by Andrew Curry - Published in
U.S. News on 4/8/2002
It was the fall of 1187, and an emissary from the besieged city of Jerusalem
had come to beg Saladin, the sultan of Egypt, for mercy. After barely four
days of assaults, the Christian defenders saw that Saladin had them hopelessly
outmatched. Waiting in his tent outside the city's walls, the Muslim ruler
knew both sides had a lot riding on the outcome of this battle.
For the city's defenders, the prospect of Saladin's wrath loomed. The last
time Jerusalem was sacked by an invading army–a Christian one–its
narrow streets ran red with blood. For Saladin, his honor depended on capturing
Jerusalem. All summer his armies had battled their way north through the
Holy Land, sweeping through the Christian fiefs like an angry desert wind,
with only one goal: recapturing the holy city that had been occupied by European
invaders for 88 years.
Now the sultan stood on the hills north of Jerusalem. But the Christian emissary
trudging toward him had no prize to offer, only surrender. For days Saladin's
men had bombarded the city from the heights to the north, finally breaching
St. Stephen's Gate. The few defenders who remained knew that prolonging the
fight would only worsen the consequences of defeat.
And so a triumphant Saladin entered Jerusalem on Oct. 2, 1187. For the sultan's
army, it was a moment of both joy and sadness. The
Christians had profaned some of Islam's holiest sites. The al-Aqsa mosque
had been used as a stable for horses. Pieces of the rock from which Mohammed
was said to have ascended to heaven had been chipped away to sell in
Constantinople.
But the victorious Saladin forbade acts of vengeance. There were no more
deaths, no violence. A token ransom was arranged for the thousands of residents.
Saladin and his brother paid for hundreds of the poorest themselves and arranged
guards for the caravans of refugees.
Sound familiar? If not, don't feel bad. Saladin doesn't get much play in
Western history books. You're more likely to read about Richard the Lion-Hearted,
the leader of the European expedition to retake Jerusalem–and even he
is most often remembered as a peripheral character in Robin Hood tales. But
ask most Muslims, and they'll tell you all about Saladin and his generosity
in the face of Christian aggression and hatred. And they'll be right.
The battle between Saladin and Richard marked the high point of the Crusades,
the first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom, which lasted
more than three centuries. And though they are only faint in the Western
consciousness, in the Muslim world the Crusades still loom large in cultural
memory. When Osama bin Laden declared his own jihad in 1998, he accused America
of "[spearheading] the crusade against the Islamic nation." And in a tape
released to his followers last year, he promised that the world would "see
again Saladin carrying his sword, the blood of unbelievers dripping from
it."
His words tapped into a reservoir of ill will. "The impact of the Crusades
created a historical memory which is with us today–the memory of a long
European onslaught," says Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic studies at American
University in Washington, D.C. Its legacy was profound. For Muslims, then
probably the strongest and most vibrant civilization on the globe, the Crusader
victories and the destruction that followed were a confidence-shaking blow.
At the same time, the Crusades were a tipping point for Europe, pushing the
continent out of an isolated dark age and into the modern world.
Christian soldiers. From their beginnings in 1095, the Crusades inspired
more passion than anyone expected. The First Crusade was preceded by droughts
and famine and heralded by meteor showers. The idea of an expedition to reclaim
Jerusalem from the unbelievers seized the imagination of people from all
social classes. Led by deeply religious knights like Godfrey of Bouillon
and Tancred, armies of "Latin" Christians (followers of the Church of Rome)
from France, Germany, England, and elsewhere marched through what is now
Hungary to Constantinople, the great center of Christianity in the East.
When the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, they looked like one
undifferentiated barbaric mess to their Muslim foes, who called them all
Franks. But the unsophisticated Franks were tough. In 1099 they surrounded
Jerusalem, assaulting the well-defended city for weeks. Finally, Godfrey
and Tancred broke through, and the Crusaders poured in. Bloodthirsty after
their fiercely fought siege, they swarmed over the walls and set upon the
city's inhabitants–Muslim, Jewish, and even Christian. Later they boasted
of wading through the city's holy sites knee deep in blood. Their brutality
horrified the Muslim world. "Amongst the Moslems, who had been ready hitherto
to accept the Franks as another factor in the tangled politics of the time,
there was henceforward a clear determination that the Franks must be driven
out," writes British historian Steven Runciman. "When later, wiser Latins
in the East sought to find some basis on which Christian and Moslem could
work together, the memory of the massacre stood always in the way."
It took almost a century before a leader strong enough to unite the Muslim
Middle East appeared. When Saladin finally retook Jerusalem, it was Christendom's
turn to be shocked. The archbishop of Tyre, a Christian stronghold north
of Jerusalem, hurried west to Italy on a black-sailed ship with news of
Jerusalem's fall, along with letters begging for help–and a crude drawing
of an Arab beating a bloodied Jesus. Chroniclers say that when Pope Urban
III learned of Saladin's victory, he died of grief. His successor, Gregory
VIII, sent messengers to spread the word of a new Crusade to wrest back the
holy city. "Every person of ordinary discretion is well able to appreciate
both the greatness of the danger and the fierceness of the barbarians who
thirst for Christian blood," he wrote. "The goal of those who profane the
holy places is nothing short of sweeping away the name of God." Echoing Urban
II, the pope promised salvation through violence: He would "acquit before
God all the sins of those who would bear the sign of the cross to go recover
the Promised Land, provided that they had confessed and were truly penitent,"
wrote contemporary chronicler William of Tyre.
The pope's message of salvation and the opportunity for earthly glory drew
the most powerful kings of Europe–like the young Richard the Lion-Hearted,
who sailed east leading armies of knights and peasants. Expeditions like
Richard's would be repeated on a smaller scale over and over again for almost
five centuries, from 1095, when the First Crusade was declared, to 1578,
when the last true Crusade was launched against Turks in Morocco. Though
historians used to write of eight distinct Crusades, scholars today argue
that "Crusades were going to the Holy Land all the time during the 200 years
that the Franks were able to hold onto their states in the Middle East,"
as author Karen Armstrong writes in Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact
on Today's World. "Long after they lost these states it was not uncommon
for kings and barons to take the cross and vow to march on Jerusalem." Many
scholars now also believe that crusading eventually spanned the entire continent
of Europe, as the church used it to fight "heretical" Christians and convert
pagans at sword point.
The First Crusade, in which wide swaths of the Holy Land were seized by Latin
Christians, is the only one that can be considered a European victory. Crusades
thereafter were either catastrophes or barely successful attempts to preserve
European strongholds in the Middle East known as the "Latin kingdoms." But
the Third Crusade is the best remembered, perhaps because of the personalities
involved. Like Richard the Lion-Hearted, the handsome and temperamental king
of England: Though known today as a paragon of chivalry, Richard was a merciless
adversary. The son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and England,
he was already a veteran warrior and strategist when he arrived in the Holy
Land in 1191 at the age of 33. He took a different view of war from Saladin's.
After one battle, he had the captured men–16,000 of them, according
to William of Tyre's occasionally inflated account–beheaded within full
view of their own armies. For 16 months, Saladin and Richard battled across
the parched plains of the Holy Land. Finally, ill and leading an exhausted
army, Richard negotiated a truce with Saladin and headed home. He never returned.
Colonial West. But Richard did come back in the popular imagination–if
in a different guise. Marching into a Jerusalem captured from the Turks in
1917, a British general, Sir Edmund Allenby, proudly declared "today the
wars of the Crusaders are completed," and the British press celebrated his
victory with cartoons of Richard the Lion-Hearted looking down at Jerusalem
above the caption "At last my dream come true." The colonial powers glorified
the Crusaders as their ideological forebears.
At the same time, Western expansion into the Middle East embittered Arabs.
"For [Muslims], imperialism is a dirty word, and they turned the Western
memory of the Crusades on its head and demonized it," says Jonathan Riley-Smith,
a historian at the University of Cambridge in Britain and author of The Crusades:
A Short History. Angry Muslim nationalists adopted the Crusades as a convenient
metaphor. It still works. "Since the late 19th century, Western imperialism
and Zionism were portrayed as a modern crusade," says Hebrew University historian
Benjamin Kedar. "This is why the topic is so timely in Arab political discourse."
Undoubtedly, George W. Bush had a different sense of the term in mind after
September 11 when he told the nation "this crusade, this war on terrorism,
is going to take awhile." But Bush's statement resounded like thunder in
the Muslim world. "It was precisely the worst word he could have used–it
allowed bin Laden and others to conceptualize the nature of the struggle
into resisting Christian and Jewish invaders and point out the hostility
of the West to the Muslim world," Ahmed says. "Crusader lore is only part
of this rage, but it's a significant part."
This rage is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning just over
a century ago, when memories of the Crusades were revived as a historical
analogy to colonialism. Before Europe's colonial expansion into the Middle
East, Muslim chroniclers paid little attention to the Crusades. "In actual
historical reality, the Crusades were far more important for the West than
for the Muslim world," says John Voll, associate director of the Georgetown
University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
For decades, Western historians held on to the idea that the Crusades were
a colonial venture motivated by just about everything but the cross: greed,
lack of opportunity in Europe, territorial expansion, or just plain aggression.
Few gave credence to the idea that the Crusaders were motivated by genuine
religious feeling. But recently Crusades scholarship has recognized that
faith could move people to violence as easily as could greed or land. The
best example is the First Crusade, called by Pope Urban II. Eager to unite
warring Christians, on Nov. 27, 1095, he spoke to a massive crowd gathered
near Clermont in France. Describing the cruelties inflicted by Muslims on
Christian pilgrims trying to visit Jerusalem and the defeats suffered by
the Byzantine Christians, he called on all of Western Christendom to rescue
their Eastern brethren. "They should leave off slaying each other and fight
instead a righteous war, doing the work of God, and God would lead them.
For those that died in battle there would be absolution and the remission
of sins," Runciman writes. "Here they were poor and unhappy; there they would
be joyful and prosperous and true friends of God."
The response was tremendous. Urban's speech was interrupted by cries of "Deus
lo volt"–"God wills it." Hundreds crowded up to Urban begging permission
to go on the holy expedition. Soon tens of thousands of commoners and knights
were heading off to the Holy Land. Across Europe, preachers called the faithful
to sew crosses on their clothes, to mark them until they succeeded in their
quest.
United under the cross and ruled by strict religious principles, the Crusaders
were able to set aside their differences. "Among those people who spoke so
many different languages there were the strongest pledges of concord and
friendship," reads a Crusader's code written in 1147. "In addition to this
they enforced the severest laws, for example that a death was to be demanded
for a death, a tooth for a tooth. They forbade every kind of display of rich
clothes; and women were not allowed to go out in public." The key to Urban's
call was a revolutionary (and doomed) theology: salvation through the sword.
"There is a very powerful devotional element," says Riley-Smith. "West European
Catholics believed they could aid their salvation by fighting the infidel
in the East. [Crusading is] as much a penance as fasting on bread and water.
. . . This idea is without precedent in Christian history."
"Milk and honey." Jerusalem was the medieval Christians' equivalent of Mecca,
Christ's tomb their quest. To take up the cross in the city's defense was
a deeply spiritual act. And more: Ever on the edge of starvation, usually
tied to a lord's land, superstitious peasants saw the journey as a road to
heaven. "To ignorant minds the distinction between Jerusalem and the New
Jerusalem was not very clearly defined," writes Runciman in History of the
Crusades. Fiery itinerant preachers like Peter the Hermit, whose army of
starving peasants had no place in Urban's vision of an orderly march on
Jerusalem, promised paradise. "Many . . . believed that he was promising
to lead them out of their present miseries to the land flowing with milk
and honey of which the Scriptures spoke," Runciman writes.
Peter's success was cited over and over again in the years to come. The defeats
suffered by better-organized Crusades led many to believe that it was the
humble who were destined to succeed, not the proud, rich military classes.
In the end, these "People's Crusades" ended in disaster too. None ever reached
the Holy Land, and most of the peasant Crusaders were either slaughtered
as they plundered their way across Europe or disbanded before ever reaching
a port. Without the resources to reach the Holy Land, most turned on
more-convenient targets, namely Europe's Jewish communities. "[Why] are we
going to seek out our profanity and to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites
for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him" was
the rationale, as recorded by a Jewish eyewitness.
But persuading landed knights to take up the cross took more than antisemitic
rants and vague stories of the Promised Land. Europe's warrior class, the
fighting force Pope Urban II really wanted, had a lot to lose: Crusaders
faced death, disease, or capture. There were also more-mundane risks. A knight's
lands and title could be stolen in his absence. If his Crusade failed, the
returning knight risked the scorn of those who blamed him for failing to
do God's work. And the costs involved in crusading were a risk in themselves.
King Louis IX of France (later to become St. Louis) set out in 1249 on crusade
from a harbor he had specially constructed with an artificial canal and grand
tower, stocked with plentiful supplies. He spent six times his annual revenue
on the venture, which ended when he was captured and forced to pay a
400,000-pound ransom. "Most Crusaders engaged in a dangerous, unpleasant,
unprofitable, and extremely expensive enterprise, and they do not seem to
have expected anything else," says Riley-Smith.
Though most were military and financial fiascoes, the Crusades had a long-term
impact on European civilization that went beyond finding an outlet for the
violence of warring Christian kingdoms. "[The Crusades] made the Continent
more cosmopolitan and gave Europeans a far greater awareness of the wider
world. Like all wars, veterans came back and had seen things they never would
have if they had stayed in their villages," says James Reston Jr., author
of Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade.
The stories they brought back also sparked a creative blaze in Europe. Beginning
in the 12th century, or around time of the First Crusade, literature and
verse flowered in the form of memoir and song. Coming after the virtual silence
that marked the Dark Ages, the proliferation of Crusader epics like the French
Song of Roland is referred to by some scholars as the "12th-century Renaissance."
Many chose not to return at all, especially second and third sons with no
chance of inheriting land back in Europe. Those who stayed created a cultural,
military, and mercantile outpost in the Holy Land. The fortresses they built
after the First Crusade were usually transplanted reflections of the European
feudal system, but over time the "Latin kingdoms" in the Holy Land also served
as a powerful integrating force. Contact with the libraries of the Arab world
opened up new worlds for the isolated scholars of Europe, who gradually gained
access to a wealth of ancient Greek texts that had been preserved for centuries
in Arabic. "Violent interactions were paralleled by economic and conceptual
exchanges," argues Georgetown's Voll. "In some ways the Crusades' positive
intellectual dimensions outweigh the negative impact."
First contact."The Crusades were an absolute failure, but they did integrate
European travelers and traders into an ongoing world system," says Janet
Abu-Lughod, author of Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350.
Increased demand for Middle Eastern luxury items meant that Europeans had
to come up with trade goods of their own, helping build industries like wool
and textiles. "By stimulating an interest in the goods of the East, they
had a double-back effect on the development of European economies." Even
later failures may have hidden some positive benefits. The end of the Crusades
and the Latin kingdoms meant the end of easy access to Asian trade goods,
but not to demand. Some historians have speculated that the closing of the
Middle East to European merchants in the 15th century accelerated the voyages
of discovery that led to the New World.
But even the Europeans' increasing sophistication did little to redeem them
in the eyes of the Muslims whose land they occupied and controlled. To the
Arabs they were "illiterate barbarians, for whom physical force is a supreme
virtue, their religion is a despised polytheism, their medicine a collection
of superstitions," writes historian Joshua Prawer in The Crusaders' Kingdom:
European Colonialism in the Middle Ages. "Far from feeling inferior to the
conqueror, the conquered regarded himself not only as his equal but by far
his superior."
More than nine centuries after Urban II called the first Crusade, the legacy
of misunderstanding and animosity is still with us today. In the West, many
of the most lasting misperceptions of Islam stem from that time. In the Arab
and Muslim world, the Crusades have made an unfortunate rhetorical comeback.
"Such analogies are really not very helpful to understand the Crusades or
present-day realities–they obscure rather than clarify," says Kedar.
"People get so obsessed with . . . the past that they don't react to the
reality but to the reflection." With that reflection distorted almost beyond
recognition by rhetoric and misunderstanding, a clearer vision of the past
has never been more important.
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