Reassessing the Crusades and Crusaders

Reassessing the Crusades and Crusaders 

Dr. Helena Schrader 

Note: Not an endorsement

The rise of the Islamic State (aka ISIS,ISIL, the Caliphate) has resulted in many people—including President Obama—talking about the crusades. The tendency is to "apologize" for the "atrocities" allegedly committed by these acts of supposed aggression. To claim the Islamic State is attacking the West out of vengeance for wars they won over 700 years ago (rather than for what we are now) is absurd, stupid and dangerous. Furthermore, these almost daily statements about the crusades reveal a profound ignorance about just what the crusades were — and were not.

1.   The crusades were not wars of aggression. They were a response to over three hundred years of Muslim aggression in which invading Muslim armies had threatened Constantinople and nearly reached the Loire.

2.   The crusades were not an invasion of traditionally Muslim territory. The Holy Land had been the home of Christianity since Christ himself, and Christianity had become the official and dominant religion by the end of the 4^th Century. At least 50% of the population of the Holy Land was still Christian when the first crusaders arrived.

3.   The crusades were not wars of religious conversion. There was no attempt to force the Muslim population in the crusader states established by the First Crusade to convert to Christianity. The Church explicitly condemned forced conversions, and secular authorities found it convenient to tax non-Christians at a higher rate.

4. Except for the First, and to a lesser extend the Third and Sixth Crusades, the Christians LOST all the crusades, and were driven out of the Holy Land in a long series of brutal, bloody campaigns in which the Mamlukes repeatedly slaughtered civilians, broke truces, failed to keep their word and enslaved thousands of civilians. The last crusader foothold in the Holy Land was lost in 1291 with the fall of Acre. In short, there is no need for modern Islam to revenge the crusades--they did that very effectively and brutally in the late 13th century.

Modern apologists for ISIL, however, are obsessed with pointing to the atrocities and injustices allegedly committed by the crusaders, while excusing, dismissing or simply ignoring the atrocities perpetrated by their contemporary opponents. This narrative is apparently motivated by the naïve hope that if we “confess” our “guilt” we can somehow deflect or weaken the hatred directed against us.  Or perhaps it is motivated by a desire to demonstrate the superiority of our “enlightened” standpoint over the “bigotry” of our enemy?  Whatever the reason, most modern references to the “barbarism” of the crusaders and the “atrocities” they committed are little more than rhetoric, yet they draw their inspiration from two "facts" that have been repeated so often that most people don't know the source but accept them unthinking. 

First, the Greek historian Anna Comnena used the term “barbarian” to describe the participants of the First Crusade, and second, after finally taking Jerusalem by storm in 1099, the crusaders unquestionably sacked the Holy City and massacred the garrison.

Now, it must be remembered that the Greeks used the term “barbarian” to refer to anyone who didn’t speak Greek. This included, in a different age, the highly civilized Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians etc. Second, the Greek Emperors considered themselves the descendants and heirs to the Roman Empire—and viewed the German, French, and Norman crusaders as the descendants of the “barbarian hoards” that had over-run the Western Empire.

Furthermore, because the Byzantine Empire preserved greater continuity with Rome, it also had a very sophisticated bureaucracy and hierarchy that left the Byzantines confused and offended by the lack of formalized command structures among the crusaders. Indeed, the complete absence of a supreme commander among the crusaders was utterly incomprehensible to a society in which the Emperor was such an absolute autocrat. 

Anna Comnena certainly saw the crusaders as barbarians – that does not mean that we should. The lack of understanding for a different culture exhibited by the Byzantine chroniclers does not mean that that other culture was inherently inferior. Modern readers—particularly enlightened, tolerant modern readers—ought to appreciate and recognize that fact.

The sack of Jerusalem, on the other hand, was unquestionably a barbaric act—from the modern perspective. It was hardly so in the eyes of contemporaries. The contemporary rules of war were clear and universally accepted: a city that surrendered could expect mercy, a city that did not could expect “to be put to the sword.” This had been the rule of war at least since the sack of Troy.

Modern sensibilities are offended particularly by the fact that Christians, allegedly fighting in the name of a peaceful, forgiving and loving Christ, could commit this “atrocity.” The fact that they did commit this act of bloodshed may be evidence that the medieval understanding of Christianity and our own diverges somewhat—but that would ignore the very sophisticated and centuries-long discussions about the nature of “just wars” and the complex theological debates about the justifications for the crusades themselves. Far more likely, by the time the crusaders at last reached Jerusalem after horrendous suffering and huge losses, they were simply not willing to curb their baser instincts even in such a sacred place.

But even this atrocity does not make the crusaders “barbarians” in the contemporary context, certainly not when it is clear that most apocalyptic descriptions of the sack are exaggerations and that thousands of Jerusalem’s inhabitants survived the sack. Nor does it make this an atrocity so exceptional that nearly a thousand years later it justifies modern-day atrocities against innocent and unarmed populations inside the Islamic State, or against unarmed civilians in terrorist attacks around the world. 

The Arabs, after all, had taken the Holy Land by the sword, not with sweet words and persuasion. In 997 the Muslims sacked Santiago de Compostella, the most important pilgrimage church in the West. In 1009 the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by the Byzantines in the reign of Constantine the Great (306 – 337), was utterly destroyed. Meanwhile, however, the Muslims had divided into Shiites and Sunnis and engaged in bloody wars in which they murdered, raped, pillaged and burned rival Muslim cities. Zengi, atabeg of Mosul, for example, according to a Muslim source ordered the “pillaging, slaying, capturing, ravishing and looting” of Edessa, but was feared in Damascus because of “his exceptionally cruel and treacherous behavior” – to his co-religionists. The great “chivalrous” Saladin spent more of his career fighting his fellow Sunni Muslims than he did fighting the Christians.

Attempts to depict the crusaders as illiterate brutes lacking in cultural accomplishments also miss the mark. The “unwashed masses” might not have been very cultivated—but nor were the peasants and common soldiers of the Byzantine Empire or the Turks.  The upper classes in 11^th century Europe, on the other hand, had already started to develop arts and architecture to a high degree of sophistication as manuscripts, artifacts and the architectural record shows. Literacy may have been confined to an elite and fostered mostly by the clergy, but the leaders of the crusade themselves were highly educated. (And, by the way, at this time classical Greek scholars had been re-discovered and were being studied in the West.) Furthermore, literacy was not exactly universal in the Byzantine and Muslim worlds either. While it is fair to say that in certain fields (notably medicine, mathematics and astronomy) the Muslim world was more advanced than Western Europe, in other fields (shipbuilding, transportation and agricultural technology), the West was more developed.  

Two features of Western European feudal society set it apart from the East into which the crusaders came so suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of the 11^th century. 

First was the decentralized system of government based on complex, feudal relationships. Both the Byzantine and the Muslim world in this period were intensely hierarchical societies in which the Emperor (in the one) and the Caliph (in the other) theoretically held supreme and absolute control over his subjects. To be sure, reality looked slightly different.  By the end of the tenth century the Syrian Caliphs were virtual prisoners of the Abbasid dynasty, and changed masters when the Seljuk Turks captured Baghdad in 1055.  Thereafter they were puppets of the Selkjuk sultans, while the Fatimid Caliphs were at the mercy of their viziers. 

But whether the theoretically absolute rulers wielded actual power or not, their powerful “protectors” always ruled in their name; they considered – and called themselves – slaves of their masters. Western feudalism, in which kings were little more than the “first among equals,” was utterly alien to the Eastern mentality, and so was the outspokenness and (from the Easter perspective) impudence of vassals. The Eastern elites saw the inherent dangers of such a fluid system and associated it with primitive tribal structures. Yet it was exactly these feudal kingdoms that gradually devolved power to ever wider segments of the population until (through a series of constitutional crises) they eventually developed into modern democracies. Meanwhile, the Eastern states remained mired in autocracy.

The other feature of Western European society that the Muslims (though not the Byzantines) found disgusting and incomprehensible was the presence of women in public life. The fact that women had names and faces that were known outside the family circle was viewed as immoral and dishonorable (much the way the Athenians viewed Spartan women) by the Muslims of the 12^th and 13^th centuries. The fact that women not only had names and faces, but a voice in civic affairs and could play a role in public life including controlling wealth and influencing politics was even more offensive. Yet modern developmental research shows a strong correlation between societies that empower and enfranchise women and development. Societies that insist on muzzling and oppressing half their population are nowadays considered less “civilized.”

Whether you view the crusaders or the Saracens as more civilized depends on how you view democracy and womens’ rights. And modern commentators who feel compelled to “apologize” for the crusades are either utterly ignorant of the issues at stake and the comparative cultures of the antagonists—or implicitly reject the very Western values they allegedly defend.