonse de Créquy had not the talent of his brothers, and lost his various appointments in France. He went to London in 1672, where he became closely allied with Saint Évremond, and was one of the intimates of King Charles II.
Charles III. de Créquy served in the campaigns of 1642 and 1645 in the Thirty Years’ War, and in Catalonia in 1649. In 1646, after the siege of Orbitello, he was made lieutenant-general by Louis. By faithful service during the king’s minority he had won the gratitude of Anne of Austria and of Mazarin, and in 1652 he became duc de Créquy and a peer of France. The latter half of his life was spent at court, where he held the office of first gentleman of the royal chamber, which had been bought for him by his grandfather. In 1659 he was sent to Spain with gifts for the infanta Maria Theresa, and on a similar errand to Bavaria in 1680 before the marriage of the dauphin. He was ambassador to Rome from 1662 to 1665, and to England in 1677; and became governor of Paris in 1675. He died in Paris on the 13th of February 1687. His only daughter, Madeleine, married Charles de la Trémoille (1655–1709).
The marshal François de Créquy had two sons, whose brilliant military abilities bade fair to rival his own. The elder, François Joseph, marquis de Créquy (1662–1702), already held the grade of lieutenant-general when he was killed at Luzzara on the 13th of August 1702; and Nicolas Charles, sire de Créquy, was killed before Tournai in 1696 at the age of twenty-seven.
A younger branch of the Créquy family, that of Hémont, was represented by Louis Marie, marquis de Créquy (1705–1741), author of the Principes philosophiques des saints solitaires d’Égypte (1779), and husband of the marquise separately noticed below, and became extinct with the death in 1801 of his son, Charles Marie, who had some military reputation.
For a detailed genealogy of the family and its alliances see Moreri, Dictionnaire historique; Annuaire de la noblesse française (1856 and 1867). There is much information about the Créquys in the Mémoires of Saint-Simon.
CRÉQUY, RENÉE CAROLINE DE FROULLAY, Marquise de
(1714–1803), was born on the 19th of October 1714, at the château of Monfleaux (Mayenne), the daughter of Lieutenant-General Charles François de Froullay. She was educated by her maternal grandmother, and married in 1737 Louis Marie, marquis de Créquy (see above), who died four years after the marriage. Madame de Créquy devoted herself to the care of her only son, who rewarded her with an ingratitude which was the chief sorrow of her life. In 1755 she began to receive in Paris, among her intimates being D’Alembert and J. J. Rousseau. She had none of the frivolity generally associated with the women of her time and class, and presently became extremely religious with inclinations to Jansenism. D’Alembert’s visits ceased when she adopted religion, and she was nearly seventy when she formed the great friendship of her life with Sénac de Meilhan, whom she met in 1781, and with whom she carried on a correspondence (edited by Édouard Fournier, with a preface by Sainte-Beuve in 1856). She commented on and criticized Meilhan’s works and helped his reputation. She was arrested in 1793 and imprisoned in the convent of Les Oiseaux until the fall of Robespierre (July 1794). The well-known Souvenirs de la marquise de Créquy (1710–1803), printed in 7 volumes, 1834–1835, and purporting to be addressed to her grandson, Tancrède de Créquy, was the production of a Breton adventurer, Cousin de Courchamps. The first two volumes appeared in English in 1834 and were severely criticized in the Quarterly Review.
See the notice prefixed by Sainte-Beuve to the Lettres; P. L. Jacob, Énigmes et découvertes bibliographiques (Paris, 1866); Quérard, Superchéries littéraires, s.v. “Créquy”; L’Ombre de la marquise de Créquy aux lecteurs des souvenirs (1836) exposes the forgery of the Mémoires.
CRESCAS, HASDAI BEN ABRAHAM (1340–1410), Spanish philosopher. His work, The Light of the Lord (ʽOr ʽAdonai), deeply affected Spinoza, and thus his philosophy became of wide importance. Maimonides (q.v.) had brought Jewish thought entirely under the domination of Aristotle. The work of Crescas, though it had no immediate success, ended in effecting its liberation. He refused to base Judaism on speculative philosophy alone; there was a deep emotional side to his thought. Thus he based Judaism on love, not on knowledge; love was the bond between God and man, and man’s fundamental duty was love as expressed in obedience to God’s will. Spinoza derived from Crescas his distinction between attributes and properties; he shared Crescas’s views on creation and free will, and in the whole trend of his thought the influence of Crescas is strongly marked.
See E. G. Hirsch, Jewish Encyclopaedia, iv. 350. (I. A.)
CRESCENT (Lat. crescens, growing), originally the waxing moon, hence a name applied to the shape of the moon in its first quarter. The crescent is employed as a charge in heraldry, with its horns vertical; when they are turned to the dexter side of the shield, it is called increscent, when to the sinister, decrescent. A crescent is used as a difference to denote the second son of a house; thus the earls of Harrington place a crescent upon a crescent, as descending from the second son of a second son. An order of the crescent was instituted by Charles I. of Naples and Sicily in 1268, and revived by René of Anjou in 1464. A Turkish order or decoration of the crescent was instituted by Sultan Selim III. in 1799, in memory of the diamond crescent which he had presented to Nelson after the battle of the Nile, and which Nelson wore on his coat as if it were an order.
The crescent is the military and religious symbol of the Ottoman Turks. According to the story told by Hesychius of Miletus, during the siege of Byzantium by Philip of Macedon the moon suddenly appeared, the dogs began to bark and aroused the inhabitants, who were thus enabled to frustrate the enemy’s scheme of undermining the walls. The grateful Byzantines erected a statue to “torch-bearing” Hecate, and adopted the lunar crescent as the badge of the city. It is generally supposed that it was in turn adopted by the Turks after the capture of Constantinople in 1453, either as a badge of triumph, or to commemorate a partial eclipse of the moon on the night of the final attack. In reality, it seems to have been used by them long before that event. Ala ud-din, the Seljuk sultan of Iconium (1245–1254), and Ertoghrul, his lieutenant and the founder of the Ottoman branch of the Turkish race, assumed it as a device, and it appeared on the standard of the janissaries of Sultan Orkhan (1326–1360). Since the new moon is associated with special acts of devotion in Turkey—where, as in England, there is a popular superstition that it is unlucky to see it through glass—it may originally have been adopted in consequence of its religious significance. According to Professor Ridgeway, however, the Turkish crescent, like that seen on modern horse-trappings, has nothing to do with the new moon, but is the result of the base-to-base conjunction of two claw or tusk amulets, an example of which has been brought to light during the excavations of the site of the temple of Artemis Orthia at Sparta (see Athenaeum, March 21, 1908). There is nothing distinctively Turkish in the combination of crescent and star which appears on the Turkish national standard; the latter is shown by coins and inscriptions to have been an ancient Illyrian symbol, and is of course common in knightly and decorative orders. It is doubtful whether any opposition between crescent and cross, as symbols of Islam and Christianity, was ever intended by the Turks; and it is an historical error to attribute the crescent to the Saracens of crusading times or the Moors in Spain.
Crescent is also the name of a Turkish musical instrument. In architecture, a crescent is a street following the arc of a circle; the name in this sense was first used in the Royal Crescent at Bath.
CRESCIMBENI, GIOVANNI MARIO (1663–1728), Italian critic and poet, was born at Macerata in 1663. Having been educated by a French priest at Rome, he entered the Jesuits’ college of his native town, where he produced a tragedy on the
