The Truth About the Crusades
By Thomas Woods Posted in User Blogs — Comments (32) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., a New York Times bestselling author, holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. His latest book is Hos the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
Not quite three weeks after the film's release we can say one thing for sure: the First Crusade was much more successful than Ridley Scott's movie.
I was stunned to hear Islamic anti-defamation groups condemn Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven."
The Muslims appear much nobler than the Christians in the film, and on the Christian side the only remotely sympathetic characters are at best agnostic. Jonathan Riley-Smith, an expert on the Crusades, described the movie as "rubbish" for just this reason - the film, he says, is "not historically accurate at all" in its depiction of "the Muslims as sophisticated and civilized, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."
More important than the film itself, though, is the history behind the Crusades themselves. Moviegoers who knew little of the period walked away with a distorted understanding of the Crusades that played into politically correct stereotypes.
Proper context for the Crusades must begin at the beginning, with the First Crusade (1096-1099). Yet - and here is the point - even the First Crusade was not the real beginning of the story.
The real beginning came in the century following the death of Muhammad in 632. During that incredible hundred years, Muslims spread their religion by force throughout Arabia, and into the modern Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, as well as into Egypt, north Africa, and Spain. Further progress into Western Europe was stopped cold by Charles Martel and his Frankish warriors at the battle of Poitiers/Tours in 732.
It is easily forgotten that some of these territories had been heavily Christian when the Muslims took them over. No one today thinks of Syria and Egypt as Christian centers, but in the seventh century they certainly were. The ancient city of Antioch had been home to a school of Christian thought second only to that of Alexandria, and Egypt had been the birthplace of Christian monasticism.
At the battle of Manzikert in 1071 much of Byzantine Asia Minor was lost to the Seljuk Turks, a group of non-Arab Muslims who were influential in the Middle East during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Alarmed, the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus issued an appeal to the Pope in Rome, from whom the Eastern world had been estranged since the Great Schism of 1054. That pope, Gregory VII, much as he wanted to help, wound up having other fish to fry. It was Pope Urban II who issued the call for the crusade in 1095.
When the Seljuk Turks conquered Palestine in the early eleventh century they at first carried out atrocities against Christians, destroying churches and killing some of the faithful. Although this approach was soon abandoned, the internal divisions of the Seljuk Turks translated into instability in the Holy Land, where Christian pilgrimages to the city's holy places became perilous. Thus the crusade called by Urban would try to ease some of the pressure from the troubled Byzantines, but also set its sights on liberating the once-Christian Holy Land from the hands of the Muslims.
At no time did the crusaders come anywhere near Arabia, the heart of Islam, and yet most people seem to think that the Crusades were an attempt by wicked Christians to invade the Muslim world and convert its inhabitants to Christianity. To the contrary, the Christians engaged in no such forced conversion of Muslims - which would explain why, during the years following the First Crusade in which the Christians occupied Jerusalem, Muslims remained the overwhelming majority of the population.
In fact, if you had asked a Muslim as recently as the eighteenth century what the Crusades were, he would have had no idea what you were talking about. From the Muslim point of view the Crusades were such a minor affair that they were scarcely worth noting. It is largely thanks to historically recent Western guilt and hand-wringing that modern Muslims have become conscious of the Crusades at all.
None of this is an attempt to whitewash the truly despicable and inexcusable aspects of the Crusades. There were plenty of atrocities on all sides, though that is a wartime phenomenon that is not exactly unknown to the modern world. But to focus on these incidents, however cruel and however contrary to the Christian Gospel they were, in the absence of this contextual material is to miss the forest for the trees.
Thus it was that in 1095, with the assistance of no secular ruler, Pope Urban II called upon Western Christians to assist their Eastern brethren. Over the past two millennia, the Church's influence on our civilization - as I show in my new book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization - has typically involved the pursuits of peace: the university system, the sciences, international law, economic thought, charitable work, the arts and architecture, and much more besides. But it also meant encouraging the Spaniards to wage a just war against their Islamic conquerors, and in the case of the Crusades to lend assistance to fellow Christians in the East who found themselves under a similar threat.
That, stated simply, is what the Crusades were about.
Any book recommendations (and anything you know of to stay away from) on the Crusades?
And I've read a decent amount about the Early Church Fathers, but you might have some more suggestions for me?
Recent reading for me have been on hesychasm and St Gregory Palamas.
or the Crusades along the Baltic?
I respectfully suggest that defining the Crusades as contra Islam creates a false dichotomy, one that continues to bedevil us to the modern day.
The Crusades were a clash of civilizations, nothing more. The Moslem civilization had been advancing for more than 600 years, extending it's reach across India to Southeast Asia, even crushing a large Chinese Army in Western China. Europe stayed in a desperate struggle before and after the crusades, all the way until the death of Sulayman the Magnificent in 1566. Much of Southwestern Europe stayed under Moslem domination until after WWI.
One interesting not on the battle of Tours in 732: most historians think it never really happened. There was no contemporary account of the battle, only accounts written down years later. Especially the Moslems at that time have no account of a large army being defeated, and they have pretty good records of general events. Probably as few as a hundred raiders were turned back at Tours, and the story grew afterwards.
Civilizations wax when the economies are expanding in relation to the neighbors, and wane when the economies are shrinking relative to the neighbors. Moslem civilizations expanded for 600 years until they controlled all of the Middle East, most of Spain, and even laid seige to Venice. When the economies of the Christian Civilizations became stronger land gradually changed from Moslem to Christian -- Spain, Malta, large areas of Lebanon.
The Crusades were nothing more than a series of alliances for military campaigns against common foes (including the 3rd crusade, which sacked Christian Constaninople). They were as brutal as the world then, which is to say very brutal. But no more so than any other large conquest, say the Moghul (Moslem) conquest of India that happened shortly afterwards.
It's true that evangelism was not a motive during the Crusades. But not out of a tolerance for other religions. Rather, the main desire was to reclaim the land-- the prior inhabitants were considered barbarians if considered at all.
After the first conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 there were few Muslims left alive to convert. It is worth noting that when the Muslims did finally take back the city (under Saladin, I think) there was no such massacre of non-combat Christians.
The fact that Muslims occupied a majority of the population in the years afterwards, can also be partially explained by the fact that so many crusaders packed up and returned to Europe once the fighting was over. Pragmatism at that point demanded that the remaining ruling Christian minority treat the more populous Muslims with respect. And you're right, a few Christian leaders were considered to be fair and wise even by the Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land.
And as much as I think invading Franks behaved atrociously, I don't feel any kind of vicarious guilt about the Crusades. It would be as ridiculous as a modern Muslim feeling guilty about their ancestor's invasion of the Iberian penninsula in the 8th century. (Actually since my ancestory is Eastern European, it would be more like a Turk feeling guilty about the Moorish invasions.) None of us were alive then, and any civilization's history is bound to have darker spots.
But I still think it's important that we remember the atrocities committed in the name of God are examples of Western Europe's dark spots. Often horrible deeds, that were committed with faulty motivations. Pretending they weren't that bad, or offering the atrocities as a kind of caveat in an otherwise glorious mission of self defense is revisionist history at it's worst.
By most modern accounts, but otherwise a very sharp analysis.
"The Fourth Crusade" by Jonathan Phillips is an excellent, and in large part sympathetic, account of the motivations and series of mishaps that led to the sack of Constantinople. Very interesting reading if you have the time.
I recommended it downthread, but I enjoyed it enough to give it a second plug here.
It's not a "liberal" book-- to the contrary it's very sympathetic to the crusaders. I'm not sure how familiar you already are with the time, but the book is very detailed and thorough-- and unlike a few other historical non-fictions I've read, the narrative does not suffer as a result.
Of course, the crusaders end up ransacking Constantinople with little pity for it's inhabitants, and they were technically excommunicated long before that for sacking the Christian city of Zara. But they start out with the noblest of intentions-- which they are repeatedly forced to sacrifice due to a very sizable debt to the Venetians looming over their heads. The transformation is fascinating, IMO.
Something that I need to point out somewhat in contradiction to the aboev is the fact that in the 11th century Islamic civilization was declining not expanding. India (other than far western India) and SE Asia remained outside its orbit still at this point in history. The "canonical" Caliph, the Abassid heir in Baghdad, was a powerless figurehead. There were rivals Caliphs in Cairo and Cordova. The Berbers had overrun much of northern Africa. And the Turks had overrun Central Asia, Persia and the upper Middle East. In Spain the Reconquista had pushed the Muslims out of half the peninsula. In some respects the Islamic Empire was in much the same shape that the Roman Empire was in in the 6th century: fractured, invaded and falling apart.
It was of course the Seljuk Turks, by conquering another large chunk of Byzantine territory, and refusing to honor centuries-old treaties protecting Christian pilgrimmage in the Holy Land, who sparked the Crusades.
The 4th crusade was the sack of Constaninople. I should never post about such things late at night, and especially I shouldn't do it assuming I remember details.
The 4th crusade was the sack of Constaninople. I should never post about such things late at night, and especially I shouldn't do it assuming I remember details.
I accidentally posted this to an earlier reply by accident. I guess both late at night and early in the morning should be off limits to my posting.
blessings to the Holy Father, from whose lips flows the direct word of God. Were it not for his Holiness (not to mention his very faithful servant Rick Santorum), who knows what the Western World might have been like.
Can you imagine the horror of a President Osama (or some such nonsense)? Can you imagine how backwards our country would still be, perhaps more like Egypt or Pakistan, having to beg at the hands of some other more powerful place? Can you imagine the terrors on the face of our women folk who would be forced to wear abayas (sp) and burkas, even in the midst of 110 degree Texas weather?
Thank you for this fine story. I swallowed the liberal school districts reports on the ways that the Catholic Church led to the (almost total)destruction of Indian people, killings of hundreds of thousands of jews (even before the Holocaust) in the Inquisition, subjugation of the dark peoples of Africa into hundreds of years of bondage and subhuman existence, and massacres of people of color all around the world.
I'm glad to read that his Holiness and the legacy of his predecessors is not as sullied as I once thought. Thank you for educating me.
Not only are you wrong in the facts suggested by your preschool-level sarcasm, you're neither good at this nor gifted with a sense of when to stop digging.
To date, all you've added is poorly worded disruption. Cut out the garbage, now. Otherwise, you will not be the first gleefully banned troll in this establishment.
Your screen name is incomplete (and to everyone else, meaningless) and your tagline makes no real point.
name and tagline are metaphors for the content.
....but I'm sure that I've been banned by better places than this! Are YOU the troll police?
Please don't get angry me because I have learned to appreciate the wonders of the heretofore-unChristian-Catholic-Church that is being celebrated in this post?
It's more the way in which history (read facts bro) gets diminished in the service of someone's fantasy about the world. The author of this book (in ascribing this role to the Catholic Church) ignores all of the pre-Chrisitian history and the contributions of African and Asian societies and kingdoms (ever heard of the Ming Dynasty) to what has become the Western World.
Troll rate me at will. I'm not here for you. But that doesn't change history!
is written by the victors. Would you consider it a "fact" that all of America quaked in fear of Joe McCarthy, because it's in a history book? You might be shocked at the "factuality" of that claim.
FWIW, you might have had some legitimate points to make here (I'm no friend of the Catholic Church), but you blew your chance at that in the manner in which you approached the question.
Atrocity is a regular feature of war. The question is, does a specific atrocity (or series of atrocities) invalidate the justice of a war?
I think all reasonable men must agree that, in principle, the Crusade was justified as a defensive attempt to liberate what had been conquered. If such an action is by nature unjust then the Allies' invasion of France in 1944 was unjust.
Following the same analogy (and admitting that analogy is a tricky business with history), it seems to me that the burden of your critique here would require us to at least serious consider the charge that the injustice of Dresden or Hiroshima invalidates the Second World War. Is this the path you want to take?
You..... um...... um..... people aren't familiar with classic American literature nor its authors.
I only hope that MachoNachos brings some salsa to share every now and then.
PC scribblings by leftist hacks to be literature much less classics.
Cheap anti-Catholicism -- basically an endearing mix of Jack Chick and the worst of the DU fever swamps -- will shorten your shelf life here considerably.
Historically inaccurate anti-Catholicism isn't helping.
There are legitimate critiques of the Catholic Church's behavior over the course of two thousand years; any human institution would acquire a few nicks in that time. You've managed to miss every one of them, although, concededly, you came within sighting distance when you mentioned the less-than-stellar approach to the Jews.
History, of course, is not changed by your ranting or my correction. However, your status will be.
As Gengis says, you're not facing troll-rating here, neighbor. I -- for reasons that are not really clear to me, except that I like targets -- give a wider berth to anti-Catholicism than to anti-any-other-religious belief garbage. Even that has a fairly short fuse. Keep that in mind.
I want to see what he said. Who was it?
It's the user with the cruddy Toni Morrison jones.
I figured it was the 1 hidden. Trusted User went away, cant see.
for your comment on the Battle of Tours? I still have my old Western Civ. textbook and it is mentioned as fact there. I'm happy to entertain revisionist versions of medieval history, but not without sources.
I made the point that the Crusades should properly be viewed as the strategic response of Christian Europe to a clear military threat from the Islamic Middle East.
http://www.redstate.org/comments/2005/5/8/211640/0843/6#6
I continue to hold that position, and, given the course of the debate here, I find it strengthened. For those who disagree, I have a question: Can you think of an alternative to the Crusades, either military or diplomatic, that would have succeeded in containing the military expansion of Islam long enough to give Europe the time to grow into a power strong enough to repel Islamic invasion? Remember that Napoleon said the logical end of all defensive warfare is surrender.
writings, which are all about the importance of family and community for helping to improve their lives. Her books fit very comfortable within mainstream Republican thought -- smaller government that is kept outside of people's private lives, religion/spirituality as the foundations for a healthy lifestyle, and (most importantly)family responsibility, support and connection as a means of dealing with the day-to-day problems in life.
It's written in an African-American cultural and historical context, but it's definitley mainstream conservative in its thinking and approahch.
A little arithmatic will show that the interval between the battle of Tours/Poitiers and the Promulgation of the First Crusade was 364 years. And while things did move slower back then, its pretty tough to argue that the Crusades were in response to a menace that had been in remission for nearly four centuries.
If the Pope had seen the Crusades as a necessary response to a direct threat to the territory of Europe, he would have said so. But he didn't. We don't need to speculate about the motives of the Crusaders: they left records.
I don't know why people worry so much about it. "The Crusades" was a vast, multi-generational complex of events. There doesn't have to be good guys or bad guys. There's nothing to get defensive over. Its like trying to discern "the reason" for the Roman Empire or the Renaissance or to figure out who's fault that was. Perfect nonsense.
as only one episode in a long history of Muslim aggression against Christian. The Seljuk Turks had wrested Asia Minor only a few years prior to the first crusade, and Muslim piracy had made the Eastern Mediterranean unsafe for European ships.
And don't assume that you know what the Pope's motives were. In that day and age it was easier to motivate large numbers to armed men to take up a cause by appealing to religious sensibilities, than to geopolitical considerations. These were simple people. Even many of the nobles couldn't read, and few would have had access to an accurate world map. If they had, they would have seen Europe half encircled between two Muslim pincers, one in Spain, and one in Asia Minor. In later years, after the Mongol invaders had been converted to Islam, the Golden Horde represented yet another threat poised to strike at the heart of Europe. As late as 1683 the Turks were able to lay siege to Vienna, and very nearly captured it. There was ample motivation for a European counterstrike, and the first crusade was the first of many such strategic offensives.
You are right, however, that there are no real "good guys" or "bad guys" in this story. Both sides committed atrocities that deserve our contempt. However, it is not enough to document the brutality of crusading period. We must also attempt to understand the reason for it.
Re: Further progress into Western Europe was stopped cold by Charles Martel and his Frankish warriors at the battle of Poitiers/Tours in 732.
Charles Martel stopped a raiding party. Granted, had it not been stopped a more serious invasion effort might have followed some day. However a more serious threat to Europe was thwarted at the other end of the Mediterranean when the Byzantines withstood two all-out sieges of Constantinople. Had "The City" fallen the rest of Europe would have been easy pickings.
It's also worth noting that not only did the Byzantines hold off the Caliphate, but when the latter became weak and corrupt a couple centuries later, they even began winning back territory under the capable Macedonian dynasty in the 9th and 10th centuries.
I would quibble with the statement that Muslims were the majority population in Palestine at the time of the Crusades. A plurality--maybe. But Christianity remained the majority religion of the former Byzantine lands for generations if not centuries after the the initial Muslim conquest since, for one thing, Islam originally was conceived of as the national religion of the Arabs (as Judaism was for the Jews) and did not take on universalist aspirations and start accepting converts until long after Mohammed was dust. Well into the present time there were large Christian minorities in the Middle East, and it's at least possible that Christians were still in the majority in the 11th century.