Speaking of cable TV, someone in a thread below asked about the History Channel thing on the Crusades. I've not watched, but here's a review from Lee Siegel at TNR:
The film conscientiously emphasizes the irreligious greed and lust that animated the Crusaders' professions of piety, though this is not exactly news. And it conscientiously shifts back and forth between Western and Middle Eastern historians, a careful attempt at balance that has the unsettling effect of reinforcing the cultural divide that the film wants to expose as the tragic catalyst for today's events. At one point Tariq Ali, the author of a novel about Saladin, the Muslims' legendary leader, responds to an off-camera interviewer who apparently has been stepping gingerly around the question of whether Saladin could be as ruthless as his Christian enemies. "Of course he was ruthless!" Ali exclaims, with exasperation, and a touch of defensiveness.
It would have been nice to have Western historians making sympathetic points about Islamic civilization--for example, that contact with Islamic habits taught some Crusaders to bathe more often. It would have been gratifying to have Muslim historians offering the same about the Crusaders, though there doesn't seem to be anything very positive that you can say about soldiers of God who liked to warm up for their journey to the Middle East by killing thousands of European Jews on their way south. It is one of history's deeper ironies that the Jews, almost destroyed by Christian Europe, now find themselves in Israel--where Europe drove them--allied with Christendom against Islam, the Church's second historical enemy after the Jews.
Indeed, the film extenuates the Crusaders' homicidal tendencies when it asserts that escaping poverty was one of the motives behind people's decision to march on Islam. On the contrary, late eleventh-century Europe was a prosperous place, and only rich knights had the resources to join the Crusades. (Bands of peasants tried, but never made it to the Middle East.) Esurience and craving for adventure spurred them on, not dire need.
If "The Crusades" leads people to read and then reflect about the subject, so much the better. They'll have to read more about it. The film leaves viewers with the impression that the Crusades, for all their many religious hypocrisies, were a wholly religious venture. But it presents no evidence that the Muslims fought the Christians for any reason other than defending their towns and cities. On the Christian side, the show never explains that in fact the Crusades permanently shifted power from the popes to the princes, a transformation that eventually made possible the rise of modern nation-states. Constantinople didn't fall to the Western Church; it fell to a consortium of Venetian shipping magnates. They tricked the Crusaders into storming Byzantium so that Venice could recover some vital business interests.
"Collision of two great faiths." "Clash of civilizations." How grand. Such conceptual splendor might satisfy some people's need to elevate politics with references to culture and ideas. If you tell them that you think large events are driven by colliding, clashing egos and interests, they look at you disapprovingly, as if you had just said you that didn't like poetry or classical music. As if you were a political philistine. And we could have had such an interesting conversation. But I wish "The Crusades" had made it clear that fire killed Peter Bartholomew, and that even the most fundamentalist faith, in the realm of politics, has even more fundamental realities behind it
I guess TNR couldn't find a reviewer who actually knew anything about the Crusades. Perhaps next time they could contact Thomas F. Madden. Here is a recent article he wrote on the Crusades:
"The Real History of the Crusades
A series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics? Think again.
by Thomas F. Madden | posted 05/06/2005 09:00 a.m.
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.
The threat of Islam
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.
Understand the crusaders
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.
During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.
What really happened?
Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:
How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? … Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?
"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"
The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:
Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors … unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? … And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood … condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?
The re-conquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one's love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself—indeed, he had the power to restore the whole world to his rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:
Again I say, consider the Almighty's goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself. … I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.
It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and his Church. It was the Crusaders' task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.
All apologies
The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews' money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.
Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:
Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered … Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but "they only wait for the time of their deliverance."
Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.
It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these "collateral damage." Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.
The failure of the Crusades
By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.
But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.
When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.
Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.
The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up Richard's French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard's lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.
The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics, which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further—and perhaps irrevocably—apart.
The remainder of the 13th century's Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis's death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.
Europe's fight for its life
One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled "Of the Decline of the Faith":
Our faith was strong in th' Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
'Twould even grieve the hardest stone …
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They're of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they've been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.
Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.
Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.
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.
Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of numerous works, including The New Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. This article originally appeared in the April 2002 issue of Crisis and is reprinted here with permission.
Copyright Crisis Magazine © 2002 Washington DC, USA
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information."
Posted by: Donald R. McClarey | November 07, 2005 at 04:36 PM
I was struck by the comment "defending their towns" in reference to Muslims. THEIR towns? Uh, the whole region was CONQUERED by the Muslims using military force. They were not invited in. So far the series has portrayed the crusaders in the typical pc way. Complete with a guy lecturing a class of children on how evil they were. Wonderful, a budding group of jihadi's who will someday strap bombs to themselves. The crusades were ultimately a defensive reaction to an ongoing series of Islamic attacks on Christendom. Good thing they occured or we might all be making pilgrimages to Mecca. I certainly hope they will spend some time showing Muslim cruelties to balance things out. But that would be to objective I am sure.
Posted by: Fr. J | November 07, 2005 at 04:46 PM
The key is the end:
But I wish "The Crusades" had made it clear that fire killed Peter Bartholomew, and that even the most fundamentalist faith, in the realm of politics, has even more fundamental realities behind it
Let's leave aside his tendentious (CQ) and butt-ignorant (CQ) use of the word "fundamentalist."
But this sentence is, distilled into chemical purity™ (Mark Shea, 2003), the reasons liberals generally do not "get religion." To use Marxist language, they understand religion as epiphenomenal. That is, religion as the result or outgrowth of something else -- something "more fundamental," one might say. That something might be economics (Marx) or neurosis (Freud) or weakness (Nietzsche) or "hate" (Siegel, apparently) or sexism (Reuther, et al) -- whatever it is, religion is dependent variable and Something Else is independent. Religion as something ultimate or true or definitive, as a cause with no grounding beyond itself -- THAT is incomprehensible.
Posted by: Victor Morton | November 07, 2005 at 05:11 PM
Fr. J.:
Your outrage is absurd. The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 A.D. They began building the Dome of the Rock in 691. The First Crusade was not preached until 1095 A.D. and did not conquer Jerusalem until 1099 -- that is, 461 years after the Muslim conquest.
You don't think that the Muslims were fighting a defensive war to protect their towns and homes? Aren't Israelis fighting such a war now, when Israel is barely over 50 years old? Suppose the Native Americans who occupied American land came back 500 years later to reclaim their land. How we would regard them?
Posted by: Celine | November 07, 2005 at 05:19 PM
Celine,
Donald's post above is worth reading. Did you do so?
Posted by: CV | November 07, 2005 at 05:25 PM
It is one of history's deeper ironies that the Jews, almost destroyed by Christian Europe, now find themselves in Israel--where Europe drove them--allied with Christendom against Islam, the Church's second historical enemy after the Jews.
-allied with Christendom, or what's left of it.
Posted by: thomas tucker | November 07, 2005 at 06:02 PM
Christians had a significant presence in the Holy Land until the last century, so the analogy with Native Americans is quite inapt.
Still, anyone who argues the crusades were a justified counter-attack seems logically committed to arguing that modern Greeks could be justified in retaking Constantinople some five hundred years after her fall.
Posted by: Kevin Jones | November 07, 2005 at 06:11 PM
What amazes and almost thrills me is the revival of historical interest here. After thirty years of teaching high school history and thirteen years of retirement I have at last found the pragmatic answer to the perennial whine, "Why do we have to study history?" "We study history, my dears, so we can better identify, hate, and fight the enemy, be it them or us as you prefer. That's what it really means to learn from the past and to understand how the past influences the presence." Glad to be retired.
Posted by: Caroline | November 07, 2005 at 06:14 PM
Celine,
The war did not end with their conquest of Jerusalem. They continued to invade. Ever hear about Charles Martel? The Spanish reconquest? That didn't end till 1492. In the 8th century a group of Muslims landed in Italy, went to Rome, and ransacked some of our churches. They violated the tombs of both Saints Peter and Paul. It wasn't like they took the Holy Land and then stopped. They are still attacking us and will continue until one of us admits defeat. That's there words not mine. Wake up and smell the Turkish coffee.
Posted by: Fr. J | November 07, 2005 at 06:29 PM
Caroline,
Yeah, I lived through plenty of pc history classes. They taught us to hate only our own country. When they bothered to teach us anything at all. No wonder kids are bored. It was all pablum. I remember substituting and teaching a class on the Spanish conquest of Mexico. All about how evil the Spanish were. Not one word on how the Aztecs were even worse imperialists who conducted human sacrifice. The kids didn't believe me till I brought in evidence. They were amazed that no one had mentioned that before. Gee, I wonder why it got left out. Perhaps because they might "hate" the "wrong" people ie. not us evil Christian westerners? History should be about concrete facts even if they are not pc propaganda. Maybe we should be glad you are retired.
Posted by: Fr. J | November 07, 2005 at 06:37 PM
I remember teaching Notre Dame students (i.e., a fairly smart bunch) and most of them being quite surprised when I told them that Nelson Mandela (a) had been acquitted of treason in a due court-of-law; and (b) was imprisoned for acts that are crimes in every country in the world (possession of explosives and conspiring to use them). Too many just had the absorbed-by-osmosis sense that he was a male Rosa Parks and the African National Congress a retitled NAACP.
Posted by: Victor Morton | November 07, 2005 at 07:11 PM
Donald,
That was an extremely good article by Thomas F. Madden, thanks so much for posting it.
He alluded briefly to Enlightenment and Protestant opinion in regards to the Crusades. I think we all understand liberal opinion about the Crusades, it's what most of us were taught after all. But what of Protestant opinion? I was so surprised when about a year ago I was reading a book by Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, about American threadcraft of all things. A historian by trade, in this book which was written around 1940 I think, I came across references to Crusaders as "ignorant" and her contempt was palpable. I was shocked because she was an extremely tradionalist Christian with a patriotism so exuberant, it would make most of us blush. Her American Protestant brothers and sisters see things quite differently today. Up until then, I was only aware of Liberals who had seen the Crusades in such a negative light.
I would also add to the observance that Islam was born of the sword and grew by the sword: it is also how it has justified itself. "Our religion is true and the evidence of this is seen our military success and conquests". More impetus to conquer the enemy when by most any measure, you have been left behind. A Christian, and especially a Jewish person, might respond to humiliation or becoming trivialized, "Same ol', same ol'"!
Posted by: Emma | November 07, 2005 at 07:52 PM
Emma, a negative view of the Crusades often, although not always, goes hand in hand with anti-Catholicism. Additionally, the Crusades are complex and require some study to understand. Too many people are lazy and simply buy into the anti-Crusades tripe in the popular culture, for example, the odious, and error-ridden Kingdom of Heaven flick.
Posted by: Donald R. McClarey | November 07, 2005 at 08:20 PM
a negative view of the Crusades often, although not always, goes hand in hand with anti-Catholicism
Sadly true. A very conservative Baptist friend, one prone to saying the most un-P.C. things about how the Middle East "works," has told me frequently how regrettable the Crusades are. On other occasions he has blasted the Inquisition. The Crusades are part of the standard kit of Church Black Legend. Which is why Madden's work is so important. Philip Jenkins also includes the Crusades in his book on anti-Catholicism.
Posted by: Rich Leonardi | November 07, 2005 at 08:41 PM
One precipitating factor in calling the Crusades was the destruction of the Holy Sepulcre by the mad Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim in the mid-11th C, followed a generation later by the Byzantine defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert. The Almoravids had recently swept into Spain and temporarily rolled back some Christian territorial gains.Danger to Christians and Christian interests had sharpened in the 11th C.
The description of this TV series makes me just as glad we don't have cable.
Spend your time with Madden or the new edition of Jonathan Reilly-Smith or with Ronald Finucane's SOLDIERS OF THE FAITH.
Posted by: Sandra Miesel | November 07, 2005 at 09:20 PM
Recently, Cardinal Keeler (who deserves credit for his work in the Catholic-Jewish dialogue) naively referred to Islam as a "religion of peace".
The excellent summary above of recent scholarship on the Crusades can be succinctly summarized in two sentences. Islam presented itself from the beginning as a military threat to Christendom and consciously sought to gain converts through military force; the fact that (in theory) peoples of the book were permitted to live in peace does not in any way contradict this view because Christians were not permitted to build new churches, had to pay high taxes for their "protection", were not permitted to evangelize, etc., etc. The Crusades were a very long delayed defensive reaction against a MILITARY threat. Orthodox mainstream Islam is so obscurantist that it could never advance in peaceful dialogue with either Christianity or secularism.
After 9/l1 I made it my business to do a serious study of Islam (and now have a mini-library on the subject). I had the opposite experience that I'd had in the past when I studied Hinduism and Buddhism. When I studied eastern religions, while in no way tempted to abandon my Catholicism, I found the study fascinating and found a number of elements to admire (and remembered Vatican II's insistence that the Church opposes nothing good and true in non-Christian religions. The more I studied Islam, the more I found myself extremely upset and even frightened. I learned, among many other things, that the distance between the Jihadis and main-stream Islam is not like (in typical PC garbage) like the distance between the Ku Klux Klan and mainstream Christianity. The most prestigious Islamic university in the world (in Cairo) has issued a fatwa approving of suicide bombing. I worried that I might be misled by studying Islam from books, so I went to our local Islamic center and spoke with Muslims. I asked what would happen if fifty-one percent of Americans became Muslim. They replied that all laws would be repealed and Sharia (God's law as found in the Quran and the Hadith) would become the law of the land. Yes, they wanted it all - the floggings and executions for apostasy and adultery, etc., etc. We had a "trialogue" at the Islamic center. The Muslim was honest and well-informed. The Jew was brilliant and well-informed. The Catholic was someone not trained in the area who came up with ridiculous sentimental nostrums that acutely embarrassed me.
There needs to be a really serious discussion in the Church about HOW to evangelize Muslims living in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The secular and lay state aspect is an opportunity provided by Providence. Significant numbers of conversions in the West of Muslims to Christianity would have reverberations throughout Islamdom. The concept of ecumenism endorsed by Vatican II is in no way incompatible with the wonderful new flourishing of Catholic apologetics (led by so many wonderful converts from evangelicalism like Scott Hahn and Peter Kreeft). Now we need a serious development of evangelism directed in love and seriousness toward our Islamic brothers and sisters in the West.
Tom Haessler
Posted by: Tom Haessler | November 07, 2005 at 09:44 PM
Americans have lived too long under the state sponsered church of tolerance with all and any religion being equal to another and thus there being no truth to be found except in tolerance. It took those who lived under a state whose religion was the Catholic Church about 400 years to finally gain the insight that the other people were not going to stop coming until they were dead or slaves to their truth, Islam. We are again in the same position. Back then there was the peace side of the Moslem faith and the war side of the faith. When necessary, they would use the peace side until it was possible to conquer using the war side. Make no mistake that the peace muslims have the same book or game plan, they are just waiting for the right opportunity. France is learning that allowing 20 million of the Islamist to enter their country did not pose immediate risks. They may have even seemed to be peace loving people. Once the numbers were substantial and they were imbedded, the war side now will come out. Some say they need to assimilate and become French. They will never do this in any land and any culture that is not under Islamic law. They must convert this country to their way or continue to infiltrate until they can overcome using first peaceful means such as the countries own laws and courts as well as the lazy citizens who see everyone as they are in tolerance. They see us as weak and ready to overcome or they would not start. If they start and find over time resistence, they will crawl back in their hole and reinforce for a new time.
Posted by: joeh | November 07, 2005 at 10:44 PM
I just watched the rest of the series. It was critical of Richard the Lionhearted for executing prisoners that Saladin refused to ransom. It was termed a "war crime" and the Muslims were "horrified". But in this same program the massacre of crusader prisoners at Hattin was passed off with no comment at all. In fact it implied they deserved it. Same actions treated very differently. Let's sum it up: Christians=bad, Muslims=good. No real attempt at grappling with history or truth. Par for the course in pc history.
Posted by: Fr. J | November 07, 2005 at 11:25 PM
Still, anyone who argues the crusades were a justified counter-attack seems logically committed to arguing that modern Greeks could be justified in retaking Constantinople some five hundred years after her fall.
Um, not quite. The Muslim conquest was not a 1-time blip that came to a peaceful halt with the death of Mohammed. Conversion by the sword was the rule for Islam, rather than the exception that it was for Christianity. The Muslim expansion was a very serious threat. Christians knew perfectly well that it was only a matter of time before they were targeted next, and your citation of Constantinople just proves my point.
In comparison, the Crusades were a pretty minor counteroffensive against a very powerful force that was a constant threat.
After the Christians went on to lose the Crusades, the Muslim Ottomans rolled over the Byzantines in the 1400's and they continued tough all the way into the 1700's. If they had succeeded at Vienna in 1683, Mozart's operas would probably be in Arabic.
Posted by: Albertus M | November 07, 2005 at 11:37 PM
Gee, I don't know that I'd be so upset if the Greeks tried for Constantinople. They did, actually, just after the First World War, and they nearly pulled it off. What if?
I don't see how the time-lapse really proves anything definitive. The passage of time it seems is relative; 100 years is a lot longer time, in terms of world politics, today, than it was a milennium ago.
I dunno; are we supposed to apologize for invading Normandy? Or were the Crusades "wrong" only because they failed?
Posted by: Septimus | November 07, 2005 at 11:57 PM
I remember when I interviewed the author Robert Spencer (Politically Incorrect Guide To Islam & The Crusades) for my Catholicreport.org site and he talked of the Crusades as a small defensive action against centuries of Islamic invasion. I thought wow this will cause some folks to have a heart attack. Spencer, a Melkite Catholic, some years before published a book whose basic premise was what should Catholics know about Islam. Unfortunately, virtually every Catholic group kept their distance except Father Mitch Pacwa who wrote the book's forward.
Posted by: Dave | November 08, 2005 at 01:40 AM
I didn't see the show, but I'd curious about several different issues that it might have covered:
- Did it discuss how the conquering of Shi'ite Fatimid Egypt by the Sunni leader Nur al-Din's forces helped form a more unified front against the Crusader states? Or how Fatimid rulers did little to aid Sunni warlords to fight Crusader forces?
- The fact that the Mongols ended up being much more of a serious threat to Muslims in the Middle East than the limited efforts of the Crusaders?
- Finally, was there any discussion of popular criticism of the Crusades in Europe? I'm not very familiar with this topic, but I've heard recordings of songs about the Crusades and run into a few excepts of texts from the period that criticize the Crusades on the grounds it was designed to enrich church leaders first and foremost. I don't write this as a sly critique - I'm just wondering if others have run into this sort of thing.
Posted by: Jeremy Rich | November 08, 2005 at 08:01 AM
Thank you, Sandra: I was looking for someone to mention those three very important precipitents.
When those are omitted in even a cursory discussion of the inception of the Crusades, you know you are dealing with fairly outdated Whig-style history.
Posted by: Liam | November 08, 2005 at 08:21 AM
The more we find out about Abraham, the more he becomes a myth. Eliminate Abraham and maybe we can start the needed convergence of the major religions. Our own Church history also needs some revisions to bring this about.
Posted by: Realist | November 08, 2005 at 10:46 AM
Victor, remember that the ANC was founded in the nineteen-teens and didn't renounce non-violence until about 1960. This, after enduring decades of hell, culminating in Grand Apartheid after 1948. Did such "rightest" insurrectionaries as, oh, Franco, Pinochet, the Contras, etc. show such patience? Political correctness takes a lot of forms, I must say.....All this is besides the ins and outs of the Crusdes.
Posted by: bruce cole | November 08, 2005 at 10:54 AM
After the Christians went on to lose the Crusades, the Muslim Ottomans rolled over the Byzantines in the 1400's and they continued tough all the way into the 1700's. If they had succeeded at Vienna in 1683, Mozart's operas would probably be in Arabic.
Yes, but the Crusades were precipitated by the Turkish victory at Manzikert. This seems to justify attacking the Turks, which the crusaders did, but they then moved on to take Arab-held Jerusalem, and then made futile sallies into Arab Egypt. The Turks were the expanding power at the time, not these Arabs.
Granted, Just War theory--especially concerning Christians warring with non-Christians--wasn't that developed at the time, but even a cursory familiarity with the events raises all sorts of concerns that a simple "but they were justified!" can't completely alleviate.
Posted by: Kevin Jones | November 08, 2005 at 11:29 AM
Realist
Sorry to disappoint your views but the longer we live the more evidence is unearthed stating the facts about biblical history. For many years, religious archeologists weren't even convinced David was real but evidenced was unearthed proving that to be false. What else is a myth to you, other Old Testament figures, the miracles of Jesus?
I am as much for Ecumenicalism as anyone but not at any price. I believe in the adage, "If you don't stand for anything you will fall for everything." I think Chesterton warned of this as well with his admonition that people end up believing in everything instead of something.
Posted by: Dave | November 08, 2005 at 11:32 AM
"Christians had a significant presence in the Holy Land until the last century, so the analogy with Native Americans is quite inapt."
I'm not sure it's so inapt. Native Americans had a significant presence in at least the interior of the North American continent until the next to last century. If the Sioux had risen up in 1905 and attached towns located in what used to be the Great Sioux Reservation, I hope it wouldn't be out of line to refer to the United States as defending "our towns."
"I was so surprised when about a year ago I was reading a book by Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, about American threadcraft of all things. A historian by trade, in this book which was written around 1940 I think, I came across references to Crusaders as "ignorant" and her contempt was palpable. I was shocked because she was an extremely tradionalist Christian with a patriotism so exuberant, it would make most of us blush."
I'll take your word about her Protestantism, but I understand she was also a pretty ardent libertarian, and while there are people who manage to be ardent Christians as well as ardent libertarians, my experience is that they're pretty rare specimens. But even if she was a solid Protestant, it wouldn't be too hard for her to despise the Crusades as just another one of those "bad things the Catholic Church did" -- like the Spanish Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo, the Index of Forbidden Books, and opposition to Italian unification.
"Yes, but the Crusades were precipitated by the Turkish victory at Manzikert. This seems to justify attacking the Turks, which the crusaders did, but they then moved on to take Arab-held Jerusalem, and then made futile sallies into Arab Egypt. The Turks were the expanding power at the time, not these Arabs."
Two points: (1) When the First Crusade began, Jerusalem was still in the hands of the Seljuk Turks. (2) The Egyptian-based Fatimids have retaken Jerusalem from the Turks by the time the Crusaders got to Jerusalem, but they had shown themselves to be horribly oppressive to native Christians and to pilgrims in the Holy Land when they ruled it earlier in the century (as Ms. Miesel mentions in her post of 9:20 yesterday) that freeing Jerusalem from their grasp could reasonably be seen as an act of liberation.
Posted by: Seamus | November 08, 2005 at 08:11 PM
I am currently reading through 3 books by a woman named Bat Ye'or, a scholar born in Egypt who is now a British citizen. So far I have finished her "The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: from Jihad to Dhimmitude". Her specialty is the actual lives of Christian and Jews lived under Shariah law in the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. Half the book is composed of actual contemporary documents in translation.
Evidently, she is the first to make such an in depth study, and what she is finding is negating a lot of what we have believed about the benign situation of the People of the Book. Just as an example: entire conquered villages were moved hundreds of miles away to prevent coordination of uprisings.
Another: nomadic Arab bands whose traditional means of support continued to be pilferage lived on the periphery of conquered settlements; they made raids on the dhimmi while the legitimate Muslim govt either looked the other way or were powerless to stop it even if they wanted to.
Another: the vaunted superiority of Islamic civilization depended on the Jews and Christians; the Arabs themselves shunned engineering and learning until very lately.
Has anybody else read Ms Ye'or? And other than the info that she became a stateless refugee in 1957 and then a British citizen, any further info on her? Was or is she a Copt, a Muslim, an agnostic?
Posted by: Julia | November 08, 2005 at 09:17 PM
The history channel episode on the crusades is revisionist history to the extreme.
While Catholic teachers rarely teacher it, the fact is the Old testament contains more than 60 prophecies clearly pointing to Jesus as the Messiah.
another interesting fact, one that will never be heard on the history channel or from the Catholic school teacher is that the Talmud, of all books actually testifies to Jesus as the Messiah. Not by design of course, rather by default.
When the High Preist would offer sacrafice to God in the Temple, there was a scarlet thread that would turn white after the offering. Until the death of Jesus, it had always turned white.
This was a sign from God that the sacrafice was indeed acceptable.
After the Crucifixion of Jesus, the Messiah, the Temple remained standing for forty years, while the High Priests continued to offer the ancient sacrafices.
But the Red Thread in the Temple would not turn White when such sacrafices were offered to God. Not once in forty years. Then of course, the boom was lowered on the Temple complex, just as Jesus foretold.
But during these forty years, the fact that the thread would not turn white was very troubling to the High Priests who could not see this was a obvious sign from heaven their sacrafice was no longer acceptable to heaven.
Eventually, they came up with the best answer they could, for this apparent rejection from the Almighty.
They noted that because of the in hospitable behaviour of the people at the time, God would not accept their sacrafice for sins.
God was punishing the people for not being nice to each other.
Obviously this was not the case, but it was the only answer that made sense to them.
It is a point worth noting that today, many claim the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah was not because of the sins of the people but because they were not hospitable to one another.
The Temple example shows the patience and mercy God affords to his Chosen people even those who rejected Him.
In our time we can see that the Catholic faithful,to whom much has been given, have for the most part apostasied into a state of indifference and God has punished His chosen people as He does when they wander.
That punishment today is poor leadership, little reverence in the Mass, and the great sin of our time, indifference towards the faith and the words of The Mother of God, as delivered at Fatima.
Posted by: Crusader 1099 | November 09, 2005 at 12:47 AM
"The history channel episode on the crusades is revisionist history to the extreme."
No, it pretty much reflects the standard, Whig-interpretation-of-history version, of the kind expounded by Steven Runciman two generations ago and by others going back probably at least to the Enlightenment.
It's people like Professor Madden who are providing the *real* revisionist history of the Crusades.
Posted by: Seamus | November 09, 2005 at 11:02 AM
Julie, Bat Ye'or is Jewish.
Posted by: mb | November 09, 2005 at 12:56 PM