The Real History of the Crusades

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.

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.

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.

. .... 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.

Wow. It's amazing to me how one-sided some of these statements are. I am fully aware of the atrocities committed by the Muslims, then and now, but it seems like in this discussion, we are unable to examine elements of history without either wholesale discarding or blindly praising them. I know most of the facts that you all are discussing. I am a humanities professor,(at a conservative Christian university), and I am not blinded to the truth about Islam, or Islamic civilization. It is true that Islamic civ transmitted much information from India, and from Greek civilization, but that doesn't in any way negate it's contribution to the West. The fact is that much of this information WAS "forgotten" by the West (or at least most of the West), and Islamic civ was able to transmit it (long before Byzantine civilization had the opportunity). That is not theft, it's a natural part of communication and interaction between civilizations (For example, the Greeks were influenced by the Egyptians via the Minoans. They took what they learned, made it better, and thankfully, we have incredible Greek sculpture as a result). In addition, they were able to expand upon some of the information which they learned from these other civilizations. It is true that Islamic civilization spread violence, and was quite destructive to the cause of Christianity throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. But I don't think that it is wise or prudent to dump the entire civilization into this collective "Muslim scum" pot. This limited thinking is a thinly veiled type of bigotry. Sure, these people are doing absolutely terrible things today, and they did then. But to say (because we dislike them and their deeds)that they have no true culture or heritage of their own, no contribution to world history, is to take an extremely narrow view of reality.
The approach that I've seen here oversimplifies the Crusades beyond all reason. There are many views out there about the Crusades, and there are the historical facts which did occur within a very real context. Someone made a comment earlier that I was viewing the period through my modern lense, and therefore missing the reality of the situation. However, it seems to me that this wholesale hatred of Islam (seemingly based primarily on current events) has caused many here to interpret history through THAT lens, making them unable to see beyond the evil, and recognize anything good connected with this civilization. That is unfortunate. (I know that some will probably say "That's because there IS NOTHING good about it!"), but if this is your response, I don't think that you're allowing yourself to view the situation beyond the lens of your offense.)

Also, I think that this statement:

"The wrong things that happened during the Crusades was done because some of the defenders of civilization and Christianity had been influenced themselves by Islam. They had suffered Islamic domination and learned how to torture, burn, slaughter and they irony is they used what they learned from the Muslims when figthing them."

is an oversimplification of the facts. Western Europeans had experienced and practiced their fair share of violence long before the Muslims came along. This doesn't really seem to be a valid argument. The Islamic forces were violent, to be sure, but come on, so were the Europeans.

On another note, did anyone have any observations regarding my comments about the Crusades and their effect upon Eastern Christians and Jews, or the fact that this was a major focus of the Reconciliation Walk? This was actually a primary focus of my posts (Islamic civ being a peripheral issue), and I'd like to hear responses to the Walk in light of this additional information.

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