The Real History of the Crusades
A series of holy wars against
Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious
fanatics? Think again.
by Thomas F. Madden |
posted
05/06/2005 09:00 a.m.
With the possible exception of Umberto Eco,
medieval scholars are not used to getting much media
attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the
annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on
Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places),
poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet
meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my
surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks,
the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant.
As a Crusade historian, I found the
tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by
journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight
deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the
Crusades?, they asked. When were they? Just how
insensitive was President George W. Bush for using the
word crusade in his remarks? With a few of my
callers I had the distinct impression that they already
knew the answers to their questions, or at least thought
they did. What they really wanted was an expert to say
it all back to them. For example, I was frequently asked
to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has a just
grievance against the West. Doesn't the present
violence, they persisted, have its roots in the
Crusades' brutal and unprovoked attacks against a
sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words,
aren't the Crusades really to blame?
Osama bin Laden certainly thinks so.
In his various video performances, he never fails to
describe the American war against terrorism as a new
Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton has
also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the
present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University,
he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after
the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed
his audience that the episode was still bitterly
remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists
should be upset about the killing of Jews was not
explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation's
editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United
States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle
Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president's fundamental
premise.
Well, almost no one. Many historians
had been trying to set the record straight on the
Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are
not revisionists, like the American historians who
manufactured the Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream
scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very
careful, very serious scholarship. For them, this is a
"teaching moment," an opportunity to explain the
Crusades while people are actually listening. It won't
last long, so here goes.
The threat of Islam
Misconceptions about the Crusades are
all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as
a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad
popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are
supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness
and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the
Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization
in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders
introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle
East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture,
leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one
need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman's
famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades,
or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted
by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet
wonderfully entertaining.
So what is the truth about the
Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out.
But much can already be said with certainty. For
starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way
defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim
aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against
Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century
were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning
for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born
in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed,
the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword.
Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the
Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and
for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no
abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a
Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional
Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and
their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war
against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was
the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith
of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire
Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was
born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target
for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for
Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of
Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after
Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful.
Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily
Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the
eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of
Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh
century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern
Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St.
Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians
as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than
Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople
sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking
them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
Understand the crusaders
That is what gave birth to the
Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious
pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than
four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already
captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some
point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to
defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were
that defense.
Pope Urban II called upon the knights
of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at
the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was
tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of
the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The
answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In
the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted
that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne'er-do-wells
who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage
in a faraway land. The Crusaders' expressed sentiments
of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were
obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a
front for darker designs.
During the past two decades,
computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that
contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading
knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their
own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up
everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was
not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish
themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They
did so not because they expected material wealth (which
many of them had already) but because they hoped to
store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt.
They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to
undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential
act of charity and love. Europe is littered with
thousands of medieval charters attesting to these
sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to
us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not
opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the
truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for
plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority
returned with nothing.
What really happened?
Urban II gave the Crusaders two
goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern
Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the
Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent
III, later wrote:
How does a man love according to divine precept his
neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian
brothers in faith and in name are held by the
perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed
down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not
devote himself to the task of freeing them? … Is it
by chance that you do not know that many thousands
of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by
the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?
"Crusading," Professor Jonathan
Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an
act of love"—in this case, the love of one's neighbor.
The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a
terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the
Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of
the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he
lay down his life for his friends.'"
The second goal was the liberation of
Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of
Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders
saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of
righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The
Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related
to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently
described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth
Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:
Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if
any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and
perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored
to his pristine liberty and the time had come for
dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful
and traitors … unless they had committed not only
their property but also their persons to the task of
freeing him? … And similarly will not Jesus Christ,
the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant
you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your
body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood …
condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the
crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?
The re-conquest of Jerusalem,
therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration
and an open declaration of one's love of God. Medieval
men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore
Jerusalem Himself—indeed, he had the power to restore
the whole world to his rule. Yet as St. Bernard of
Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing
to His people:
Again I say, consider the Almighty's goodness and
pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself
under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so,
that He can help you to satisfy your obligations
toward Himself. … I call blessed the generation that
can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as
this.
It is often assumed that the central
goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim
world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the
perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the
enemies of Christ and his Church. It was the Crusaders'
task to defeat and defend against them. That was all.
Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were
generally allowed to retain their property and
livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed,
throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of
Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the
Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the
Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But
these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In
any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not
the threat of violence.
All apologies
The Crusades were wars, so it would
be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety
and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was
brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There
were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually
well-remembered today. During the early days of the
First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by
Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine,
robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find.
Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the
carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like
the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and
killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed
it was a righteous deed, since the Jews' money could be
used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were
wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish
attacks.
Fifty years later, when the Second
Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached
that the Jews were not to be persecuted:
Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he
finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for
their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are
for us the living words of Scripture, for they
remind us always of what our Lord suffered … Under
Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but
"they only wait for the time of their deliverance."
Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian
monk named Radulf stirred up people against the
Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard
demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to
travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with
Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the
massacres.
It is often said that the roots of
the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms.
That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and
more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during
the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to
kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and
preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to
be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic
deaths like these "collateral damage." Even with smart
technologies, the United States has killed far more
innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But
no one would seriously argue that the purpose of
American wars is to kill women and children.
The failure of the Crusades
By any reckoning, the First Crusade
was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of
command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was
simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy
territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them
died, either in battle or through disease or starvation.
It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the
brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful.
By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch
to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered
Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in
Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed
that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims
to such heights, was now turning.
But it was not. When we think about
the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of
what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of
the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The
Crusades are interesting largely because they were an
attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of
crusading, it was only the First Crusade that
significantly rolled back the military progress of
Islam. It was downhill from there.
When the Crusader County of Edessa
fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an
enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in
Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and
Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard
himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were
killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem
only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus,
which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians.
In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe
were forced to accept not only the continued growth of
Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing
the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up
throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify
Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory
in the East.
Crusading in the late twelfth
century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every
person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help.
Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if
need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian
East. On the home front, all Christians were called to
support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms.
Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the
great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a
single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the
Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces
wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom
of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True
Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began
surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of
Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports
held out.
The response was the Third Crusade.
It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the
German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and
King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it
was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the
Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while
crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home
before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came
by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an
already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine.
After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home,
where he busied himself carving up Richard's French
holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard's
lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb
tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory
after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast.
But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two
abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy
City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one
day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace
in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed
pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The
desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain
the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.
The Crusades of the 13th century were
larger, better funded, and better organized. But they
too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground
when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics,
which the Westerners never fully understood. They had
made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial
claimant who promised great rewards and support for the
Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars,
their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had
promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204
the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked
Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the
world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously
excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced
the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do.
The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between
Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even
today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is
a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct
result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox
people, drove the two further—and perhaps
irrevocably—apart.
The remainder of the 13th century's
Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade
(1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in
Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and
reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two
Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta,
but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and
forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the
Holy Land for several years, spending freely on
defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to
free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he
led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease
that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis's death, the
ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a
brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By
1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or
ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the
Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts
and many more plans, Christian forces were never again
able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th
century.
Europe's fight for its life
One might think that three centuries
of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the
idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had
little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more,
not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th
centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their
fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also
continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople
and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th
century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy
for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of
the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans
began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would
finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire
Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the
time, Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools, gave
voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled "Of the
Decline of the Faith":
Our faith was strong in th' Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
'Twould even grieve the hardest stone …
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They're of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they've been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.
Of course, that is not what happened.
But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II
captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of
Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly
thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529,
Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not
for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress
and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it
is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the
city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.
Yet, even while these close shaves
were taking place, something else was brewing in
Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The
Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman
values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for
commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other
movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and
the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its
life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale.
The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy
and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades
unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the
fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which
was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at
Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare.
The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As
Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and
sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and
pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of
Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he
finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the
modern Middle East.
From the safe distance of many
centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the
Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars
over. But we should be mindful that our medieval
ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our
infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of
political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the
modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and
all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer
enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service
of something they hold dear, something greater than
themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it
is a fact that the world we know today would not exist
without their efforts. The ancient faith of
Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy
toward slavery, not only survived but flourished.
Without the Crusades, it might well have followed
Zoroastrianism, another of Islam's rivals, into
extinction.
Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and
chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis
University. He is the author of numerous works,
including
The New Concise History of the Crusades, and
co-author, with Donald Queller, of
The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople.
This article originally appeared in the April 2002 issue
of
Crisis and is reprinted here with permission.
Copyright Crisis Magazine © 2002 Washington DC, USA |