The Glory of the Crusades (2 page)

5. The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be seen as the first Holocaust.

6. The Crusades were wars of conversion.

7. The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West.

Seeds of the Myths

The creation of these myths began in the sixteenth century when Protestant authors used the still-ongoing Crusades to attack the Church and, principally, the papacy. Most Protestant critics of that time viewed the Crusades as the creation of the anti-Christ (the pope) to increase Church wealth. Crusaders were portrayed as ignorant followers of superstition who participated in holy wars, which were nothing more than examples of Catholic bigotry and cruelty. Protestant teaching was completely opposed to the Crusading movement because it necessitated obedience to the papacy, preserved the unity of Christendom, and provided spiritual benefits (indulgences).
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Martin Luther set the stage for the Protestant interpretation of the Crusades by seeing the Ottoman Turkish threat to Europe in the early sixteenth century as part of God’s plan for divine retribution against the evils of the Catholic Church. At the height of his revolution against the Church, Luther wrote, “to fight against the Turks is to oppose the judgment God visits upon our iniquities through them.”
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After a Turkish invasion force reached the gates of Vienna in 1529, Luther reconsidered his anti-Crusade stance and actually encouraged Christian princes (Catholic and Protestant alike) to join together to fight the Turkish horde. Of course, Luther did not actually call for a Crusade, nor did he desire a religious war resembling the Crusades. He steadfastly rejected any such notion by writing, “If in my turn I were a soldier and saw in the battlefield a priest’s banner or cross, even if it were the very crucifix, I should want to run away as though the devil were chasing me!”
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Watering the Myths

If these Reformation-era writers were the first to view the Crusades through the lens of anti-papal rhetoric, seeing the entire effort as nothing other than a vast waste of European resources undertaken by barbaric, superstitious warriors, these themes received increasing nourishment once combined with the new anti-Church hostility of the Enlightenment.

Centered in France and occupying the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment sought to weaken the influence of the Church in European society. Enlightenment thinking affected most areas of life, including the study and presentation of history. Crusade history was used by intellectuals “not as a historical study in its own right but as a tool in conceptual arguments about religion and the progress of civilization.”
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The Crusades would continue to be used in this way by future generations to further their own agenda against society and the Church.
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The main Enlightenment critics of the Crusades were the Frenchmen Voltaire and Denis Diderot, and England’s David Hume and Edward Gibbon. Voltaire (1694–1778) waged a fierce campaign of satire and ridicule against the Catholic Church. In 1751 he published an essay on the Crusades in which he described them as an “epidemic of fury which lasted for 200 years and which was always marked by every cruelty, every perfidy, every debauchery, and every folly of which human nature is capable.”
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He further opined that the Crusades were “wasteful, pointless, ruined by excessive papal ambition for worldly power, an example of the corrosive fanaticism of the middle ages.”
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Diderot (1713–1784) also saw the Crusades in a wholly negative light and criticized them for the despoliation of Europe. Diderot wrote that the consequences of these “horrible wars” were “the depopulation of its nations, the enrichment of monasteries, the impoverishment of the nobility, the ruin of ecclesiastical discipline, contempt for agriculture, scarcity of cash and an infinity of vexations.”
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Diderot also complained that the Crusades were worthless enterprises of savagery in which European knights were sent by the Church to “cut the inhabitant’s throats and seize a rocky peak [Jerusalem] which was not worth one drop of blood.”
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Hume (1711–1776) believed the Muslim world was superior in “science and humanity” and the Crusades were “the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.”
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The reflections of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) on the Crusades mimicked the writings of his fellow “enlightened” thinkers principally in the thought that the Crusades brought nothing but negative consequences to Europe. In Gibbon’s mind, the Crusaders were ignorant and superstitious criminals manipulated by the Church:

At the voice of their pastor, the robber, the incendiary, the homicide, arose by their thousands to redeem their souls by repeating on the infidels the same deeds which they exercised against their Christian brethren; and the terms of atonement were eagerly embraced by offenders of every rank and denomination. None were pure; none were exempt from the guilt and penalty of sin; and those who were the least amenable to the justice of God and the Church were the best entitled to the temporal and eternal recompense of their pious courage.
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Gibbon also believed that the primary motivation of the Crusaders was greed, with Western warriors bent on the pursuit of “mines of treasures, of gold and diamonds, of palaces of marble and jasper, and of odoriferous groves of cinnamon and frankincense.”
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This erroneous view of Crusader motivations, still commonly held, may be Gibbon’s enduring mark on the popular history of the Crusades.

Modern Scholarship

In the early twentieth century, the Crusades were brushed with a colonial color which later greatly influenced (and still influences) modern Islamic understanding of the movement. The dissolution of the Ottoman Turkish Empire after its defeat in the First World War produced colonial mandates for the British and French in the Middle East. These European powers used Crusading imagery to describe their overseas colonies. A London magazine published a cartoon of King Richard I watching the British marching into Jerusalem with the words, “At last my dream come true.”
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The French commander of Syria, General Henri Gouraud, was reported to have remarked, “Behold, Saladin, we have returned.”
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The main author who contributed to this colonial interpretation of the Crusades was the Frenchman Rene Grousset (1858–1952). However, within a half-century of the publication of his
History of the Crusades,
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most scholars had thoroughly rebuked Grousset’s colonial view.

As the twentieth century reached its midpoint, another group of historians would interpret the Crusades through the lens of economics. For these Marxist scholars, the Crusades were colonial endeavors motivated by economic factors impacted by the growth in medieval population and the shortage of resources in Europe.

Additionally, most historians of the early to mid twentieth century viewed the Crusades in a wholly negative light because of a personal animus against religion as a whole. These scholars could not fathom the idea of warriors with actual faith engaging in warfare for primarily religious reasons. Instead these critics believed the “medieval crusades were evil precisely because they were wars of religion.”
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More recent Crusades scholarship has been shaped by the writings of two historians who had vastly different careers. Carl Erdmann (1898–1945) was a brilliant scholar whose work,
The Origins of the Idea of Crusading
(1935) examined the Crusades as an outgrowth of the papal reform movement in the eleventh century, which primarily sought to ensure the independence of the papacy and Church against secular interference. He also expanded the scope of the Crusades to any area where Christian warriors, motivated by spiritual incentives, engaged in armed conflict. Unfortunately, Erdmann would die relatively young at the age of forty-seven while serving in the German
Wehrmacht
in the Balkans.
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More than any other historian, Steven Runciman (1903–2000) shaped modern popular understanding of the Crusades, and his interpretation continues to influence Hollywood and the media.
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Runciman specialized in Byzantine history, and in his still-influential three-volume
History of the Crusades
(1951–1954) viewed the Crusades through that prism. Most modern Crusades scholars are highly critical of Runciman’s work, for although it is well written and engaging it is more literature than history, and is colored by Runciman’s Byzantine leanings. Christopher Tyerman wrote, “The scholarship is wide but not deep; the literary technique effective in short stretches but taken in large doses tends to indigestion.”
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Runciman was another historian, in a long line, who failed to view the Crusades from a contemporary point of view, making his work “dated in technique, style and content; derivative, misleading, tendentious; a polemic, masquerading as epic.”
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Nonetheless, Runciman shaped modern popular perception of the Crusades, Crusaders, and medieval Muslims by illustrating Western warriors as simple barbarians bent on the destruction of a peaceful and sophisticated Islamic culture. He saw Western Europe as over-populated, violent, and economically stagnant; the Crusades were thus “great barbarian invasions.”
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In contrast to the barbaric and ruthless Western warriors, the Muslim general Saladin was presented as the perfect ruler who was merciful, considerate, tolerant, modest, and intellectual. In essence, Saladin was reduced by Runciman “to a catalogue of nineteenth-century English upper-class virtues.”
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Ultimately, Runciman condemned the Crusades as sins against the Holy Spirit:

In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow as the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
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Happily, Crusades scholarship over the last generation has greatly enhanced our understanding of the Crusading movement and overturned much of the erroneous interpretations and fanciful tales of the agenda-driven authors of the past. Modern scholars are focused on studying the Crusades from the perspective of the participants and understanding what motivated people to participate in them.
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Yet despite the work of these excellent scholars, popular perception of the Crusades remains fixated in a Protestant/ Enlightened/Runciman orientation.

Catholic Misunderstandings

Even good Catholic writers can find themselves relying on old stereotypes when discussing the Crusades. Fr. Robert Barron’s popular video series and companion book,
Catholicism
, strikes a condemnatory tone when discussing the Crusades. Referencing the four marks of the Church, Fr. Barron addresses the criticism leveled against the Church’s holiness and remarks, “How could one possibly declare as holy a church that has been implicated in so many atrocities and outrages over the centuries? How could a holy church have supported the Crusades, the Inquisition and its attendant tortures, slavery, the persecution of Galileo... and the burning of innocent women as witches?”
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In Father Barron’s assessment, the Crusades are one example in a long “litany of crimes” in which even high-ranking clergy did “cruel, stupid and wicked things.”
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He even suggests that the saintly Bernard of Clairvaux was probably “wrong, even sinful, to preach the Second Crusade.”
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Fr. Barron’s work in this area betrays a lack of awareness of the recent and authentic scholarship on the Crusades (as well as the Inquisition) and instead relies on old, formulated, and erroneous criticisms of the Church’s historical past. Regrettably, the popularity of his (otherwise excellent) series ensures that these false narratives continue to influence the understanding of Catholics today.

Critics of the Church and even those within the Church argue that Pope St. John Paul II addressed the Crusades when during the Great Jubilee of 2000 he “apologized” for the sins of the Church; therefore, Catholics should not view these events in a positive light.

This view is not supported by the facts. John Paul II did not apologize for the Crusades; in fact, he never even mentioned the word during the Day of Pardon on March 12, 2000. In order to set the Church on a renewed footing as it entered the Third Millennium of the Faith, the pope tasked the International Theological Commission
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to study the concept of a purification of memory that aimed “at liberating personal and communal conscience from all forms of resentment and violence that are the legacy of past faults, through a renewed historical and theological evaluation.”
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On the Day of Pardon, John Paul II requested forgiveness from God for the faults and failings of our brothers and sisters who have gone before us in the Faith. His desire was born from a love of God and the Church in order for it to enter the third millennium free from the sins of Church members in the past. The pope not only asked God for forgiveness for the failings of past members of the Church but also called the Church to forgive those who have trespassed against it.