Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Christians lost Jerusalem again in 1244, when the marauding Khwarazmian Turks in flight from the Mongol armies rampaged through the holy city, a portent of a terrifying threat to both Christendom and Islamdom. Between 1190 and 1258, Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes had overrun northern China, Korea, Tibet, Central Asia, Anatolia, Russia, and eastern Europe. Any ruler who failed to submit immediately saw his cities laid waste and his subjects massacred. In 1257 Hulugu, Genghis Khan’s son, crossed the Tigris, seized Baghdad, and strangled the last Abbasid caliph; then he destroyed Aleppo and occupied Damascus, which surrendered and was spared destruction. At first King Louis IX of France and Pope Innocent IV hoped to convert the Mongols to Christianity and let them destroy Islam. Instead the Muslims would save the Crusaders’ coastal state and, possibly, Western Christendom from the Mongols. Finally, the Mongol rulers who established states in the Middle East would convert to Islam.

  In 1250 a group of disaffected Mamluks took over Saladin’s Ayyubid Empire in a military coup. Ten years later the brilliant Mamluk commander Baibars defeated the Mongol army at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Galilee. But the Mongols had conquered vast swaths of Muslim territory in Mesopotamia, the Iranian mountains, the Syr-Oxus Basin, and the Volga region, where they established four large states. Mongol violence was not caused by religious intolerance: they acknowledged the validity of all faiths and usually built on local traditions once a region had been subjugated; so by the early fourteenth century, the Mongol rulers of all four states had converted to Islam. The Mongol aristocracy, however, still followed the Yasa, Genghis Khan’s military code. Many of their Muslim subjects were dazzled by their brilliant courts and were fascinated by their new rulers. But so much Muslim scholarship and culture had been lost in the devastation that some jurists decreed that the “gates of ijtihad [independent reasoning]” had closed. This was an extreme version of the conservative tendency of agrarian civilization, which lacked the economic resources to implement innovation on a large scale, valued social order over originality, and felt that culture was so hard won that it was more important to conserve what had already been achieved. This narrowing of horizons was not inspired by an inherent dynamic of Islam but was a reaction to the shocking Mongol assault. Other Muslims would respond to the Mongol conquests very differently.

  Muslims were always ready to learn from other cultures, and in the late fifteenth century they did so from the heirs of Genghis Khan. The Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and the Moghul Empire in India would be created on the basis of the Mongol army state and become the most advanced states in the world at the time. But the Mongols also unwittingly inspired a spiritual revival. Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73) had fled the Mongol armies with his family, migrating from Iran to Anatolia, where he founded a new mystical Sufi order. One of the most widely read Muslims in the West today, his philosophy is redolent of the refugee’s homelessness and sense of separation, but Rumi was also enthralled by the vast extent of the Mongol Empire and encouraged Sufis to explore boundless horizons on the spiritual plane and to open their hearts and minds to other faiths.

  No two people will respond to the same trauma identically, however. Another thinker of the period who has also achieved great influence in our own time was the “fighting scholar” Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1382), also a refugee who, unlike Rumi, hated the Mongols. He saw the Mongol converts, now fellow Muslims, as kufar (“infidels”).88 He also disapproved of the suspension of ijtihad: in these fearful times jurists needed to think creatively and adapt Shariah to the fact that the ummah had been weakened by two ruthless enemies: the Crusaders and the Mongols. True, the Crusaders seemed a spent force, but the Mongols might still attempt the conquest of the Levant. In preparation for a military jihad to defend their lands, Ibn Taymiyyah urged Muslims to engage in the Greater Jihad and return to the pure Islam of the Prophet’s time, ridding themselves of such inauthentic practices as philosophy (falsafah), Sufi mysticism, Shiism, and the veneration of saints and their tombs. Muslims who persisted in these false devotions were no better than infidels. When Ghazan Khan, the first of the Mongol chieftains to convert to Islam, invaded Syria in 1299, Ibn Taymiyyah issued a fatwa (“legal ruling”) declaring that despite their conversion to Islam, the Mongols were infidels, because they observed the Yasa instead of the Shariah, and their Muslim subjects were not bound to obey them. Muslims had traditionally been wary of condemning fellow Muslims as apostates, because they believed that only God could read a person’s heart. The practice of takfir, declaring that a fellow Muslim has apostatized, would take on new life in our own times, when Muslims have once again felt threatened by foreign powers.

  During the Crusading period, Europe had adopted a narrower perspective and become what one historian has called a “persecuting society.” Until the early eleventh century, Jews had been fully integrated in Europe.89 Under Charlemagne they had enjoyed imperial protection and held important public posts. They became landowners and craftsmen in all trades; Jewish physicians were much in demand. Jews spoke the same languages as Christians—Yiddish did not develop until the thirteenth century—and gave their children Latin names. There were no “ghettos”: Jews and Christians lived side by side and bought houses from one another in London until the mid-twelfth century.90 However, during the eleventh century, there were rumors that Jews had persuaded the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim to destroy the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 1009, even though the caliph, who seemed to have been certifiably insane, had persecuted Jews and his fellow Muslims as well as Christians.91 In consequence, Jews were attacked in Limoges, Orléans, Rouen, and Mainz. Linked with Islam in the Christian imagination, their position grew more precarious with each Crusade. After Richard I took the Cross in London in 1198, there were persecutions in East Anglia and Lincoln, and in York in 1193, Jews who refused baptism committed suicide en masse. The so-called blood libel, whereby the deaths of children were blamed on the local Jewish community, first surfaced when a child was killed in Norwich during the 1140s; there were similar cases in Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmunds, and Winchester (1192).92

  This wave of persecution was certainly inspired by a distorted Christian mythology, but it was also the product of social factors. During the slow transition from a purely agrarian to a commercialized economy, towns were beginning to dominate Western Christendom, and by the end of the twelfth century were becoming important centers of prosperity, power, and creativity. There were great disparities of wealth. Lowborn bankers and financiers were becoming rich at the expense of the aristocracy, while some townsfolk had not only been reduced to abject poverty but had also lost the traditional support structures of peasant life.93 Money, in common use by the late eleventh century, came to symbolize the disturbing changes caused by this rapid economic growth that undermined the traditional social structure; it was seen as “the root of all evil,” and in popular iconography the deadly sin of avarice inspired visceral loathing and dread.94 Originally Christians had been the most successful moneylenders, but during the twelfth century Jews had their lands confiscated and many were forced to become bailiffs, financial agents of the aristocracy, or moneylenders and were thereafter tainted by their association with money.95 The Jew in Peter Abelard’s Dialogue (1125) explains that because Jews’ land tenure is so insecure, “the principal gain that is left for us is that we sustain our miserable lives here by lending money at interest to strangers. But that just makes us more hated by those who think that they are oppressed by it.”96 Jews, of course, were not the only scapegoats of Christian anxiety. Since the Crusades, Muslims, once regarded with vague indifference in Europe, had now come to be regarded as fit only for extermination. In the mid-twelfth century Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, depicted Islam as a bloodthirsty religion that had been propagated entirely by the sword—a fantasy that may have reflected hidden guilt about Christian behavior during the First Crusade.97

  Disquiet about nascent capitalism and the gro
wing violence of Western society, both of which were so obviously at odds with the radical teachings of Jesus, also surfaced in the “heresies” that the Church had begun to persecute actively in the late twelfth century. Again, the challenge was political rather than doctrinal. The conditions of peasants had reached their lowest level, and poverty had become a major problem.98 Some had become rich in the towns, but population growth had fragmented inheritances and multiplied the numbers of landless villagers roaming the countryside desperately seeking employment. The structural violence of the “three estate” system was the cause of much anxious soul-searching among Christians. In orthodox as well as heretical circles, the well-to-do were coming to the conclusion that the only way to save their souls was to give away their wealth, which they now regarded as sinful. After a serious illness, Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), son of a wealthy merchant, renounced his patrimony, lived as a hermit, and founded a new order of friars dedicated to serving the poor and sharing their poverty; it increased rapidly in membership. Francis’s rule was approved by Pope Innocent III, who hoped thereby to retain some control of the poverty movement that threatened the entire social order.

  Other groups were not such loyal adherents of the Church. Even after they had been excommunicated in 1181, the followers of Valdes, a rich businessman of Lyons who had given all his wealth to the poor, continued to attract much support as they traveled through the towns of Europe in pairs like the apostles, barefoot, clad in simple garments and holding all things in common. Still more worrying were the Cathari, the “Pure Ones,” who also roamed the countryside, begging for their bread, and were dedicated to poverty, chastity, and nonviolence. They founded churches in all the major cities of northern and central Italy, enjoyed the protection of influential laymen, and were especially powerful in Languedoc, Provence, Tuscany, and Lombardy. They embodied the gospel values far more clearly and authentically than did the worldly Catholic establishment who, perhaps because they felt at some level guilty about their reliance on a system that so clearly contradicted Jesus’s teachings, responded viciously. In 1207 Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) commissioned Philip II of France to lead a Crusade against the Cathars in Languedoc, who, he wrote, were worse than the Muslims. The Cathar Church “gives birth continually to a monstrous brood by which its corruption is vigorously renewed after that offspring has passed on to others the canker of its own madness and a detestable succession of criminals emerges.”99

  Philip was happy to oblige, since this would enhance his hold over southern France, but Counts Raymond VI of Toulouse and Raymond-Roger of Béziers and Carcassonne refused to join his Crusade. When one of Raymond’s barons stabbed the papal legate, Innocent was convinced that the Cathars were determined “to annihilate us ourselves” and eliminate orthodox Catholicism in Languedoc.100 In 1209 Armand-Amalric, abbot of Citeaux, led a large army there, laying siege to the city of Béziers. It is said that when his troops asked the abbot how they could distinguish orthodox Catholics from the heretics in the town, he had replied: “Kill them all; God will know his own.” Indiscriminate slaughter followed. In fact, it seems that when the Catholics of Béziers were ordered to leave the town, they refused to abandon their Cathar neighbors and chose to die with them.101 This Crusade was as much about regional solidarity against outside intrusion as it was about religious affiliation.

  The extremity of both the rhetoric and the military ruthlessness of the Catharist Crusade is symptomatic of a profound denial. Popes and abbots were dedicated to the imitation of Christ, but, like Ashoka, they had come up against the dilemma of civilization, which cannot exist without the structural and military violence against which the Cathars were protesting. Innocent III was the most powerful pope in history: he had secured the libertas of the Church and, unlike his predecessors, could command kings and emperors as their monarch. But he headed a society that had almost succumbed to barbarism after the collapse of the Roman Empire and was now in the process of creating the world’s first predominantly commercial economy. All three Abrahamic faiths began with a defiant rejection of inequity and systemic violence, which reflects the persistent conviction of human beings, dating back perhaps to the hunter-gatherer period, that there should be an equitable distribution of resources. Yet this militated against the way Western society was heading. Cathars, Waldenses, and Franciscans all felt torn by this impasse, realizing perhaps that as Jesus had pointed out, all who benefit from the inherent violence of the state are implicated in its cruelty.

  It seems unlikely that Innocent agonized unduly about this dilemma, though his neurotically exaggerated anti-Cathar rhetoric may express some dis-ease with his position. Far more poignant was the stance of Dominic de Guzmán (c. 1170–1221), founder of the Order of Preachers; like the Franciscans, his friars had adopted a poverty that was so extreme that they could own no property and begged for a living. The mendicant Dominicans traveled throughout Languedoc in pairs trying to bring the “heretics” back to orthodoxy peacefully, reminding them of Saint Paul’s insistence that Christians obey the political authorities. But they were inevitably tainted by their association with the anti-Cathar Crusade, especially after Dominic attended the Lateran Council of 1215 to seek Innocent’s approval of his order.

  Those Christians who remained loyal to the Church but could see how the intrinsic violence of Christendom violated the gospel teaching were inevitably conflicted. Unable to admit that the “heretics” had a point, yet furious with them for drawing attention to their dilemma, they projected these sentiments outward, in forms monstrous and inhuman. There were paranoid fantasies of a highly organized, clandestine Catharist Church determined to destroy the human race and restore Satan’s kingdom.102 We shall see that similar conspiracy fears would later erupt in other societies that were going through a traumatic modernization process and would also result in violence. The Council of Rheims (1157) described the Cathars “hiding among the poor and under the veil of religion … moving from place to place and undermining the faith of simple people.”103 Soon Jews would be said to belong to a similar international conspiracy.104 Even a fair-minded man like Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, who claimed to be reaching out to the Muslim world with love rather than force, described Islam as a “heresy and diabolical sect” addicted to “bestial cruelty.”105 At the outset of the Second Crusade he wrote to King Louis VII of France that he hoped he would kill as many Muslims as Moses and Joshua had killed Amorites and Canaanites.106 During this period Satan, often pictured as a monstrous human being with horns and a tail, became a far more menacing figure in Western Christianity than in either Judaism or Islam. As they made their stressful transition from a political backwater to a major world power, Europeans were terrified of an unseen “common enemy,” representing what they could not accept in themselves and associated with absolute evil.107

  Innocent III had achieved a virtual papal monarchy in Europe, but no other pope would match his power. Secular rulers, such as Louis VII of France (1137–80), Henry II of England (r. 1154–89), and Frederick II all challenged this papal supremacy. They had built powerful kingdoms with government institutions that could intrude more than ever before into the lives of ordinary people, so they were all zealous persecutors of “heretics” who threatened the social order.108 They were not “secularists” in our sense; they still regarded royal power as sacred and war as holy, but they had developed a Christian theology of war that was quite different from that of the official church. Again, we find it impossible to pinpoint a single, essentialist “Christian” attitude to war, fighting, and violence. The Christian template could be used to very different effect by different groups.

  Bishops and popes had used both the Peace of God and the Crusades to control the warrior aristocracy, but during the thirteenth century the knights responded by developing a chivalric code that declared independence of the papal monarchy. They rejected the Cluniac reform, had no intention of converting to the monastic ideal, and were indifferent to Bernard’s scathing critique
of knighthood. Their Christianity was laced with the Indo-European warrior code of the Germanic tribes, with its ethos of honor, loyalty, and prowess.109 Where the reforming popes had forbidden knights to kill their fellow Christians, urging them to slaughter Muslims instead, these rebellious knights were happy to fight any Christian who threatened their lord and his people.

  In the chansons de geste, or “songs of deeds,” composed in the early twelfth century, warfare is a natural, violent, and sacred activity. These knights clearly loved the excitement and intensity of the battlefield and experienced it with religious fervor. “Now war is upon us again, all praise to Christ!” cries one of King Arthur’s knights.110 The Song of Roland, composed in the late eleventh century, describes an incident that occurred at the end of Charlemagne’s campaign in Muslim Spain: Archbishop Turpin kills Muslims with joyous abandon, and Roland has no doubt that the souls of his dead companions have gone straight to heaven.111 His sword, Durendal, which has relics embedded in its hilt, is a sacred object, and his loyalty to Charlemagne inseparable from his devotion to God.112 Far from having monastic aspirations, these knights regard monks with disdain. As Archbishop Turpin says robustly, a knight who is not “forward and fierce in battle” might as well “turn monk in monastery meek and for his sins pray daily on his knees.”113