WHAT DO GEORGE W. BUSH, Lord Longford and the Daily Express have in common? All launched “crusades”, which, like their medieval namesakes, turned out — or are turning out — to be failures. With equally unsuccessful effect, English football supporters in the World Cup finals wore crosses over suits of mock mail.
It is amazing that the sordid, abortive long-ago wars that we call crusades should still command such symbolic power. Even those who detest the memory of the crusades overestimate their importance: Pope John Paul II even apologised for them.
The apparent return of Western imperialism to the Middle East has renewed interest. Loose talk of a clash of civilisations has helped to stimulate a lot of hurried histories. Public appetite for reading about the crusades — now catered for in Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War: A New History of the Crusades —has coincided with a wave of awareness among historians that the existing literature was wrong: too materialist, too ignorant or dismissive of crusading spirituality and of the emotions and piety that crusaders invested in their bloody work. Objectively, however, the crusades do not deserve the attention they are getting. And the specialists continue to miss some of the most interesting points.
Historians have mistaken the crusades for early signs of Western vitality — European capacity to make war way beyond their frontiers. Yet the crusaders’ failure demonstrates that the opposite is true. Chasm-like discontinuities separate the “rise of the West” from the frustrations of the Middle Ages. Part of the crusades’ impact was to alert Westerners to their weakness and to the smallness of the corner of the world that they occupied.
To some extent, acquaintance with Arabic and Syriac scholarship helped the slow recovery of the learning of antiquity in Europe. But the big effect of the crusades in Christendom was how they warped Christian piety.
The crusading movement started as an outgrowth from peaceful pilgrimage. Increasingly in the 10th and 11th centuries, Christians made the difficult journey to Jerusalem — and a few other holy destinations — as an act of penance. Because of disorder in the Islamic world and the selective persecution of Christians, Holy Land pilgrimages became armed expeditions. Simultaneously, Christians began to adopt what had formerly been a Muslim notion — holy war. The land where Christ’s feet trod, and where so many saints’ bones lay buried, sanctified those who fought and died for it. Artists began to use crusaders and Saracens to represent virtue and vice in depictions of psychomachia. Knights no longer envied monks their easy route to salvation. War, as well as prayerful chastity and poverty, could be a means of penance. Warriors could fulfill their vocation for violence and still be saved. “The blood of Muslims,” declared a French poet in the early 12th century, “washes out sins.”
In the 1090s, preachers whipped up hysteria that sent thousands of ill-armed pilgrims to their deaths in an effort to reach Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Pope Urban II orchestrated a well-planned attack. Most participants were aristocrats, their followers and dependants. It is often claimed that the crusaders were younger sons, with inadequate inheritances, or adventurers “on the make”, escaping restricted opportunities at home. But typical crusaders were rich — with a lot to lose and Heaven to win.
Their efforts were only, at most, a feeble precedent for conflict between civilisations. Around the Mediterranean, Christian and Muslim communities continued to live alongside one another, intermarrying, exchanging culture, even worshipping at the same shrines. Christian and Muslim states rarely behaved as if they thought of each other as natural enemies. It was common to make alliances against third parties, regardless of religion. The mutual demonisation that fuelled crusading passions was uncharacteristic. Crusading fervour contributed as much, perhaps, to growing hostility between Christians and Jews as between Christians and Muslims.
Islam, meanwhile, as Tyerman says, “was only marginally inconvenienced”. The big conflict of the era was not between crusaders and Muslims but between Sunni and Shia.
In the mid-12th-century, Zangi — a Turkish chief who dubbed himself “pillar of the faith” — saw the opportunity to build an empire. Like Osama bin Laden, he proclaimed jihad against infidels and Shia Muslims alike. The strategy worked. Saladin, the Kurdish soldier who seized Zangi’s empire in a coup in 1170, reduced the crusader states to tiny enclaves. Yet that was not his greatest achievement: he sought to be remembered as the “reviver of the empire of the Commander of the Faithful”, a restorer of Islamic unity, a torch of Sunni Islamic orthodoxy.
Muslim rivals were extinguished, Egypt conquered for Sunni Islam. Islamic solidarity was never again challenged by such a large or menacing state outside the Shia heartland of Iran. The other legacy of Saladin was Islamic militancy: jihad remained a way of legitimising upstart dynasties and regimes.
Of the many attempts to write one-volume histories of the crusades in recent years, Tyerman’s is the best: an intelligible yet elegant, readable yet scholarly narrative, though neither searching nor surprising.
Occasionally his judgments seem questionable. Like other historians, he is vague about what holy war means and insensitive to its possible Islamic origins. His reading of the sermon in which Urban II launched the crusade seems highly tendentious: there are so many contradictory versions that no confident interpretation can be convincing.
His excursions into so-called crusades in Europe and on the Spanish and Baltic frontiers are less assured and less thoroughly grounded in the sources than his chapters on the Holy Land. But his account of the crusader states is vivid, convincing and concise. He does justice to the story of the Jews and explains how cultural change eventually made crusading superannuated.
He manages masses of details without succumbing to tedium. He relishes the contradictions of historical evidence and eschews “sonorous summing-up”. This is a pity, as there are some genuine parallels for our time. The most obvious for Muslims is: heal your divisions. The most obvious for the West is: stay out of the Middle East.
Extract from GOD’S WAR by Christopher Tyerman
Violence, approved by society and supported by religion, has proved a commonplace of civilised communities. What are now known as the crusades represent one manifestation of this phenomenon. The crusades were wars justified by faith conducted against real or imagined enemies defined by religious and political elites as perceived threats to the Christian faithful. The religious beliefs crucial to such warfare placed enormous significance on imagined awesome but reassuring supernatural forces of overwhelming power and proximity that were nevertheless expressed in hard concrete physical acts: prayer, penance, giving alms, attending church, pilgrimage, violence. Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain.
The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising agression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history. Understood by participants at once as a statement of Christian charity, religious devotion and godly savagery, the “wars of the cross” helped fashion for adherents a shared sense of belonging to a Christian society, and contributed to setting its human and geographic frontiers. In these ways, the crusades helped define the nature of Europe.
By forcing an otherwise improbably intimate contact with western Asia through centuries of contest over the Christian Holy Places in Palestine, the crusades encouraged European inquiry and experience beyond traditional horizons. The moral certainties fostered by crusading left physical or cultural monuments and scars from the Arctic Circle to the Nile, from the synagogues of the Rhineland to the mosques of Andalusia, from the vocabulary of value to the awkward hinterland of historic Christian pride, guilt and responsibility.
Whether admired, mocked or condemned, the crusades remain one of the great subjects of European history.
© Christopher Tyerman, 2006
