How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (19 page)

Edessa was the first crusader state to be established. When the main body of crusaders marched south in 1098 to attack Antioch, Baldwin of Boulogne—brother of Godfrey of Bouillon—led a smaller force east to Edessa and managed to convince Thoros, the childless ruler of the city (who was a Greek Orthodox Christian), to adopt him as his son and heir. When Thoros was assassinated by angry subjects, Baldwin took over. Edessa also had the distinction of being the first crusader state to be retaken by Islam (in 1149).

After Bohemond captured the city of Antioch in 1098, he was named prince. His nephew Tancred became regent when Bohemond returned to
Italy in 1105 to raise a new army to fight the Byzantines. Bohemond died in 1111, making Tancred the permanent prince, although he too died the next year. The area remained an independent state until 1119, when it was joined to the Kingdom of Jerusalem (although Bohemond’s descendants continued as princes). In 1268 Antioch fell to an army led by Baybars, sultan of Egypt, whose troops killed every Christian they could find.

The County of Tripoli was the last of the four crusader states to be established—in 1102. It came into being when Count Raymond IV of Toulouse laid siege to the port city of Tripoli. When Raymond died suddenly in 1105, he left his infant son as heir, so when the knights finally took the city, the county became a vassal state of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It fell to Muslim forces in 1289.

By far the most important and powerful of the crusader states was the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was also known at Outremer, the French word for “overseas” (
outre-mer
). Initially that term applied to all the crusader states, but it came to refer primarily to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey of Bouillon, who led the capture of Jerusalem, was installed as the first ruler, with the title Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.

Despite its name, the Kingdom of Jerusalem included the city of Jerusalem for only about ninety years. As Muslim aggression built up, Western forces simply did not have enough troops to defend the long corridor linking Jerusalem with the coast. Consequently, it is absurd to claim, as many historians do, that the forces of Saladin prevented Richard the Lionheart from retaking Jerusalem during the Third Crusade. Richard knew that such a conquest was pointless and made no effort to take Jerusalem. Instead he overwhelmed Saladin’s army at Arsuf, after which the Muslim leader signed a treaty restoring to Christian pilgrims the right of safe passage to and from Jerusalem.

Although few of the original crusaders remained to defend these kingdoms, two knightly religious orders eventually reinforced their ranks. These orders combined “monastic discipline and martial skill … for the first time in the Christian world,” as the historian Thomas F. Madden pointed out.
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The Knights Hospitallers were founded to care for sick Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, but in about 1120 the order expanded its vows from chastity, poverty, and obedience to include the armed protection of Christians in Palestine. The Knights Templar originated as a military religious order in about 1119. Hospitallers wore black robes with a white cross on the left sleeve; the Templars wore white robes
with a red cross on the mantel. The two orders hated each other, but together they provided the kingdoms with a reliable force of well-trained soldiers who built and garrisoned a chain of extremely well-sited castles along the frontiers.

Nevertheless, the existence of the kingdoms remained perilous, surrounded as they were by a vast and populous Muslim world. For many years, whenever the Muslim threat loomed especially large, new Crusades were mounted in Europe, bringing fresh troops east in support of the kingdoms. But eventually Europeans lost their fervor to defend—and, just as important, to
pay for
the defense of—the Holy Land, and Islamic forces ate away at the crusader areas.
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Still, that the Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted until 1291, when its last fortress at Acre fell to a huge Muslim army, seems a remarkable achievement.

What the Crusades most revealed about the West was the superiority of its tactics and military hardware. Unwilling to shift from light cavalry, the Muslims were unable to dent crusader heavy-infantry formations. Beyond that, their arrows could not pierce the crusaders’ mail armor unless shot from point-blank range, whereas the crusader crossbows were lethal at considerable range. Crossbows were widely used during the First Crusade, but during the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart fielded a large number of crossbow
teams
: a shooter supported by one or two loaders, facilitating a very high rate of fire. And of course Richard, like most crusader commanders, held in reserve a contingent of heavy cavalry that was irresistible when properly utilized. The few Muslim victories in the field were due to overwhelming numbers; their other victories involved sieges.

Crusader “War Crimes”

Of late, the alleged brutality of the crusaders is much lamented. In 1999, for example, the
New York Times
solemnly proposed that the Crusades were comparable to Hitler’s atrocities.
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The former priest James Carroll agreed, charging that the Crusades left a “trail of violence [that] scars the earth and human memory even to this day.”
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And the ex-nun and popular writer Karen Armstrong claimed that “crusading answered a deep need in the Christians of Europe,” because Christianity has “an inherent leaning towards violence.”
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Carroll and Armstrong, along with many other modern authors, have gone so far as to claim that the Muslims who did battle with the crusaders were civilized and tolerant victims.

It is absurd to impose modern notions about proper military conduct on medieval armies; both Christians and Muslims observed quite different rules of warfare. One of these was that if a city surrendered before the attacking forces had to storm over the walls, the residents were supposed to be treated leniently. This was true no matter how long the siege had lasted. But when a city forced the attackers to storm the walls and thereby incur serious casualties, commanders (Muslims as well as Christians) believed they had an obligation to release their troops to murder, loot, and burn as an example to other cities that might be tempted to hold out in the future. This was the case in the fall of Jerusalem—the primary instance of a “massacre” that animates critics of the crusaders.

Many Western histories of the Crusades express such outrage against crusader “war crimes” but give little or no attention to the many massacres Muslims committed. As the British historian Robert Irwin noted, his country has “a long tradition of disparaging the crusaders as barbaric and bigoted warmongers and of praising the Saracens as paladins of chivalry.” Irwin added, “Indeed, it is widely believed that chivalry originated in the Muslim East,” with Saladin upheld as “the most perfect example of Muslim chivalry.”
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Another British historian, Christopher Tyerman, pointed out that such beliefs are neither recent inventions nor confined to Britain. Since the Enlightenment, Tyerman wrote, Saladin has “bizarrely” been portrayed “as a rational and civilized figure in juxtaposition to credulous barbaric crusaders.”
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In 1898 Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm visited Damascus and placed a bronze laurel wreath on Saladin’s tomb. The wreath was inscribed: “From one great emperor to another.”
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Much has been made of the fact that Saladin did not murder the Christians when he retook Jerusalem in 1187. Writing in 1869, the English historian Barbara Hutton claimed that although Saladin “hated Christians … when they were suppliants and at his mercy, he was never cruel or revengeful.”
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But as Muslim writers have acknowledged, Jerusalem was an exception to Saladin’s usual butchery of his enemies. Indeed, Saladin had planned to massacre the knights holding Jerusalem, but he offered safe conduct in exchange for their surrender of Jerusalem without resistance. In most other instances Saladin was quite unchivalrous. For example, Saladin’s secretary, Imad ad-Din, related the sultan’s treatment of captured knights following the Battle of Hattin (1187): “He [Saladin] ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and sufis and a
certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.”
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It thus seems fitting that during one of his amazing World War I adventures leading irregular Arab forces against the Turks, T. E. Lawrence “liberated” the kaiser’s wreath from Saladin’s tomb; it now resides in the Imperial War Museum in London.

Similarly, many Western historians have given little or no coverage to Baybars, sultan of Egypt, although he is much more celebrated than Saladin in Muslim histories of this period. When Baybars took the Knights Templar fortress of Safad in 1266, he had all the inhabitants massacred after promising to spare their lives during negotiations.
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Later that same year his forces took the great city of Antioch. Even though the city surrendered after four days of siege, Baybars ordered all inhabitants, including all women and children, killed or enslaved. What followed was, as Thomas Madden observed, “the single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era.”
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Since Bohemond VI, prince of Antioch, was away when this disaster befell his city, Baybars sent a letter telling him what he had missed:

You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers.… You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.
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The massacre of Antioch is seldom reported in the many apologetic Western histories of the Crusades.

Of course, even though most of the crusaders went to war for God and at considerable personal cost, few of them adopted a religious lifestyle. They ate and drank as well as they were able, and most of them routinely violated commandments, especially those concerned with adultery and coveting wives. Moreover, they did not disdain the spoils of battle and looted as much as they were able—which wasn’t much when balanced against the costs of crusading. And of course they were often cruel
and bloodthirsty—after all, they had been trained from childhood to make war, face to face, sword to sword. No doubt it was “unenlightened” of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were innocent victims.

Christendom

It was only though the auspices of the Church that a “European” effort such as the Crusades could be conceived and initiated. Indeed, the Church was the only entity that gave some semblance of political and cultural coherence to the West—despite the fact that, even by the time of the Crusades, much of the North had not yet been converted to Christianity

Two Churches

Ironically, the immense favoritism the Roman emperor Constantine showed toward Christianity did it substantial harm. Eamon Duffy, in his history of the papacy, pointed out that Constantine elevated the clergy to high levels of wealth, power, and status so that bishops “became grandees on a par with the wealthiest senators.”
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Not surprisingly, “there was a stampede into the priesthood,” in the words of Richard Fletcher.
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Soon Christian offices, and especially the higher positions, were dominated by sons of the aristocracy—some of them gaining bishoprics even before being baptized. Gaining a church position became a matter mainly of influence, commerce, and eventually heredity. Simony became the rule—an extensive and expensive traffic in religious offices, including even lowly parish placements. There quickly arose great clerical families whose sons followed their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers into holy offices. Even the papacy soon ran in families. Pope Innocent (reigned 401–417) was the son of his predecessor, Pope Anastasius (399–401). Pope Silverius (536–537) was the son of Pope Hormisdas (514–523). Many other popes were the sons, grandsons, nephews, and brothers of bishops and cardinals. Competition for high church offices became so corrupt that from 872 to 1012 a third of all popes died violent deaths, many of them murdered as a result of the constant intrigues among the Roman ecclesiastical families, and at least one killed by an irate husband.
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Of course, many who entered the religious life were neither careerists nor libertines. The “stampede” into the priesthood was accompanied by a rapid expansion of monasticism, which, perhaps surprisingly, also was dominated by the privileged: 75 percent of ascetic medieval saints were sons and daughters of the nobility, including the children of kings.
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By the middle of the fourth century there were thousands of monks and nuns, nearly all of them living in organized communities; as time passed, the number of monks and nuns continued to soar.

In effect, two parallel churches arose. These can usefully be identified as the Church of Power and the Church of Piety.

The Church of Power was the main body of the Church as it evolved in response to the immense status and wealth bestowed on the clergy. It included the great majority of priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes until the Counter-Reformation began during the sixteenth century. Most clergy of the Church of Power were sensible and temperate men, but they tended to be worldly in both senses of that term—practical and morally somewhat permissive.