The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (23 page)

Recent studies of Crusaders’ documents reveal that the vast majority of them were not “second sons” looking for a profit and estates in the Middle East. Most were, like Godfrey, lords of their own estates, men with a great deal to lose.
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Certainly some Crusaders did very well for themselves after the First Crusade. Fulcher of Chartres writes, “Those who were poor there, here God makes rich. Those who had few coins, here possess countless besants; and those who had not had a villa, here, by the gift of God, already possess a city.”
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But most who did return to Europe came back with nothing material to show for their efforts.

PC Myth: The Crusades were fought to convert Muslims to Christianity by force

To hear some PC types tell it, the Crusaders swept into the Middle East, swords in hand, and set about killing every “infidel” they saw, except those they forced to convert to Christianity. But this is lurid, politically motivated fantasy. Glaringly absent from every report about Pope Urban’s address at the Council of Claremont is any command to convert Muslims. The pope’s only preoccupation is to defend Christian pilgrims and recapture Christian lands. It was not until over a hundred years after the First Crusade (in the thirteenth century) that European Christians made any organized attempt to convert Muslims to Christianity, when the Franciscans began missionary work among Muslims in lands held by the Crusaders. This effort was largely unsuccessful.

When the Crusaders were victorious and established kingdoms and principalities in the Middle East, they generally let the Muslims in their domains live in peace, practice their religion freely, build new mosques and schools, and maintain their own religious tribunals. Some have compared their status to that of the dhimmis in Muslim lands; they retained a certain measure of autonomy, but were subject to unfavorable taxation rates and other restrictions. It is likely that the Crusaders adopted some of the dhimmi laws already in place, but they did not subject Jews or Muslims to dress codes. So Jews and Muslims could avoid day-to-day discrimination and harassment.
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This was the opposite of Muslim practice. The key difference is that the dhimma was never part of Christian doctrine and law, as it has been and remains part of Islam.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

The New Concise History of the Crusades
by Thomas F. Madden; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, is a briskly told page-turner that dispels innumerable PC myths about why the Crusades were fought, who fought them, and what happened during each one.

What’s more, the Spanish Muslim Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217), who traversed the Mediterranean on his way to Mecca in the early 1180s, found that Muslims had it better in the lands controlled by the Crusaders than they did in Islamic lands. Those lands were more orderly and better managed than those under Muslim rule, so that even Muslims preferred to live in the Crusader realms:

Upon leaving Tibnin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj [Franks, or Crusaders]—may God preserve them from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lot to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.
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So much for the contention that the Crusaders were barbarians attacking a far superior and more advanced civilization.

Chapter 11

THE CRUSADES: MYTH AND REALITY

I
t is often said: “The Crusaders marched across Europe to the Middle East. Once there, they pillaged and murdered Muslim and Jewish men, women, and children indiscriminately, and forced the survivors to convert to Christianity. Awash in pools of blood, they established European proto-colonies in the Levant, inspiring and setting a pattern for legions of later colonialists. They were the setting for the world’s first mass killings, and are a blot on the history of the Catholic Church, Europe, and Western civilization. So horrifying were they that Pope John Paul II ultimately apologized to the Islamic world for the Crusades.”

Any truth?

No. Virtually every assertion in this paraphrase, though routinely made by numerous “experts,” is wrong.

Guess what?

• The Crusades were
  not
  early manifestations of European colonialism in the Middle East.
  
• The Crusader massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem in 1099 was a terrible atrocity, but it was nothing unusual according to the rules of warfare of the time.
  
• The Crusades were not called in order to target Jews as well as Muslims.
  

PC Myth: The Crusaders established European colonies in the Middle East

As the Crusaders made their way east in response to Pope Urban’s call, their principal leaders met with Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus. He prevailed upon them to agree individually, in accord with Urban’s wishes, that any lands they conquered would revert to the Byzantine Empire. The Crusaders changed their minds about this after the siege of Antioch in 1098. As the siege dragged on through the winter and Muslim armies advanced north from Jerusalem, the Crusaders waited for the Byzantine emperor to arrive with troops. But the emperor had received a report that the Crusaders’ situation in Antioch was hopeless and turned back his forces. The Crusaders felt betrayed and became enraged. After they overcame immense odds and took Antioch, they renounced their agreements with Alexius and began to establish their own governments.

These were not, however, colonial arrangements. The Crusader states simply would not have been recognizable as colonies to someone familiar with Virginia, Australia, or the Dutch East Indies in later centuries. Broadly, a colony is a land that is ruled by a far-off power. But the Crusader states were not ruled from Western Europe; the governments they established did not answer to any Western power. Nor did the Crusader rulers siphon off the wealth of their lands and send it back to Europe. They had no economic arrangements with any European country. The Crusaders established their states in order to provide permanent protection for Christians in the Holy Land.

In fact, many Crusaders ceased to think of themselves as Europeans. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres wrote:

Consider, I pray, and reflect how in our time God has transferred the West into the East. For we who were Occidentals now have been made Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank is now a Galilaean, or an inhabitant of Palestine. One who was a citizen of Rheims or of Chartres now has been made a citizen of Tyre or of Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least, are unmentioned. Some already possess here homes and servants which they have received through inheritance. Some have taken wives not merely of their own people, but Syrians, or Armenians, or even Saracens who have received the grace of baptism. Some have with them father-in-law, or daughter-in-law, or son-in-law, or stepson, or step-father. There are here, too, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One cultivates vines, another the fields. The one and the other use mutually the speech and the idioms of the different languages. Different languages, now made common, become known to both races, and faith unites those whose forefathers were strangers. As it is written, “The lion and the ox shall eat straw together.” Those who were strangers are now natives; and he who was a sojourner now has become a resident.
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At the same time, another feature of colonialism, large-scale emigration from the home country, did not materialize. No streams of settlers came from Europe to settle in the Crusader states.

PC Myth: The capture of Jerusalem was unique in medieval history and caused Muslim mistrust of the West

After a five-week siege, the Crusaders entered Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. An anonymous contemporary account by a Christian has seared what happened next into the memory of the world:

One of our knights, Letholdus by name, climbed on to the wall of the city. When he reached the top, all the defenders of the city quickly fled along the walls and through the city. Our men followed and pursued them, killing and hacking, as far as the temple of Solomon, and there there was such a slaughter that our men were up to their ankles in the enemy’s blood.

The emir who commanded the tower of David surrendered to the Count [of St. Gilles] and opened the gate where pilgrims used to pay tribute. Entering the city, our pilgrims pursued and killed the Saracens up to the temple of Solomon. There the Saracens assembled and resisted fiercely all day, so that the whole temple flowed with their blood. At last the pagans were overcome and our men seized many men and women in the temple, killing them or keeping them alive as they saw fit. On the roof of the temple there was a great crowd of pagans of both sexes, to whom Tancred and Gaston de Beert gave their banners [to provide them with protection]. Then the crusaders scattered throughout the city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods. Afterwards our men went rejoicing and weeping for joy to adore the sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus and there discharged their debt to Him.
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It is jarring to our modern sensibilities to read a positive account of such a wanton massacre; such is the difference between the attitudes and assumptions of those days and our own. Similarly, three principal Crusade leaders, Archbishop Daimbert; Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon; and Raymond, Count of Toulouse; boasted to Pope Paschal II in September 1099 about the Crusaders’ Jerusalem exploits: “And if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.”
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Significantly, Godfrey himself, one of the most respected Crusade leaders, did not participate in the slaughter; perhaps he was more aware than the rank-and-file soldiers of what a betrayal this behavior represented to the Crusaders’ principles.

Balderic, a bishop and author of an early twelfth-century history of Jerusalem, reports that the Crusaders killed between twenty and thirty thousand people in the city.
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That is likely exaggerated, but Muslim sources put the number even higher. Although the earliest Muslim sources do not specify a death count, Ibn al-Jawzi, writing about a hundred years after the event, says that the Crusaders “killed more than seventy thousand Muslims” in Jerusalem. Ibn al-Athir, a contemporary of Saladin, the Muslim leader who gained impressive victories over the Crusaders late in the twelfth century, offers the same number.
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The fifteenth-century historian Ibn Taghribirdi records one hundred thousand. So the story of this massacre has grown over the centuries, to the point where a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, recounted at a leading Catholic university, Georgetown, in November 2001, that the Crusaders murdered not just every Muslim warrior or even every Muslim male, but “every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound” until the blood was running not just up to their ankles, as the Christian chronicler had it, but as Daimbert, Godfrey, and Raymond have boasted: “up to their knees.”
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This atrocity, this outrage, was—we have been told time and again—the “starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West.”
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It might be more accurate to say that it was the start of a millennium of anti-Western grievance mongering and propaganda. The Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem was a heinous crime—particularly in light of the religious and moral principles they professed to uphold. However, by the military standards of the day, it was not out of the ordinary. In those days, it was a generally accepted principle of warfare that if a city under siege resisted capture, it could be sacked, and if it did not resist, mercy would be shown. Some accounts say that the Crusaders promised the inhabitants of Jerusalem that they would be spared, but reneged on this promise. Others tell us that they did allow many Jews and Muslims to leave the city in safety. Count Raymond gave a personal guarantee of safety to the Fatimid governor of Jerusalem, Iftikar al-Daulah.
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In the mind of a Crusader, when such guarantees were issued, those who remained in the city would have been more likely to be identified with the resistance—and their lives forfeited.
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