There has often been a misguided assumption by many who have this strange impression that before the Crusades, Christianity had been a largely pacifist and “anti-war” religion for 1,000 years. Historical facts show this to be rather naïve. Even after the Roman Empire had become largely Christian, it still had to engage in various wars with hosts of enemies over the course of the centuries. Earlier emperors fought the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and the Persians. Charlemagne fought various pagan tribes in northern Europe, the Huns, and even the armies of Islam who attempted to invade Europe from Spain.
The point here is that we must make a clear distinction: Christianity, indeed Christ himself, clearly teaches that on an individual level we are to pray for our enemies and not repay evil for evil. Yet on a national level, it is incumbent upon the rulers to protect their citizens whom God has entrusted in their care. To fail to do so would be to fail in one’s vocation to be a godly ruler. In that respect, when we come to the Crusades, we see that very thing come into play: Muslim armies had been conquering Byzantine lands for years, they had continued to attempt to wipe out the Byzantine Empire and to invade Western Europe as well. On top of that, they were also terrorizing Christian pilgrims who travelled to the Holy Land. It was up to the leaders, namely Emperor Commenus and Pope Urban II, to fight back against the Islamic Empire and to protect their citizens. In that respect, as Piers Paul Read states in The Templars, “From the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s first razzia, the Christians’ perception was that wars against Islam were waged either in defense of Christendom or to liberate and reconquer lands that were rightfully theirs” (311).
What made the Crusades unique, though, was not the fact that Christians went to war. What made the Crusades unique was how the Pope encouraged people to go to war. When encouraging the leading nobility of Europe to raise armies to travel to the Holy Land and liberate the holy places from Muslim hands, the Pope offered an extra incentive: he equated going to war with penance and stated that anyone who went on crusade would get his sins forgiven. Such a notion was extremely reckless and dangerous—for although Christians had gone to war for nearly the previous millennium, war was never considered a Christian virtue. Indeed, it was standard Church practice to require returning soldiers to do a certain amount of penance after they returned from war, for it was seen as sometimes tragically necessary, but it was still tragic. With Pope Urban’s call for crusade, though, there was a dangerous precedent that presented “killing the infidel” as a means to merit God’s forgiveness. And that was a step too far.
The People’s Crusade…The Crusader Armies
The result of such rhetoric could be seen in the mob of peasants that trekked through Europe on their way to Constantinople, raping and pillaging every “Muslim-looking” town they came across—unfortunately, many if not most of these towns were inhabited by either Jews or Eastern Christians. The unruly mob of the “People’s Crusade” eventually was wiped out shortly after they set foot into Asia and encountered seasoned Islamic troops, but the trail of barbarism they left in their wake should serve as a sober warning: careless rhetoric by religious leaders (and modern day secular leaders for the matter) could can easily inflame the uneducated masses and lead them to commit shameful atrocities.
Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that the actual Crusader armies that were raised by the European nobility were trained-soldiers who viewed the crusade as a defensive war against the aggressive and hostile actions of an Islamic empire. They were not travelling to the Holy Land in search of riches—the Crusades were almost solely funded by Europe’s nobility, and most returned to Europe poorer than when they left on crusade. The goal was simple: liberate the holy places and protect Christians living there who were suffering at the hands of the Muslim Turks.
The Crusaders of the first crusade successfully took Jerusalem, and they ended up establishing four kingdoms: the County of Edessa, the Princedom of Antioch, the Country of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. One thing must be quickly said concerning the accusation that the Crusaders mercilessly butchered both Muslims and Jews once they took Jerusalem. Jonathan Riley Smith has stated, “We know it to be a myth that the crusaders targeted the Jewish community in Jerusalem. We also know that the figure for the Muslim dead, which used to range from ten to seventy thousand on the basis of accounts written long after the event, out to be revised downward. A contemporary Muslim source has been discovered that puts the number at three thousand.”
One might still say that 3,000 dead Muslims in Jerusalem is still a war crime—yet such an accusation shows an ignorance of the rules of medieval warfare. In war, during times of a siege, the besieged city had a choice: (A) either open their gates and surrender, or (B) honker down and try to wait the siege out. If the city surrendered, the citizens would be spared, but the city would still suffer some pillaging; if however the city refused, and the result was a long, drawn-out siege, and if the besieging army eventually successfully took the city, it was accepted that many of the people in the city would be killed—it was the price for prolonging the siege. Such military action was considered justified by the rules of medieval warfare. As Rodney Stark has stated:
“It is important to realize that according to the norms of warfare at that time, a massacre of the population of Jerusalem would have been seen as justified because the city had refused to surrender and had to be taken by storm, thus inflicting many causalities on the attacking forces. Had Jerusalem surrendered as crusaders gathered to assault the walls, it is very likely that no massacre would have occurred. …Muslim victories in similar circumstances resulted in wholesale slaughters too” (229).
“No doubt it was very ‘unenlightened’ of the crusaders to be typical medieval warriors, but it strikes me as even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Convention on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were either UN Peacekeepers or hapless victims” (232).
That being said, in reality the Muslim armies were actually worse. Stark tells us of the actions of Baybars, the Sultan of Egypt: “When Baybars took the Knights of Templar fortress of Safad in 1266, he had all the inhabitants massacred even though he had promised to spare their lives during negotiations. Later than same year his forces took the great city of Antioch. Even though the city surrendered after four days, Baybars ordered all inhabitants, including all women and children, killed or enslaved. What followed was ‘the single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era’—it is estimated that seventeen thousand men were murdered and tens of thousands of women and children were marched away as slaves” (TC 231).
And then there was the infamous Tamerlane (1336-1405 AD). Stark writes: “A Muslim of Turkic-Mongol origins, Tamerlane is remembered mainly for his barbarity, earning the sobriquet the ‘Scourge of God,’ as Christopher Marlowe put it in his great play. Again and again Tamerlane perpetrated huge massacres—perhaps as many as two hundred thousand captives (men, women, and children) were slaughtered during his march on Delhi—and had towering pyramids built from the heads of his victims. And while he killed huge numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, he virtually wiped out the Christians and Jews in the East. In Georgia alone, Tamerlane ‘destroyed seven hundred large villages, wiped out the inhabitants, and reduced all the Christian churches…to rubble.’ Any Christian communities that survived Tamerlane were destroyed by his grandson Ulugh Beg” (TC 211).
War is always horrible, but both the so-called “enlightenment” narrative of the Crusades and the current Muslim condemnation of the Crusades is simply false and rather dishonest. The men of the so-called “enlightenment” were motivated to distort history because of their hatred against the Catholic Church—and they were willing to falsify history to achieve their own ends. As for the current Muslim condemnations of the Crusades, they came about only after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. With the loss of an Islamic Empire that had stood for over 1,000 years, Muslims found themselves subjects to the conquering forces of Europe.
It was only then that Muslim intellectuals seized upon the accusations from the so-called “enlightenment” and made them their own. For the first time in Islamic history, Muslims began to argue that the Crusades were attempts by European imperialism to colonize Muslim lands. And why did they do this? Because after WWI, European countries were colonizing Muslim lands! As Rodney Stark states, “…current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth century creation, prompted in part by ‘post-World War I British and French imperialism and the post-World War II creation of the state of Israel” (233).
The Effects of the Crusades
Having given a brief defense for the cause of the Crusades, and an explanation of the reality of the Crusades themselves, I want to briefly address the cultural effect that the Crusades had on the development of western civilization. First, it must be pointed out that the Crusaders did not go to the Holy Land to forcibly convert Muslims. In fact, as Rodney Starks points out, “Muslims who lived in crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Consequently, the crusader kingdoms always contained far more Muslim residents than Christians” (228).
Secondly, there was the establishment of the monastic-military orders: The Knights Templar (founded in 1119 AD), whose mission was to protect the temple mount and Jerusalem (they wore white robes with red cross on mantel); and The Knights Hospitaller (founded in 1182 AD), whose mission was to care for and protect the Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land (they wore black robes with white cross on left sleeve). Raymond Le Puy, the founder of the Hospitallers, said, “Wherever there are hospitals of the sick, the commanders of the houses must serve the sick with good courage and provide them with all they need, and do them service without murmuring or complaint, so that by this ministry they may have part in the glory of heaven.”
Thirdly, the Crusades brought a tremendous amount of culture and learning back to Western Europe. The Islamic world had been the recipients of classical learning when it conquered Byzantine lands. They had enlisted Byzantine administrators, philosophers, architects, and teachers to bolster their Islamic empire. The famed Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, for example, though ordered to be built by the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik, was nevertheless designed and built by Byzantine architects and artisans.
And so, what ended up happening when the Crusader armies marched in and conquered the Holy Land, was that they encountered (ironically) a wealth of Byzantine culture and learning that the Islamic empire had incorporated. Now obviously, there were scores of Islamic scholars, philosophers, and artisans who contributed greatly to the Islamic empire, but the initial learning they received and later elaborated on and contributed to came from the scholars, philosophers, and artisans of the Byzantine Empire. And in turn, the Crusader Christians from the west eventually brought that very culture back to western Europe.
It was during the era of the Crusades that learning really began to take off in Europe. Well, “take off” is a relative term…it certainly was a “take off” for that time. But that will be for the next post.
