The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (77 page)

The crusades in western history and memory

By the early nineteenth century a broad consensus, informed by Enlightenment thinking, had emerged in the West. Medieval crusaders were scorned for their brutish and misguided barbarity, though occasionally lauded for their bravery. However, attitudes were soon to be tempered by a potent strand of romanticism for a more idealised vision of the Middle Ages. This trend was evoked in the wildly popular and hugely influential fiction penned by the British author Sir Walter Scott. His novel
The Talisman
(1825), set at the time of the Third Crusade, portrayed Saladin as the ‘noble savage’, gallant and wise, while presenting King Richard I as a rather tempestuous thug. Scott’s book, along with works including
Ivanhoe
(1819), and those by other authors, helped to engender a vision of the crusades as grand, daring adventures.
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Around the same time, some European scholars began to engage in historical parallelism–the desire to see the modern world reflected in the past–depicting the crusades and the creation of the crusader states in triumphalist terms as commendable exercises in proto-colonialism. This trend started the process of separating crusading (and the very word ‘crusade’) from its religious and devotional context, allowing the war for the Holy Land to be celebrated as an essentially secular endeavour. Writing in the early nineteenth century, the French historian François Michaud published a widely disseminated, three-volume account of these holy wars (along with four further volumes of sources), peppered with misleading statements and misrepresentations of history. Michaud applauded the ‘glory’ earned by the crusaders, noting that their objective was ‘the conquest and civilisation of Asia’. He also identified France as the movement’s spiritual and conceptual epicentre, stating that ‘France would one day become the model and centre of European civilisation. The holy wars contributed much to this happy development and one can perceive this from the First Crusade onwards.’ Michaud’s publications were both a product of, and further stimulus to, potent sentiments of French nationalism–a drive to formulate a national identity that saw the war for the Holy Land dragged into a fabricated reconstruction of ‘French’ history.
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Romanticised, nationalistic enthusiasm for the crusades was by no means the preserve of France. The newly created state of Belgium adopted Godfrey of Bouillon as its hero, while, across the Channel, Richard the Lionheart was embraced as an iconic English champion. Both men were immortalised in striking equestrian statues in the mid-nineteenth century. Godfrey’s image stands in Brussels’ Grand Place, while Richard sits astride his horse, sword raised, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Throughout the nineteenth century the tendrils of interest spread far and wide. Benjamin Disraeli, the future British prime minister, was fascinated by the crusades–travelling to the Near East in 1831, even before he was elected to Parliament; and later publishing a novel,
Tancred: or The New Crusade
, about a young nobleman with a crusading heritage. The American writer Mark Twain also toured the Holy Land, visiting the battlefield at Hattin, and was much impressed by the sight of a sword, once reputedly owned by Godfrey of Bouillon, which stirred ‘visions of romance [and the] memory of the holy wars’.

In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany went to extraordinary lengths to enact his crusading fantasies. Decked out in mock-medieval regalia during a visit to the Levant, he processed on horseback into Jerusalem and then journeyed to Damascus to pay his respects to Saladin, whom the kaiser regarded as ‘one of the most chivalrous rulers in history’. On 8 November he laid a wreath on the Ayyubid sultan’s rather dilapidated tomb and later paid for his mausoleum’s restoration.
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Of course, not all western study of the crusades in this period was coloured by fanciful notions of romanticism and nationalistic imperialism. Through these same years a strong trend towards a more precise, detached and empirical approach was gathering pace. But even in the 1930s, the French crusade historian René Grousset made comparisons between France’s involvement in the crusades and the return of French rule to Syria in the early twentieth century. And it was the more impassioned and intemperate accounts that exerted most influence over popular perceptions. The potency and potential perils of such facile modern parallelism became apparent in the context of the First World War. In the course of this conflagration, France was granted a mandate to govern ‘Greater Syria’ by the League of Nations–and French diplomats sought to reinforce claims to this territory by citing crusade history.

The British, meanwhile, were mandated to administer Palestine. Arriving in Jerusalem in December 1917, General Edmund Allenby was evidently conscious of the offence which might be caused within Islam by any tinge of crusading rhetoric or triumphalism (not least because there were Muslim troops serving in the British Army). In stark contrast to Kaiser Wilhelm, Allenby entered the Holy City on foot, and was said to have issued strict orders forbidding his troops from making references to the crusades. Unfortunately, his caution did not prevent sections of the British media from revelling in the event’s supposed medieval echoes. Indeed, the satirical English periodical
Punch
published a cartoon headed ‘The Last Crusade’, depicting Richard the Lionheart looking down on Jerusalem from a hill-top, with the caption: ‘My dream comes true!’ Later, an apocryphal, but nonetheless enduring, rumour spread that Allenby had himself proclaimed: ‘Today the wars of the crusades are ended.’

In fact, even then, the word ‘crusade’–already disassociated from religion–was starting to be detached in the English language from its medieval roots. In 1915 the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George described the First World War as ‘a great crusade’ in a rallying speech. By the time of the Second World War, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s D-Day orders, issued for 6 June 1944, contained the exhortation to Allied troops: ‘You are about to embark on a great crusade.’ Eisenhower’s 1948 account of the war was entitled
Crusade in Europe
.
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Modern Islam and the crusades

After a sustained period of marked disinterest, the Muslim world began to exhibit the first flickers of renewed curiosity about the crusades in the mid-nineteenth century. Around 1865, the translation of French histories by Arabic-speaking Syrian Christians led to the first uses of the term
al-hurub al-Salabiyya
(the ‘Cross’ wars) for what before had been known as the wars of the
Ifranj
(the Franks). In 1872, an Ottoman Turk, Namik Kemal, published the first ‘modern’ Muslim biography of Saladin–a work seemingly written to refute Michaud’s triumphalist history that had recently been translated into Turkish. Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1898 visit to the Near East either coincided with, or perhaps fuelled, another burst of interest, for in the following year the Egyptian scholar Sayyid ‘Ali al-Hariri produced the first Arabic history of the crusades, entitled
Splendid Accounts of the Crusading Wars
. In this book al-Hariri wrote that the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1908) recently had sought to characterise western occupation of Muslim territory as a new ‘crusade’, and al-Hariri stated that the sultan ‘rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a crusade against us in the form of a political campaign’. Around the same time, the Muslim poet Ahmad Shaqwi wrote a verse questioning why Saladin had been forgotten by Islam until the reminder provided by Kaiser Wilhelm.
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In the years that followed, Muslims from India to Turkey and the Levant began to comment on the similarity between medieval crusader occupations and modern western encroachments–a comparison that, of course, had been espoused vocally and enthusiastically in the West for decades. A gathering fascination with Saladin as a heroic Muslim figurehead is also evidenced by the opening of a new university in Jerusalem named after the sultan in 1915. These two related phenomena were accelerated by events towards the tail end of the First World War: the establishment of the British and French mandates in the Levant; the extensive reporting of Allenby’s supposed reference to the crusades; and the widespread popularisation of historical parallelism in Europe. By 1934 one prominent Arabic author was moved to suggest that ‘the West is still waging crusading wars against Islam under the guise of political and economic imperialism’.

The critical change came, however, after the Second World War, with the UN-mandated foundation of the state of Israel in 1948–the realisation of what has been called Zionism. That October, the commentator ‘Abd al-Latif Hamza wrote that ‘the struggle against Zionists has reawakened in our hearts the memory of the crusades’. From 1948 onwards, the Muslim world engaged in an increasingly active re-examination of the medieval war for the Holy Land. Arab-Islamic culture already had a long tradition–stretching back to the central Middle Ages and beyond–of seeking to learn from the past. It is not surprising, therefore, that across the Near and Middle East, scholars, theologians and radical activists now started to refine and affirm their own historical parallels; to harness crusade history for their own purposes.
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The principles of ‘crusade parallelism’

This process of historical appropriation continues to this day. The crusader period was, and is, exceptionally well suited to the needs of Islamic propagandists. Having come to an end almost 800 years earlier, the precise events of this era are sufficiently cloudy to be readily reshaped and manipulated: useful ‘facts’ can be selected; any uncomfortable details that do not correlate with a particular ideology are easily discarded. The crusades can also be used to construct a valuable didactic narrative, because they encapsulate both ‘western’ attack and eventual Islamic victory. Jerusalem’s role likewise is critical. In reality, the political and even the devotional importance accorded by Muslims to the Holy City varied and wavered in the course of the Middle Ages, even as it did in later centuries. But the medieval struggle for dominion of this site helps modern ideologues to cultivate an idea of Jerusalem–and most especially of the
Haram as-Sharif
, or Temple Mount–as a sacred and inviolable stronghold of the Muslim faith.

Over the past sixty years, a wide range of Islamic groups and individuals, from politicians to terrorists, have sought to draw comparisons between the modern world and the medieval crusades. On points of detail and emphasis there are important differences in the messages and ideas they propagate, but there is also a relatively consistent substructure underpinning all of their various arguments, dominated by two ideas. The first is that the West, as an invading colonial power, is now committing crimes against the Muslim world, just as it did 900 years ago; recreating the medieval crusades in the modern era. However, Israel’s creation, with Western support, added a new strand to the story. In the twentieth-century incarnation of this struggle, it is not just imperialist crusaders but also Jews who are seeking to occupy the Holy Land. Together they are supposed to be joined in a ‘Crusader-Zionist’ alliance against Islam. Propagandists seek to lend an aura of credibility to this strange juxtaposition by pointing out that Israel occupies roughly the same territory as the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem. In recent decades, however, the geographical focus of this ideology has rapidly been expanded. New western, and notably American-led, interventions in the Near and Middle East and Central Asia have been positioned alongside the Arab–Israeli conflict and the plight of the Palestinians, adding to the crimes of the so-called ‘Crusader-Zionist’ alliance. These include the two Gulf Wars, the struggle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the stationing in the sacred Muslim territory of Saudi Arabia of US troops, described by Osama bin Laden as ‘Crusader hosts [who] have spread in it like locusts’.
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The second pillar of ‘crusade parallelism’ relates to the supposed capacity for Islam to learn valuable lessons from the medieval era. In 1963, the Muslim author Sa‘id Ashur published a two-volume
History of the Crusades
in Arabic, in which he claimed that the situation facing modern Muslims was very similar to that of the Middle Ages, and therefore it was ‘incumbent upon us to study the movement of the crusades minutely and scientifically’. Numerous Islamic ideologues have sought to find inspiration in the medieval war for the Holy Land. Some have argued for the unification of Islam, by force if necessary, and the unflinching and relentless pursuit of
jihad
, in supposed imitation of the Muslims of the Middle Ages. Many propagandists suggest that Islam must be willing to patiently face a long battle–after all, it took eighty-eight years to reclaim Jerusalem from the Franks and almost two centuries to destroy Outremer. Crucially, Muslim ‘heroes’ of the crusader era have also been raised as exemplars–most notably Saladin. Indeed, in the course of the twentieth century, the Ayyubid sultan has been widely mythologised as the central Islamic champion of the medieval war for the Holy Land. It is now Saladin, not Sultan Baybars, who has gained cult status across the Arabic-speaking world. His defeat of the western Christians in the Battle of Hattin is revered as one of the greatest victories in Muslim history, and his subsequent recapture of Jerusalem is the subject of intense pan-Islamic pride and celebration.
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Arab Nationalism and Islamism

Diverse ideals have been constructed upon these two foundation stones–the idea of a renewed crusader offensive and the need to draw instruction from the Middle Ages. In fact, the true power of this manipulative approach to the past has proved to be its remarkable flexibility, for Muslim adherents of two diametrically opposed ideologies–Arab Nationalism and Islamism–have sought with equal enthusiasm to appropriate crusading history.