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The Economist – vol. 337 Nº 7946

INTERPRETING THE CRUSADES

Religious warriors (Jonathan Riley-Smith)

Nine hundred years after the first of them was proclaimed, the crusades still resonate
-and not just in the Middle East. Jonathan Riley-Smith, professor of ecclesiastical
history at Cambridge University and the author of several books on the crusades,
reflects on their changing interpretation.

That the crusades continue to fascinate is obvious from the vast number of books,
television programmes and films pouring forth around the world. Nor is the fascination
merely historical. The crusades helped shape many notions still current in today’s world,
ranging from concepts of religious violence, through anti-Semitism, to ethnic cleansing.
Interpretation of the crusades has also changed to reflect the mood of the times. Once
considered as religiously motivated, the crusades later metamorphosed into an early
manifestation of European imperialism; they then became a monstrous enterprise,
motivated by greed. Now the pendulum has swung back again to favour a religious
interpretation.
That was certainly how the First Crusade was presented by Pope Urban II, who
proclaimed it on November 27th 1095, in a field outside the French town of Clermont.
The event was stage-managed. The pope had wanted nobles to come from across
Western Europe to hear his sermon, and the crowd reacted with obviously rehearsed
acclamations. Few nobles turned up, and the theatre must have been risky: it was the
onset of winter, and the pope was an old man on an arduous preaching tour. Even so, his
appeal for knights to liberate Jerusalem struck a chord in western society. Between 1096
and 1101 a succession of armies, their numbers swelled by non-combatant pilgrims,
swept into Asia Minor.
The most significant force, comprising perhaps 60,000 people, of whom about 6,000
were knights, came together in June 1097. Two years later some 15,000, of whom 1,500
were knights, took Jerusalem. They had undergone (and inflicted) the most appalling
sufferings. They had struck out on their own, with no system of provisioning; during the
eight-month siege of Antioch, a region roughly 50 miles around was stripped bare by
foraging parties.

BY INVITATION

Within a year of leaving Europe most of the crusaders’ horses were dead; more
seriously, their pack animals died as well, forcing them to carry their armour in sacks.
Not surprisingly, the crusaders’ march was punctuated by moments of blind panic.
There was a continuous trickle of deserters. But there was also a growing sense of
wonder at their achievement. From the moment they entered Syria, visions in the
heavens multiplied. One victory was attributed to an army of angels, saints and the
crusaders’ dead, which came galloping up on the left flank -significantly, it was horsed-
and routed the Muslims. To contemporaries the success of the First Crusade could be
explained only by divine intervention.
Urban II could have had no idea that he was starting a movement that would endure for
hundreds of years, involve huge numbers of people from all classes and manifest itself
in so many different theatres of war -the Spanish Armada of l588 was an unsuccessful
crusade. It is not surprising that events that impinged so directly on history should
attract the interest of a bread public. More to the point, their effects still influence
relations between Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and between Christians, Jews and
Muslims.

Several centuries of crusading

Many Muslims, for instance, still reckon that the crusades initiated centuries of
European aggression and exploitation. Some Catholics want the pope to apologise to the
world for them. Liberals of all stripes see the crusades as examples of bigotry and
fanaticism. Almost all these opinions are, however, based on fallacies. The denigrators
of the crusades stress their brutality and savagery, which cannot be denied; but they
offer no explanation other than the stupidity, barbarism and intolerance of the crusaders,
on whom it has become conventional to lay most blame. Yet the original justification for
crusading was Muslim aggression; and in terms of atrocities, the two sides’ scores were
x about even.
The anti-crusaders draw on, and distort, the views of historians from the late 19th
century on, who offered mainly materialistic reasons for the crusades. These historians
saw them as early examples of the expansion of Europe, with recruitment for them a
response to economic, not religious, impulses. In an imperialist age, the crusades
seemed to be forerunners. The conquests in the east were, in a phrase much loved by
French historians, ”the first French empire”. This was picked up by the British at the
time of Allenby’s victories over the Turks and his entry into Jerusalem in 1917-18; it
was then passed on to early Arab nationalists, who turned it on its head.
The First Crusade certainly began the process of European conquest and settlement in
the eastern Mediterranean; but this was not planned from the start. The Christian knights
assumed they would be joining a larger force that would drive back Muslim Turks who
had recently invaded Asia Minor, and restore Jerusalem, lost for 350 years, to the
Byzantine empire. It was only a year into the campaign when, finding little support
from the Byzantine Greeks, they struck out on their own.
The subsequent decision to settle the Levant comprehensively seems to have been taken
not from a desire for land or profit, but to defend the holy places that the crusade had
won, and to maintain a Christian presence in the Holy Land. If the kingdom of
Jerusalem established by the crusades was a colony, it was in a special category of such
enterprises, grounded more on ideology than economics. Another example is modern
Israel.
More recently those still looking for an econmic explanation of the crusades have
argued that rising populations forced European families to take measures to prevent the
break-up of their estates, either through primogeniture or through the practice of
allowing only one male of each generation to marry. These measures, it was said,
produced a surplus of young men with no prospects, who were naturally attracted by the
hope of adventure, spoils and land overseas. Yet there is no evidence to support the
argument -nor, even, that younger sons tended to crusade rather than older ones. And it
can be shown from documents that foremost in the minds of most nobles and knights
was not any prospect of material gain but anxiety about the costs.
Warfare is always an expensive business; and this was war of a type never experienced
before. The crusaders were volunteers, at least theoretically. Those not ensconced in the
household of a great crusading noble had to finance themselves. Meeting the bills often
meant raising cash on property or rights. It was to alleviate this burden that European
kings, shortly followed by the church, instituted systems of taxation (including the first
regular income taxes) to provide subsidies. The argument that the crusades were a
response to economic conditions at home turns out to be grounded on dubious
assumptions.
Why did these interpretations hold for so long? Charters recording the.pledging and
selling ofproperty and rights by crusaders have, after all, been in print for at least 100
years. The reason that so many historians overlooked them may have been that they
were blinded by an abhorrence of religious and ideological violence, and by their
inability to comprehend that it could have had any appeal. They forgot how
intellectually respectable the Christian theory of holy war once was. It was easier to
believe that the crusaders were too simple-minded to understand what they were doing;
or to argue that they had been motivated, whatever they said, by a desire for material
gain.
Since 1945 new questions have been asked. Combat psychatry made great strides during
the second world war; it became harder to categorise behaviour in war in the old clear-
cut terms of heroism or brutality. There was also a natural revival of interest in the
theoretical underpinning of a “just war”. The Nuremberg trials, and their assumption
that crimes could be committed against humanity, gave new life to the concept of
natural law. Similarly, the debate over whether obedience to orders was justified raised
questions about the legitimate authority of the state in war. Later on, the doctrine of
nuclear deterrence, and a concern with proportionality, brought another just-war
criterion, right intention, into the foreground, the
1960’s revival of Christian theories of positive force in South American liberation
movements also contributed to the debate.
Crusade historians, in short, suddenly discovered that there were sincere and devout
contemporaries of theirs holding ideological positions quite like, those of the medieval
writers they were studying. And, with their eyes opened, the fundamental weakness of
arguments for a materialist motivation, and the paucity of the evidence on which they
rested, became clearer.

Holy war

The theoreticians at the time of the crusades drew on the work of theologians such as St
Augustine of Hippo, the greatest and most influential proponent of Christian violence.
For them, violence, when employed as a means of opposing ”injuries” and thus
achieving justice could accord with divine providence. All rulers, even pagans, were
divine ministers who could proclaim just wars; but God could also personally order
violence. Violence specifically commaded by him was not to be distinguished from
other just violence, except that it was ”without doubt just”. The concept of a political
Christ, which was to return in the 1960s, passed so out of fashion after the late 18th
century that in the 1930s one theologian, Jacques Maritain, wrote of sacred violence
being an impossibility, because no modern state could be associated with Christ’s
wishes for mankind.
It is no coincidence that in the decades leading up to the proclamation of the First
Crusade a group of brilliant intellectuals were anthologising and reviving St Augustine’s
ideas. Crusade propagandists took trouble to conform their arguments to the criteria for
Christian violence he had laid down including the need for a just cause and a right
intention on the part of the fighters; and they drew on the idea of a war at Christ’s
command mediated by the pope as his agent on earth.

Waves of crusades
Dates Places
First 1095-1102 Asia Minor, Palestine
Second 1147-49 Syria, Palestine
Third 1189-92 Cyprus, Palestine
Livonian 1193-1230 et seq. Prussia, Lithuania
Fourth 1202-04 Greece, Constantinople
Albigensian 1209-29 France (v herectics)
Fifth 1217-29 Egypt, Palestine
Sapnish 1229-53, 1482-92 Spain, North Africa
St Louis 1248-54, 1269-72 Palestine, Egypt
Nicopolis 1396 Balkans
Hussite 1420-31 Bohemia (v herectics)

Yet in one respect crusading was unlike nearly every other manifestation of Christian
holy war. The cross was enjoined on men (and women) not as a service, but as a
penance. The association of war with penance, in which the assumption was made that
combat was so severe and unpleasant an experience for the penitent fighter that it
constituted an act of self punishment, had first been made a decade before the preaching
of the First Crusade. It was unprecedented in Christian thought, as conservative
opponents pointed out at the time. It
was startling because it put fighting on the same meritorious plane as prayer, works of
mercy, and fasting. The penitential element was reinforced by associating the First
Crusade with pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the most sacred goal of all, and a place where
devout Christians went to die.
Although over the centuries the penitential element was to some extent diluted by the
notion of chivalric service, it remained at the heart of the crusading ethos. Preparations
for crusades were always surrounded by an atmosphere of penitence. From the Fourth
Lateran Council in the early 13th century to the Council of Trent in the middle of the
16th, every general council of the Catholic church was summoned on the ground that no
crusade.could be successful without a reform of the church. Crusaders knew that they
were embarking on a campaign in which their obligations constituted an act of condign
self-punishment.
In some cases, indeed, men considering entry into monasteries changed their minds on
hearing about the First Crusade and joined up instead; they saw in crusading some
equivalence to monasticism. Running through many of the documents issued by
departing crusaders is a pessimistic piety, expressed in a horror of sin and a fear of its
consequences. The crusaders craved forgiveness. They joined up, as one put it, ”in order
to obtain the pardon that God can give me for my crimes”; or, wrote another, so that he
might gain Christ”.
In most expressions of holy war God is at the centre of things; in crusading the crusader
was. For him the crusade was only secondarily about service in arms to God or the
benefiting of the church; it was primarily about benefiting himself, that was why a
Dominican preacher in the later 13th century commented of the crusading dead that, by
this kind of death, people make their way to heaven who perhaps would never reach it
by another road.” Hard as it is to understand, Christian culture had produced an
ideology in which fighting was an act of self-sanctification.

But the side-effects

It is necessary not to lose sight of the rest of the picture. Ventures of this sort easily
attract XXXpaths, and no method was devised whereby the crusades could screen
recruits for suitability. Indeed, it could not have been, because crusades were technically
pilgrimages that had to be open to all. In any case successive Popes were sometimes
only too pleased to get any response at all to their appeals. Because the successful
launching of a crusade depended on arms-bearers volunteering to take part, churchmen
went to great lengths to address them in a language easy to understand. In doing so, they
ran the danger of arousing forces which they could not control. For example, to call on
men in an age of extended families and endemic blood-feuds to go to the assistance of
their ”father” Christ, who had lost his patrimony, or of their ”brothers and sisters”, who
groaned under a Muslim yoke, risked the swift degeneration of any crusade into a
vendetta. The passions unleashed, when combined with the stresses of crusading, led to
acts of unspeakable horror.
There was even, sometimes, a savage beauty about active service. Think of Richard the
Lionheart battling against Saladin; of the glittering coats of arms carved and painted on
the walls of fortresses on the shores of the Aegean and the Baltic; of a fleet leaving
Venice in the autumn of 1202 with trumpets and horns calling and braying to each other
from ship to ship across the water; or, most romantic of all, of the colourful bravado of
the Teutonic knights in 14th-century Prussia, who attracted recruits from all over
Europe for campaigns against Lithuania that involved long rides through a wilderness of
forest, undergrowth and bog, before a ravaging cavalcade in pagan territory, and finally
a feast at Marienburg where a Table of Honour was laid for the most prestigious
knights, and badges were presented to the most meritorious by the grand master.
This chivalric theatre masked, however, many awful atrocities:ferocious pogroms
against Jews that were features of the preliminaries of many crusades, gross examples
of ethnic cleansing in which non-Christians were driven from towns of religious of
strategic significance by deliberate campaigns of terror, and collapses in military
discipline that led to appalling consequences for any wretches unlucky enough to be
found in the crusaders’ path.
No one could possibly condone a movement that, through its cocktail of idealism,
indiscipline, alienation and stress, managed to give birth to such grotesque
manifestations of inhumanity. Yet one should not criticise crusaders for being what they
were not. They were not imperialists or colonialists. They were not simply after land or
booty. And they were not too stupid to know what they were doing. Their scale of
values was different from today’s. They were pursuing an ideal that, however alien it
seemed to later generations of historians, was enthusiastically supported at the time by
such heavyweights as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Thomas Aquinas.
Blindness to reality can be dangerous. Only ten generations have passed since Christian
armies, operating within a clear tradition and inspired by a coherent ideology, were
winning a land war against the Turks in the Balkans. Modern Christian sacred violence
has largely been confined to churches in poor countries. Although the Lebanese
Maronites, whose church submitted to Rome in 1180, have always had a folk memory
of a golden age under crusader rule, and the Croats -and, from a different perspective,
the Orthodox Serbs- have romanticised the disasters and triumphs of the Balkan wars
against the Turks, in almost all Christian tribalism in recent years there has been no
specific ideology of holy war. The roots of ethnic violence have, in every case, lain
rather in nationalism.
Things may be different in Islam, although nationalism obviously plays a large part
there as well. Some Muslims now maintain that the jihad should be interpreted merely
as a battle against evil. But in its traditional form, it was a war for the extension of
Islamic territory. Some Muslims still seem to envisage the use of force, not only to
counter perceived threats to their way of life, but to bring about world reformation on
their own terms.
Indeed, it is conceivable that a situation could arise not unlike that in the 50 years or so
before the proclamation of the First Crusade. After a period of quiescence, fanatical
Muslims, Turkish religious warriors in Asia Minor and Berber zealots in Spain were
destabilising the frontiers between the Religions. The development of crusading was in
part a response to a huge loss of Christian territory in the east.
History never repeats itself. But if renewed aggressiveness among Muslims were to
meet a revival of Christian theories of positive force, the outcome could be nasty. One
way to avoid it is to study and interpret the crusades –and the conditions that allowed
them to flourish. Understanding should help to bring enlightenment.

IMÁGENES DE LAS COPIAS:

1) titulo: “Holy warrior at work”. Un guerrero con aureola de santo lucha montado
en un caballo blanco. Lleva una espada y un escudo.
2) “Cracking crusader castle” – la copia en muy mala pero se ve una especie de
fuerte muy grande y creo que en la cima de una colina.
3) “THe capture of Antioch, 1098” – Castillo rodeado por un numero enorme de
guerreros con espadas y una imagen mas de soldados agarrando prisioneros,
gente en el piso, mucha violencia.
4) “Godfrey de Bouillon, crusader King of Jerusalem” – Un guerreo con atuendo
muy importante y corona a caballo, tambien con atuendo de mucha importancia.
5) “Knights embarking for the crusades” – la imagen es muy mala pero se ven
personas subiendo a un barco, cargando cosas y muchos sentados en fila con sus
remos en la mano.
6) “Crusaders besiege Damascus in the 12th century” – igual que 3), mucha gente
alrededor de un castillo. Todos con espadas.
7) “Discovery of a holy lance in Antioch cathedral” – interior de una catedral.
Muchisima gente mira (algunos arrodillados) una lanza que una especie de papa
tiene en la mano. Creo que es un Papa por el atuendo.
8) “Phillip II crushing a Saracen” – el rey montado a caballo creo que con un pie
esta “aplastando” a un hombre contra el piso.
9) “Louis IX attacks the Moors at Carthage, 1270” – una especie de mapa de dos
territorios separados por agua. En cada territorio un grupo de guerreros a caballo
y con lanzas y en el agua un barco lleno de gente.