Much has been written about the Crusades, so I will not attempt to write yet another history about them. The Crusades, though, were incredibly significant on a number of political, economic, cultural levels, and for that reason I want to address them. Contrary to the modern narrative ever since the so-called “Enlightenment,” the Crusades were not wars instigated by fanatical, bloody-thirsty, imperial-minded European Christians intent on slaughtering innocent, peace-loving Muslims. History, and reality for that matter, is far too complex and messy to allow for such over-simplistic and inflammatory nonsense.
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that such over-simplistic and inflammatory nonsense about the Crusades is precisely what we’ve been told for the past 300 years. In their attempt to paint the Catholic Church (and Christianity in general) as the root of all evil in the world, Enlightenment propagandists literally re-wrote (i.e. lied about) history. Voltaire (1694-1778 AD) stated that the Crusades were an “epidemic of fury which lasted for two hundred years and which was always marked by every cruelty, every perfidy, every debauchery, and every folly of which human nature is capable.” David Hume (1711-1776 AD) called the Crusades “the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.” Denis Diderot (1713-1784 AD) depicted the Crusades as “a time of the deepest darkness and of the greatest folly.” And Edward Gibbon (1737-1794 AD) claimed that the real motivation of the crusaders was for “mines of treasures, of gold and diamonds, of palaces of marble and jasper, and of odoriferous groves of cinnamon and frankincense.”
These propagandists did their job well, for this is the very same false narrative that we are still being told today. As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Triumph of Christianity, “In 1999, the New York Times had solemnly proposed that the Crusades were comparable to Hitler’s atrocities or to the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo” (214). Not only that, but the constant charges coming from the Islamic world over the past century have been that Europe’s involvement in the Middle East ever since the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI is yet just another chapter in European colonialism that had begun with the Crusades. Indeed, “As Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic studies at American University in Washington DC, suggests: ‘the Crusades created a historical memory which is with us today—the memory of a long European onslaught’” (TC 213).
The Cause for the Crusades
Yet the historical facts clearly show this is not, and was never, the case. In fact, the complete opposite is true. In fact, as Rodney Stark points out, “claims that Muslims have been harboring bitter resentments about the Crusades for a millennium are nonsense: Muslim antagonism about the Crusades did not appear until about 1900 in reaction against the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of actual European colonialism in the Middle East” (216).
The fact is that the Crusades were precipitated by an aggressive and militant Islamic onslaught that had been going on for 400 years, ever since the time of Muhammad himself. Islamic armies had already invaded and occupied a great swath of the Byzantine Empire, from the Middle East to Egypt to North Africa and to Spain, and had countless times tried to invade Europe itself. And in the territories they conquered and occupied, they reduced Christians to second-class citizens. Christians were called the dhimma. They were forced to pay a heavy tax for being Christians, were forced to wear a certain type of clothing that identified themselves as Christians, and were not allowed to worship—even in their homes—if it could be heard by any Muslim, and thus offend them.
If anyone wants to get a feeling for what life for Christians in the Islamic-occupied territories was like, one just has to look at what is going on in modern day Iraq and Syria, where ISIS has imposed those very Islamic restrictions on the Christian minorities in the territories they have taken over. When reading about ISIS destroying 1,800 year old Christian churches and imposing such brutal treatment on the innocent Christian minority in the region, who doesn’t feel righteous indignation? Who doesn’t think that something must be done to stop such brutal and inhumane behavior? Such was treatment of Christians in the Holy Land for the 450 years before the Crusades.
And then, in the latter half of the 11th century, Muslim Turks ramped up their harassment even more, killing and enslaving not only Christians living in Islamic-occupied territory, but also Christian pilgrims from Europe who would travel to the Holy Land to worship at Christian shrines. As Rodney Stark states, “The Turks were unflinchingly intolerant. There was only One True God and his name was Allah, not Yahweh or Jehovah. Not that the Turks officially prohibited Christian pilgrimages, but they made it clear that Christians were fair game. Hence, every Anatolian village along the route to Jerusalem began to exact a toll on Christian travelers. Far worse, many pilgrims were seized and sold into slavery while others were tortured, often seemingly for entertainment” (218). Such harassment and enslavement apparently wasn’t enough. The Turks also wanted to even wipe out every structural evidence of Christianity. Stark tells us that in 1009,“…at the direction of Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim, Muslims destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem—the splendid basilica that Constantine had erected over what was believed to be the site of the tomb where Christ lay before the Resurrection. Worse yet, the Muslims attempted to destroy the tomb itself, leaving only traces of the hollow in the rocks” (217).
This was the situation that caused the Byzantine emperor Alexius Commenus to appeal to the Pope in Rome to send aid to help the persecuted Christians in the East. As Stark tells us, “In his letter, the emperor detailed gruesome tortures of pilgrims and vile desecrations of churches, altars, and baptismal fonts. Should Constantinople fall to the Turks, not only would thousands more Christians be murdered, tortured, and raped, but ‘the most holy relics of the Saviour,’ gathered over the centuries would be lost” (219). The fact that so many European Christians personally knew pilgrims who had endured such treatment at the hands of the Muslim Turks only helped strengthen the Alexius’ appeal. And so, in response, on November 27, 1095 at Clermont, Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade with the famous words, “God wills it!”
And history would never be the same. More on that in the next post.
