The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume regarded the crusades as ‘the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. He also conceded that they ‘engrossed the attention of Europe and have ever since engaged the curiosity of mankind’. These two themes of judgement and fascination have supplied the strands for the cultural rope that binds these medieval holy wars to modern interest. Hume was right. Since 1095, when Pope Urban II answered the call for help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus by summoning a vast army to fight in the name of God to recover the Holy City of Jerusalem and liberate eastern Christianity, there has never been a time when the consequences of this act have not gripped minds and imaginations, primarily in western society but increasingly, since the nineteenth century, among communities that have seen themselves as heirs of the victims of this form of religious violence. Throughout, the crusades have been configured to reflect later concerns and circumstances in a process that matches the protean quality of the phenomenon itself. Of all aspects of the European world in the so-called medieval period, the crusades enjoy the clearest recognition in modern times.
Of the drama and dislocation involved in crusading, there is no doubt. For more than four centuries from the end of the eleventh century, although with slackening intensity from the fourteenth, western Europeans, more used to lives circumscribed by the narrow geography of localities and regions, found themselves fighting under the banner of the Cross on battlefields as far apart as Lake Chud in western Russia and the Nile Delta, from Portugal to the Arabian deserts, in wars justified as holy against, among others, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Greeks, Slavs, Balts, Livs, Russians, Bosnians, Turks and Spaniards, Muslims both Sunni and Shiah, pagans and Christian enemies of the pope. The personalities and actions of figures such as Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard Cœur de Lion, Saladin, Frederick Barbarossa or St Louis have haunted literature, myth and popular imagination ever since. The word ‘crusade’, although a non-medieval Franco-Spanish hybrid, has entered the Anglo-American language as a synonym for a good cause vigorously pursued, religious or secular. However floridly and misleadingly romantic, the image of mailed knights bearing crosses on their surcoats or banners, fighting for their faith under an alien sun, occupies a familiar niche in the façade of modern western perceptions of the past. Their story still moves.
In this lies a strong irony, for crusading has always lacked objective precision in definition, practice, perception or approval. Such startling intrusions into the customary procedures of western life inevitably elicited complex responses even when the activity became integrated into the devotional practices and assumptions of the western Church. By turns and at the same time, crusading has been understood by participants, contemporaries or later observers as warfare to defend a beleaguered faith; the ultimate expression of secular piety; a decisive ecclesiastical compromise with base secular habits; a defining commitment of the Church to accommodate the spiritual aspirations of the laity; the pinnacle of admired ambition for a ruling military élite; an agent as well as symbol of religious, cultural and ethnic identity, even superiority; a vehicle for personal self-aggrandisement, commercial expansion and political conquest; an expression of the authority of the papacy, and a means of imposing uniformity and order within Christendom as well as securing and extending its external frontiers; a manifestation of Christian love for fellow believers and of divine care for God’s people; an experiment in European colonialism; an example of recrudescent western racism; an excuse and incentive for religious persecution, ethnic cleansing and acts of barbarism; a noble cause; or, as Steven Runciman, the best-known crusade historian of the twentieth century, imperishably intoned: ‘one long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost’. While not all these views can necessarily be accommodated simultaneously, if at all, they indicate why their subject continues to intrigue.
Throughout its history, crusading, always a minority, if strikingly disruptive, activity among the Christian faithful of western Europe, had attracted criticism as well as enthusiasm, from those appalled at such overt embracing of physical, violent war as an act of spiritual penance, those who regarded the conduct of crusaders as beneath contempt, and those who distinguished between campaigns fought under the Cross for selfless or selfish political ends. Crusading was born in controversy, the struggle between supporters of the pope or the German emperor over the appropriate independence of the Church from lay influence. The direction of the special privileges associated with the initial expedition to Jerusalem of 1096–9 (remission of the penalties of sin, Church protection of property and family, immunity from litigation and debt reclamation, etc.) to other conflicts, against the Muslim rulers in Spain, the pagans of the Baltic, religious heretics or Christian enemies of popes, widened the scope for both commitment and criticism. The cries of many victims went largely unheard in the west: the Jews massacred by the First and Second Crusaders in the Rhineland in 1096 and 1146–7 or butchered by the triumphant Christian army in the streets of Jerusalem in July 1099; or the Muslims who shared that fate not just in Jerusalem in 1099 but in countless cities, towns, villages and forts across the Near East. Warfare, however dressed up in moral or religious terms, brutalises, kills and maims victors and vanquished. Christian, Muslim or Jewish polemic, alike in articulate passion, rarely impinged on each other. In Christendom the blunt certainty of the Song of Roland determined reactions: ‘Christians are right and pagans are wrong.’ The crusades provide a good example of how contact can breed hardening of intercultural attitudes even while channels of material transmission flow more freely. This was most catastrophically confirmed when an army of crusaders in 1204 sacked the Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople, with most showing only a few qualms. The sense of embattlement upon which the ideology of crusading rested ensured that the wars of the Cross persisted as long as the religious assumptions that had given rise to and sustained them remained intact: the authority of the pope and Church to mediate penance and redemption.
However, those critics within the pale of western culture who felt victimised or disappointed by some or all of the wars of the Cross were less easy to ignore, although easy to exaggerate. The papacy’s sponsorship of the brutal conquest of Languedoc by crusader armies from northern France (1209–29) was justified by the need to extirpate the threat of Cathar heresy, a dualist creed that had caught hold in the region and undermined the established Church. Many troubadours from the area castigated the crusaders for preferring war in southern France to fighting the infidel. This smacked of parti pris. Elsewhere, the premise of the military action to eradicate a cancer that endangered the spiritual health of all Christendom and the salvation of Christians was more readily accepted. Crusading, on all fronts, attracted interest not because it was thought eccentric, evil or corrupt. Few would have subscribed as a practical option to Francis of Assisi’s preference for conversion over combat with Islam, any more than did Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt when Francis visited him during the Fifth Crusade in 1219.* While many disapproved of the papacy’s increasing obsession from the thirteenth century with using wars of the Cross to eradicate enemies within Christendom, others were happy to join these campaigns and take advantage of the spiritual and material benefits on offer. Few doubted the almost apocalyptic efficacy of Christian rule in the Holy Land, even long after its political realisation had become more of a distant memory than even a pipe-dream. Crusading continued to hold the gaze at least of prominent politicians and members of both lay and clerical élites, and, judging by wills, lesser propertied people, both men and women, because it appeared to embrace some of the constant and dangerous issues facing western European Christians: how to earn salvation in a sinful world; how to lead a strenuously active, not just passive, good and faithful life; how to measure God’s approbation of individuals and society on the gauge of physical victory and defeat; even how to ensure the political survival of their entire religion.
Perhaps the strangest aspects of crusading to the Holy Land lay in its lack of connection with the territories to which the armies were directed. This is where comparisons with modern imperialism collapse. There existed no strategic interest for the knights of the west to occupy parts of Syria and Palestine. The alleged commercial imperatives driving Italian trading cities could have been achieved, if more gradually and possibly on a smaller scale, at smaller cost and with far less risk through peaceful means, as they demonstrated in their dealings with Muslim Egypt after the loss of the Holy Land. Trade piggybacked the crusades, not vice versa. The presence of western warriors and settlers in Muslim Iberia or the pagan Baltic made some economic and political sense; these were immediate frontiers. This was not true for the Holy Land, whose occupation depended on its status as a relic of Christ on earth. Whatever else, the justification if not explanation for the Palestinian wars from 1096 to 1291 lay in aspirations of faith. Mutatis mutandis, this applied to all Holy Wars of the Cross. Hence one central paradox of crusading history: the grip of crusade ideology and practice was decisively loosened not by Muslim victories, although they were frequent enough, but by the Reformation, which challenged the belief system that underlay the crusade – papal authority, a penitential system based on the granting of indulgences and dependent on a view of the centrality of priests and the Church in mediating the grace of God to believers. Protestants did not cavil at Holy War; but they rejected the form of the crusade as theologically spurious and ecclesiastically corrupt. In a further irony, this coincided with the greatest external Muslim threat to Christendom’s survival, the advance of the Ottomans, who reached the gates of Vienna in 1529, the very year the German evangelical princes signed the ‘Protest’ from which the term ‘Protestant’ derives.
As a demonstration of the protean and forceful effect of faith, the crusades inevitably attracted the attention of historians of all denominations (and none) as well as of Enlightenment philosophers analysing the imperfections of mankind and human society. Each generation has managed to reinvent the crusades in its own image. As the pattern of nation states achieved dominance in European affairs from the seventeenth century, so the crusades were appropriated to national myths, especially in France, where the equation of the medieval term ‘Frank’ with the modern French proved irresistible if unsound. To many eighteenth-century savants, crusading appeared a classic example of barbaric enthusiasm: irrational, pointless and destructive, even if energetic and heroic. Yet with the removal of the Ottoman political threat, the growing fashion for eastern travel and artefacts, and the beginning of systematic commercial and political exploitation of the Near East by western powers combined with the escapist, often politically reactionary medieval revival to create a new nineteenth-century set of images. The crusades increasingly featured in academic and popular literature as stirring tales, part of the ascent of the west, tribute, in Ernest Barker’s purple prose, to ‘the majesty of man’s incessant struggle towards an ideal good’. Although some still maintained that the whole enterprise was misguided, the picture of the crusaders as chivalric heroes or gilded thugs became firmly established, their actions part of what Edward Gibbon so misleadingly called ‘the World’s debate’. This last interpretation, that the crusades operated as the medieval act in an immemorial contest between east and west, Christianity and Islam, apart from being historically meaningless, was adopted in the late nineteenth century both by western colonisers and, as witness to that exploitation, by elements in the Muslim Near East seeking a future beyond the senescent Ottoman empire. When General Allenby entered Jerusalem in December 1917 some in the British army and press corps saw this as the fulfilment of some crusading destiny; so, drawing rather different conclusions, did some of their opponents. The French even claimed a Syrian mandate in 1919 on the spurious grounds of their historic interests in the area. As Amir Faisal, soon to be palmed off with the newly made throne of Iraq, sardonically enquired: ‘Could I be reminded just who won the crusades?’ With the rise of Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel, primarily by Jews from the European diaspora, with borders not so very different from the twelfth-century kingdom of Jerusalem, an equation with or rejection of the crusading past became in some quarters more plausible. At a banal level, when we read of the negotiations between Saladin and Richard I over the partition of Palestine in 1191–2 coming unstuck on the question of jurisdiction within the city of Jerusalem, we can experience a tremor of recognition, however false. It is one of the most savage of many bitter ironies that a nineteenth-century depiction of the crusades as a prototype for modern imperial exploitation and western cultural aggression or, alternatively, as a just war in defence of core but culturally specific western moral values, has so destructively entered twenty-first-century international politics.
Modern society is no less captivated by belief systems than any other, even if the western liberal European tradition harbours suspicion of organised religion. The crusades’ combination of religion and politics, faith and materialism, has proved, if anything, increasingly captivating. This cannot surprise. The history of the crusades has left its litter. Shopping would not be pursued in Knightsbridge, nor cricket in St John’s Wood, nor the law in the Temple if it had not been for the Military Orders of the Temple and the Hospital of St John, whose estates these London medieval suburbs once were, religious Orders founded to protect and succour pilgrims to Jerusalem in the aftermath of its conquest by an army from western Europe in 1099; Orders that later found themselves leading the defence of the land these westerners conquered and the political settlement they carved out from the indigenous peoples and their own no less violent rulers. Even more perhaps than in these historic survivals, the history of the crusades throws up concerns central to all societies, about the forging of identity, the communal force of shared faith, the use and abuse of legitimate violence, the nature of political authority and organised religion, the exploitation or fear of what sociologists call ‘the other’, alien people or concepts ranged against which social groups can find cohesion: communism and capitalism; democracy and fascism; Christians and non-Christians; east and west; them and us. The first great anti-Semitic pogrom in western Europe came as the result of recruiting for a new form of Holy War in 1096, the war of the Cross, the First Crusade.
There can be no indifference to such issues. However, there can equally be no summoning of the past to take sides in the present. The plundering of history to pronounce modern indictments serves no rational purpose and merely clouds understanding of a distant actuality whose interest lies as much if not more in its uniqueness and difference from other times, and especially from today. To observe the past through the lens of the present invites delusion. Only by trying to treat the evidence of the past as far as is possible on its own terms can any semblance of clear insight be achieved. That must be the justification for what follows, where eyewitnesses with their own distinct voices, preoccupations and experience can speak for themselves. Given the scope of the wars of the Cross, selection is inevitable. This one concerns only the witnesses to the Holy Land enterprise between 1095 and 1099. Yet throughout, the burden of understanding lies on us to appreciate their world, not on them to provide ours with facile precedents or good stories.
CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN