Epilogue: Aftermath
"We perish sleeping one and all,
The wolf has come into the stall..."
– Sebastien Brant, Ship of Fools, 1494
The crusades left a tangled legacy that is, for the most part, deeply misunderstood. It's a common assumption today that they poisoned relations between east and west, weaponizing Islam, and leading to centuries of mistrust and bitterness; that their cardinal sin – apart from being a monstrous exercise in hypocrisy – was the destruction of the enlightened age of Islam, forcing it to harden and turn inward, driving the religion toward a violent embrace of jihad. The crusades, in other words, planted the bitter seeds of modern day terrorism.
This view is unfortunately as persistent as it is wrong. Far from being devastated by the crusades, the Islamic world considered them irrelevant and – aside from place names and a few folk tales – promptly forgot about them. There was no Arabic word for 'crusader' until the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first Arabic history of the crusades didn't arrive until the verge of the twentieth.147 This was both because Islam drew no distinction between 'crusaders' and any other infidels, and the fact that, in terms of reversing the advance of Islam, the crusades were a miserable failure. They were no more worth remembering than any other unsuccessful infidel who had tried to stop the inevitable triumph of the Faith.
In the short term of course, the crusades did have some tactical success. They managed to keep Jerusalem for almost a century, and forced the Islamic world to focus its resources on the Holy Land instead of new conquests. But once Jerusalem fell again, the relentless advance continued.
The first four centuries of jihad had resulted in the conquest of most of the Christian world, and after the interruption of the Crusades, Muslim armies resumed the march to claim the rest. Under the leadership of the Ottoman Turks, a dynamic Asiatic people named after their eponymous founder, the sword of Islam was directed against Byzantium, the only Christian power left in Asia. By 1331, Nicaea, the empire's last major city in Anatolia had fallen, driving the Byzantine Empire out of a land it had held for more than a thousand years. In 1348 the invasion of Europe began, as the Ottomans quickly swallowed Greece, Macedonia, and a large chunk of the Balkans, reducing the once mighty Eastern Roman Empire to little more than the city of Constantinople.
Two serious attempts were made to save it. In 1396, King Sigismund of Hungary, whose kingdom was next on the menu if Constantinople fell, organized a 'crusade' of similarly threatened eastern European states. They met the Ottoman army at the Greek city of Nicopolis, present-day Preveza, near the spot where fourteen centuries earlier the emperor Augustus had defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The city's name, which means 'City of Victory', proved cruelly ironic. Most of the Christians were slaughtered, with a few escaping into the nearby woods. Those who had the misfortune to be captured alive were dragged naked before the sultan, forced to their knees and beheaded. What remained of Bulgaria was gobbled up by the Turks by the end of the year.
The second and final attempt to stop the advance took place in 1444. A collection of threatened states led by Transylvania, a medieval kingdom in the center of present-day Romania, attempted to protect Hungary by attacking Ottoman territory, but were crushed as they crossed through Bulgaria. Those who were captured were either killed or sold into slavery.148
The defeat broke the back of Christian Eastern Europe and sealed the fate of Byzantium. On May 29, 1453, the end finally came for the two thousand year-old Roman state, when, in a blaze of cannon smoke, Islamic forces burst through the broken defensive walls of Constantinople, walls that had rebuffed attacks for a thousand years. The Hagia Sophia, Christendom's most splendid church was converted to a mosque, and the capital of Orthodox Christianity became the center of a rising Islamic power.
The response by Western Europe to all of this was shock. Despite the centuries of aggression, they continued to believe that some miracle would occur, or that things couldn't possibly be as bad as reported. Constantinople was always on the brink of disaster. It had withstood countless waves of attackers and it could surely resist one more. In any case, the threat was far away.
Except that it no longer was. Ottoman armies swept into Albania and Bosnia, annihilating the armies sent against them. The sultan who conquered Constantinople now controlled Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople – four of the five great cities of Christendom – and he made no secret of the fact that he was coming for Rome next. In 1480, the sultan's armies landed in southern Italy and overran the city of Otranto. Eight hundred of its citizens refused to convert to Islam and were beheaded, the rest were sold into slavery.
Ripples of panic swept the peninsula and calls for a new crusade were frantically issued, but nothing seemed able to shake the rest of Europe from its lethargy. A contemporary German writer summed up the mood perfectly in a satirical poem called the 'Ship of Fools'. "We perish sleeping one and all, the wolf has come into the stall..." After listing the four great cities that were currently under the Islamic yoke, he finished with a dark prediction that seemed all but certain to come true. "But they've been forfeited and sacked, and soon the head will be attacked."
The fortuitous death of the sultan prevented the Ottomans from taking advantage of their Italian foothold, but the conquests in Eastern Europe continued apace. In 1521 the last Serbian resistance collapsed, and the Islamic army entered Hungary. The next year they drove the Hospitallers from Rhodes and began the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean. Before the end of the decade they had swallowed Hungary and entered Austrian territory. By 1529 they were at the gates of Vienna, poised to enter central Europe.
What ultimately saved Europe – ironically enough – were its western crusades. The seven-hundred year struggle to free the Iberian peninsula from the Islamic grip, better known as the Reconquista, reached its conclusion just as eastern Europe was beginning to succumb to the Ottoman advance. In 1492, Granada, the last Islamic emirate in the peninsula, surrendered, enabling the newly united Spanish crown to finance the voyage of Christopher Columbus. The resulting wealth, combined with the explosive growth of scientific and economic advances spawned by the Renaissance, catapulted Europe into the modern world. Within a hundred years of Columbus' voyage, the King of Spain ruled over a domain that dwarfed the sultanate, and the stagnating Ottomans were well on the way to becoming the 'sick man of Europe'.
Although Christopher Columbus himself prayed in 1492 that any riches he found would be used to liberate Jerusalem, he was the last of a dying breed. The new rational Europe of the Enlightenment had little time for memories of the crusades. They had committed the sin of being driven by faith, and were the ultimate example of the kind of superstition that drove men like Voltaire to demand 'Ecrasez L'Infame' – crush the infamous thing – referring to the Catholic Church.
The version of the crusades that survived were romantic stories that either glamorized popular figures like Richard the Lionheart or presented them as misguided zealots compared to enlightened Muslim figures like Saladin. These in turn were pressed into service by the imperialist powers of the nineteenth century who recast them as early attempts to bring civilization to the benighted populations of the Middle East.
It was this garbled interpretation of the crusades that was reintroduced to the Islamic world by the colonial nations of Western Europe. The Europeans took great pains to point out both their civilizing mission and their romantic identification with the forgotten crusaders.149 It was a message that was deeply resented. The years between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries had been bewildering for Islam. The Muslim world became culturally stagnant and backwards, still clinging to the illusion of superiority, while the West vaulted past it. Muslims watched helplessly as the great Ottoman Empire was reduced to an impotent puppet, saved from complete collapse only by virtue of the fact that the Europeans couldn't agree on what to do with its territory.
The humiliation was made more acute in the wake of World War I when foreign offices in London and Paris decided the fate of the Middle East. There was no longer any hiding from the obvious. The infidels had far surpassed the faithful. To a Muslim world that felt belittled and ignored, the crusades suddenly became relevant, a galvanizing moment of resistance when the westerners were successfully evicted. Saladin, whose Kurdish ancestry and short-lived success had kept him out of most Arabic history books, was abruptly reclaimed as a great pan-Islamic hero.150
This newfound recognition only increased with the foundation of Israel, which – despite the fact that it's Jewish – was seen by the Muslim world as a new crusader state. In Syria, Saladin's face appeared on stamps and currency, and a great bronze equestrian statue – complete with two captive Christians in tow – was erected outside the capital of Damascus with the inscription, "Jerusalem's Liberation." Not to be outdone, the Iraqi dictator Sadaam Hussein called himself the new Saladin, and had four bronze statues of himself set up, each one wearing a helmet in the shape of the Dome of the Rock – a reference to the sultan's reconquest of the Holy Places of Jerusalem.151
Ironically, this caricature of the crusades, of thuggish uncivilized westerners launching unprovoked attacks on the more peaceful, enlightened East, has seeped back into the West. It was perhaps most famously vocalized by former President Clinton in 2001, when he mused that the terror attacks were essentially the chickens of the crusades coming home to roost.
Such a view is dangerous for many reasons, not least because it contorts the past to fit the political needs of the moment. 'History', the Roman poets Cicero and Virgil wrote, 'is the teacher of life...’ and ‘as the twig is bent, the tree inclines'. The temptation to misuse it is both pervasive and powerful, and must be resisted at all costs. One need not agree with Napoleon – that history is a set of lies agreed upon – to see the danger in attempting to control the present by inventing the past. The crusades were not the first great clash between East and West, or even between Christianity and Islam. They didn't irrevocably set the two Faiths against each other or cause one side to decline.
They were, however, immensely significant. At the start of the crusading period the medieval Church appeared on the way to becoming the central organizing force of Christendom. With a single speech, Urban II launched a movement that inspired as many as a hundred and fifty thousand people to uproot themselves and attempt to walk the nearly three thousand miles to Jerusalem. By the end of the period, this papal overreach had resoundingly failed, paving the way for the later Reformation.
The popes weren't the only ones who were diminished. Ironically – given the stated purpose of the crusades – Christendom was generally weakened by them. The shattering of the great bulwark of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade tore the Christian world into 'Catholic' and 'Orthodox' halves. The two sides had been drifting apart for centuries, but after 1204, they no longer considered each other fully Christian.152
The crusades had a nearly opposite effect back home in Western Europe where they were a catalyst in the changing idea of what it meant to be a 'knight'. The men who had fought with William the Conqueror at Hastings in 1066, were little more than glorified mercenaries on horseback, effective, powerful, and brutal. This first began to change with Urban's speech where he argued that they should use their weapons in the service of a higher calling. These words were taken seriously, and the idea that knighthood should include a code of behavior eventually trickled back home.153 Within a century of the First Crusade, this idea of chivalry had crystallized in poems like the Song of Roland, and the legend of King Arthur. Both were given their most famous literary forms in the early twelfth century and became medieval best sellers.154 The crusades, in other words, helped to create the iconic image of the knight in shining armor that has come to symbolize the middle ages.
Finally, the crusades fueled the growth of the Italian Maritime Republics – namely Venice and Genoa – giving them almost unfettered access to the markets of the eastern Mediterranean – usually to the disadvantage of their Muslim and Byzantine counterparts. The wealth that this produced not only brought back novelties155 to Europe, but it also created a class of rich merchants whose descendants would be among the patrons of the Italian Renaissance.
These are reasons enough to explore the world of the crusades without twisting them beyond their proper context. They demonstrate the full range of human folly and idealism, boasting a cast of saints, scoundrels, and everyone between. They show that human nature is repetitive even if history is not, and offer a vision of a vastly different world than our own.
They also happen to be fascinating.