The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (25 page)

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

The Crusades: The World’s Debate
by Hilaire Belloc; 1937, republished by Tan Books, 1992. Belloc presents an arresting prophecy:

“In the major thing of all, Religion, we have fallen back and Islam has in the main preserved its soul…. We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessions and dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled. Perhaps before [these lines] appear in print the rapidly developing situation in the Near East will have marked some notable change. Perhaps that change will be deferred, but change there will be, continuous and great. Nor does it seem probable that at the end of such a change, especially if the process be prolonged, Islam will be the loser.”
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PC Myth: The Crusades were bloodier than the Islamic jihads

The Crusaders massacred in Jerusalem; Saladin and his Muslim troops didn’t. This has become emblematic of conventional wisdom regarding the Crusades: Yes, the Muslims conquered, but the inhabitants of the lands they seized welcomed their conquest. They were just and magnanimous toward religious minorities in those lands. The Crusaders, by contrast, were bloody, rapacious, and merciless.

We have shown this conventional wisdom to be completely false. Saladin only refrained from massacring the inhabitants of Jerusalem for pragmatic reasons, and Muslim conquerors easily matched and exceeded the cruelty of the Crusaders in Jerusalem on many occasions. The Muslim conquerors were not welcomed, but were tenaciously resisted and met resistance with extreme brutality. Once in power, they instituted severe repressive measures against religious minorities.

Did the pope apologize for the Crusades?

“Alright,” you may say, “but despite everything you’re saying, the Crusades are still a blot on the record of Western civilization. After all, even Pope John Paul II apologized for them. Why would he have done that if they weren’t regarded negatively today?”

There is no doubt that the belief that Pope John Paul II apologized for the Crusades is widespread. When he died, the
Washington Post
reminded its readers “during his long reign, Pope John Paul II apologized to Muslims for the Crusades, to Jews for anti-Semitism, to Orthodox Christians for the sacking of Constantinople, to Italians for the Vatican’s associations with the Mafia and to scientists for the persecution of Galileo.”
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A broad list, but John Paul II never apologized for the Crusades. The closest he came was on March 12, 2000, the “Day of Pardon.” During his homily, he said, “We cannot fail to recognize
the infidelities to the Gospel committed by some of our brethren
, especially during the second millennium. Let us ask pardon for the divisions which have occurred among Christians, for the violence some have used in the service of the truth and for the distrustful and hostile attitudes sometimes taken towards the followers of other religions.”
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This is hardly a clear apology for the Crusades. Anyway, given the true history of the Crusades, such an apology would not have been warranted.

The Crusaders do not deserve the opprobrium of the world, but—as we shall see—the world’s gratitude.

Chapter 12

WHAT THE CRUSADES ACCOMPLISHED—AND WHAT THEY DIDN’T

T
here were many crusades, but when historians refer to “the Crusades” they generally mean a series of seven campaigns by troops from Western Europe against Muslims in the Holy Land. The First Crusade was called in 1095 and began in 1099; the Seventh Crusade ended in 1250. The last Crusader cities fell to the Muslims in 1291.

Guess what?

• After the Crusades, the Muslims resumed their attempts to conquer Europe by jihad.
  
• Christians were as responsible as Muslims for the Islamic conquest of Eastern Europe: They made short-sighted and ultimately disastrous alliances with jihad forces.
  
• Western leaders who think non-Muslims can “win hearts and minds” among Islamic jihadists are similarly naïve and shortsighted.
  

1. The First Crusade (1098–1099) was the most successful: The Crusaders captured Jerusalem and established several states in the Middle East.
   
2. The Second Crusade (1146–1148) was an unsuccessful—indeed, disastrous—attempt to recapture a Crusader state, Edessa, which had been conquered by the Muslims in 1144. At first, it was diverted to a successful operation to recapture Lisbon from the Muslims in 1147; then, when it finally arrived in the East, most of this army of Crusaders was crushed in Asia Minor in December 1147—before it ever reached the Holy Land.
   
3. The Third Crusade (1188–1192) was called by Pope Gregory VIII in the wake of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem and destruction of the Crusader forces at Hattin in 1187. This Crusade was dominated by strong personalities who were often at odds with one another: Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, King Richard the Lionhearted of England, and King Philip of France. They did not manage to retake Jerusalem, but they did strengthen Outremer, the Crusader state that stretched along the coast of the Levant.
   
4. The Fourth Crusade (1201–1204) was disastrously diverted by a claimant to the Byzantine throne, who convinced the Crusaders to come to Constantinople to help him press his claim. The Crusaders ended up sacking the great city, shocking the Christian world. They established a Latin kingdom in Constantinople, earning the everlasting enmity of the Byzantines and further weakening the already fragile Byzantine Empire.
   
5. The Fifth Crusade (1218–1221) focused on Egypt. The Crusaders hoped that by breaking Egyptian power, they could recapture Jerusalem. They besieged Damietta, a city on the Nile Delta that was the gateway to Egypt’s great cities, Cairo and Alexandria. As the siege dragged on, the Egyptian sultan al-Kamil grew increasingly worried and twice offered the Crusaders a restored kingdom of Jerusalem if they would just leave Egypt. The Crusaders refused and ultimately took Damietta; however, infighting and disunity ultimately doomed this Crusade. The Crusaders concluded an eight-year truce with al-Kamil and abandoned Damietta in exchange for the True Cross (a relic of the cross used to crucify Jesus), which Saladin had captured.
   
6. The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229) was essentially a continuation of the Fifth. After years of delaying his Crusader vow, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was excommunicated by the pope; however, he still made his way to the Holy Land. The mere prospect of another Crusade seemed to frighten al-Kamil, who was also distracted by his attempt to conquer Damascus. He offered the Crusaders a ten-year truce, by which they would regain Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. However, Frederick agreed to leave Jerusalem defenseless and allowed Muslims to remain there without restriction. This made it all but inevitable that the Muslims would eventually retake the city. This they did in 1244, killing large numbers of Christians and burning numerous churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
   
7. The Seventh Crusade (1248–1250) was the best-equipped and best-organized of all the Crusades. It was led by the pious French king Louis IX. He again set his sights on Egypt, and captured Damietta. However, when attempting to take Cairo, the Crusaders were defeated at Mansourah; shortly thereafter, Louis himself was captured. He was ultimately ransomed and returned to Europe after a brief period in the Crusader center of Acre. He even attempted another crusade later, but accomplished little.
   

The Crusader kingdom lasted a few more decades. Antioch, where the Crusaders established their first kingdom in 1098, fell to the warriors of jihad in 1268. In 1291, the Muslims took Acre, devastating the Crusader army in the process. The rest of the Christian cities of Outremer fell soon afterward. There were other attempts in Europe to mount Crusades, but they came to little or nothing. The Crusader presence in the Middle East was no more, and would never be restored.

Making deals with the Mongols

Just as the last cities of Outremer were facing extinction, an offer of help came from a most unlikely source: Arghun, the Mongol ruler of Persia and client of the great conqueror Kublai Khan, sent an emissary to Europe in 1287. Arghun was not simply eccentric; the Mongols had been at odds with the Muslims for quite some time. In 1258, Hulagu Khan, the brother of Kublai Khan, toppled the Abbasid caliphate. Two years later, a Christian Mongol leader named Kitbuka seized Damascus and Aleppo for the Mongols. Arghun wanted to raise interest among the Christian kings of Europe in making common cause to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims once and for all. Arghun was a Buddhist; his best friend was the leader, or Catholicos, of the Nestorian Church, a Christian sect that had broken with the great Church of the Empire in 431. His vizier, meanwhile, was a Jew. Arghun seemed to hold every religion in high regard except Islam. He came to power in Persia by toppling the Muslim ruler Ahmed (a convert from Nestorian Christianity) after Ahmed made attempts to join forces with the Mamluks in Cairo.

Ahmed had written to Pope Honorius IV in 1285 to suggest an alliance, but when the pope did not answer, the Mongol ruler sent Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian Christian from deep in the heart of Central Asia, to Europe to discuss the matter personally with the pope and the Christian kings. Sawma’s journey was one of the most remarkable in the ancient world: He started out from Trebizond and traveled all the way to Bordeaux to meet with King Edward I of England. Along the way, he met the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus in Constantinople (to whom he referred as “King Basileus,” or King King, demonstrating that thirteenth-century translators weren’t infallible); traveled to Naples, Rome (where Honorius IV had just died and a new pope had not yet been chosen), and Genoa; went on to Paris, where he dined with King Philip IV of France; met with Edward I in Bordeaux; and returned to Rome for a triumphant meeting with Pope Nicholas IV.

All the European leaders liked Rabban Sauma’s proposal of a Mongol-Christian alliance to free the Holy Land. Philip IV offered to march to Jerusalem himself at the head of a Crusader army. Edward I was likewise enthusiastic: Sauma was proposing an alliance that the king himself had called for in the past. Pope Nicholas showered Sauma, Arghun, and the Nestorian Catholicos with gifts. But what none of these men, or anyone else in Europe, could decide was a date for this grand new Crusade. Their enthusiasm remained vague, their promises non-specific.

The crowned heads of Europe were too disunited and distracted with challenges at home to take up the Mongols’ offer; perhaps they were also suspicious of a non-Christian king who wanted to wage war to liberate the Christian Holy Land. They may have feared that once they helped the wolf devour the Muslims, the wolf would turn on them. But in any case, it was an opportunity missed. Dissatisfied with the results of Rabban Sauma’s journey, Arghun sent another emissary, Buscarel of Gisolf, to Europe in 1289. He asked Philip IV and Edward I for help, offering to take Jerusalem jointly with soldiers sent by the Christian kings; he would then hand the city over to the Crusaders. Edward’s answer, which is the only one that survives, was polite but non-committal. Dismayed, Arghun tried yet again in 1291, but by then Outremer had fallen. By the time the emissaries returned, Arghun himself was dead.
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Certainly, if the pope and the Christian kings had concluded an alliance with Arghun, the Crusaders might have been able to retake Jerusalem and reestablish a significant presence in the Holy Land. This would probably have postponed, at the very least, the Muslim march into Eastern Europe that commenced with a fury in the century following the final destruction of Outremer. But the leaders of Europe were distracted and shortsighted, so preoccupied with relatively insignificant squabbles at home that they did not realize just how much was at stake. Had they fully recognized the ultimate goals of the jihad warriors, they almost certainly would have been more open to an alliance with Arghun.

But there was considerable evidence that they had no real understanding of those goals at all.

Making deals with the Muslims

The jihad was now a seven-hundred-year-old project that advanced with Muslim strength and grew quiescent with Muslim weakness, but was never abandoned or repudiated by any Muslim leader or sect. But that did not mean that they were unwilling to enter into agreements with the Christians. The English historian Matthew of Paris reported that in 1238, Muslim envoys visited France and England, hoping to gain support for a common action against the Mongols—a fact that opens a new perspective on the modern Muslim and PC view that the Crusaders were nothing more than “rapists” of Islamic land.
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