Western Europe
Historians have long recognised that interaction between western Christendom and the Muslim and wider Mediterranean worlds during the Middle Ages played an important, perhaps even critical, role in advancing European civilisation. These contacts resulted in the absorption of artistic influences and the transference of scientific, medical and philosophical learning–all of which helped to stimulate far-reaching changes in the West, and ultimately contributed to the Renaissance. Gauging the relative importance of different spheres of contact within this process is all but impossible. Thus, while the art and architecture of the ‘crusader’ Levant exhibited unquestionable signs of intercultural fusion, ‘crusader’ styles of manuscript illumination or castle design cannot reliably be tracked back to the West and categorically isolated as the sole inspiration for any given European exemplar. By its nature, the textual transmission of knowledge is easier to trace. In this area of exchange Outremer played a notable role–as witnessed in the translations made at Antioch–but its importance was secondary to the plethora of copied and translated texts that poured out of Iberia in the Middle Ages. At best, we can conclude that the crusades opened a door to the Orient, but by no means was it the only portal of contact.
Other forms of change brought about by the crusades in Latin Europe can more easily be determined. On a practical level, large-scale expeditions had a huge political, social and economic impact upon regions such as France and Germany, culminating as they did in the interruptive disappearance of whole kinship groups and sections of the nobility. The absence of the ruling classes, and especially crown monarchs, could cause widespread instability and even regime change. The advent of the Military Orders and the spread of their power to virtually every corner of the West had an obvious and profound effect upon medieval Europe–as new and formidable players on the Latin stage, these orders possessed the might to rival established secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The popularity of crusading served to increase the authority of the papacy and to reconfigure the practice of medieval kingship. It also influenced the emerging notions of knighthood and chivalry. By creating a new form of penitential activity, these holy wars likewise altered devotional practice–a process that accelerated markedly in the thirteenth century with the vast extension of crusade preaching, the commutation of vows and the system of indulgences.
Throughout this period, it is true that more Latin Christians stayed in the West than were actively engaged in crusading activity or fighting in the war for the Holy Land. But by the same token, between 1095 and 1291, few living in Europe remained wholly untouched by the crusades–whether through participation, taxation or the broader formulation of a communal Latin Christian identity within society.5
THE LONGER SHADOW
In February 1998 a radical terrorist network, describing itself as the ‘World Islamic Front’, declared its intention to wage ‘Holy War against Jews and Crusaders’. This organisation, led by Osama bin Laden, has come to be known as al-Qaeda (literally, the ‘base’ or ‘foundation’). Five days after al-Qaeda’s 11 September attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, US President George W. Bush walked on to the south lawn of the White House and, before a crowded huddle of international journalists, affirmed America’s willingness to defend its soil, warning that ‘this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while’. Later, in October that same year, bin Laden responded to the approaching allied invasion of Afghanistan. He characterised this operation as a ‘Christian crusade’, stating that ‘this is a recurring war. The original crusade brought Richard from Britain, Louis from France and Barbarossa from Germany. Today the crusading countries rushed as soon as Bush raised the cross. They accepted the rule of the cross.’6
How can it be possible that this language of medieval holy war has found a place in modern conflicts? This rhetoric seems to suggest that the crusades have somehow continued unabated since the Middle Ages, leaving Islam and the West pitted against one another–locked in an undying and embittered war of religion. In fact, there is no unbroken line of hatred and discord connecting the medieval contest for control of the Holy Land to today’s struggles in the Near and Middle East. The crusades, in reality, are a potent, alarming and, in the early twenty-first century, distinctly dangerous example of the potential for history to be appropriated, misrepresented and manipulated. They also prove that a constructed past can still create its own reality, for the crusades have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion.
Among the root causes of this phenomenon is the disjuncture between popular and collective interest in, and perception of, the medieval crusading era, across what might broadly be termed the Muslim world and the West. At a basic level this difference can be shown in terminology. From around the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the crusades came to be known in Arabic as al-hurub al-Salabiyya (the ‘Cross’ wars), a term that underlines the elements of Christian faith and military conflict. In English, however, the word ‘crusade’ has largely been disassociated from its medieval and devotional origins–taken now to denote striving in the interests of a cause that is often presented as just. The term ‘crusade’ is strewn with casual abandon through media and popular culture in the West. Indeed, it is quite possible to speak of a crusade against religious fanaticism, even of a crusade against violence. Western interpretation of the Arabic word jihad is equally jarring. Many Muslims consider that the idea of jihad relates, first and foremost, to an inner spiritual struggle. But in the West the word is commonly thought to embody a single meaning: the waging of a physical holy war. As with so many of our modern attitudes to the crusader era, this problem with terminology emerged only in the last two centuries. To an extent, however, the divergence of Western and Islamic memories and perceptions occurred in the more immediate aftermath of Outremer’s eradication.
Later medieval and early-modern perceptions
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Europe still engaged in struggles against other Muslim enemies (most notably the Ottoman Turkish Empire), the medieval crusades attained a semi-mythic status. Certain, supposedly central, ‘heroes’ were lionised. Godfrey of Bouillon was included, alongside the likes of Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar, among the ‘Nine Worthies’–the most revered figures in human history. Richard the Lionheart was celebrated as a legendary warrior-king, while Saladin was actually widely praised for his chivalric demeanour and noble character. In Dante’s conception of the afterlife, depicted in his famous Divine Comedy (1321), Saladin appeared in the first level of Hell, the plane reserved for virtuous pagans.
However, with the coming of the Reformation after 1517 and later the birth of Enlightenment thinking, European theologians and scholars undertook a broad reassessment of Christian history. By the eighteenth century, the crusades had been consigned to a dark and distinctly undesirable medieval past. The British scholar Edward Gibbon, for example, asserted that these holy wars were an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’, born of religious faith. The French intellectual Voltaire, meanwhile, condemned the crusade movement as a whole, but reserved some admiration for particular individuals–with King Louis IX praised for his piety and Saladin described as ‘a good man, a hero and a philosopher’.7
By contrast, throughout the late medieval and early-modern periods of Mamluk and Ottoman rule, Near and Middle Eastern Islam exhibited very little interest in the crusades. Most Muslims seem to have regarded the war for the Holy Land as a largely irrelevant conflict, fought in a bygone age. True, the barbarous Franks had invaded the Levant and carried out acts of violence, but they had been roundly punished and defeated. Islam, quite naturally, had prevailed and the era of Frankish intrusion was brought to an unequivocal and triumphant end. When ‘heroic’ figures were drawn as exemplars from this period, they tended to differ from those selected in the West. Far less attention was paid to Saladin. Instead Nur al-Din’s piety was applauded, while Baybars became prominent in
folklore from the fifteenth century onwards. Throughout these centuries there appears to have been no sense that crusader aggression had sparked a perpetual holy war, or that Frankish atrocities still somehow demanded retribution.8
To understand how the crusades emerged from the dusty corners of history, seemingly to become relevant to the modern world, the academic study and social, political and cultural recollection of these wars since 1800 must be traced in Islam and the West.
The crusades in western history and memory
By the early nineteenth century a broad consensus, informed by Enlightenment thinking, had emerged in the West. Medieval crusaders were scorned for their brutish and misguided barbarity, though occasionally lauded for their bravery. However, attitudes were soon to be tempered by a potent strand of romanticism for a more idealised vision of the Middle Ages. This trend was evoked in the wildly popular and hugely influential fiction penned by the British author Sir Walter Scott. His novel The Talisman (1825), set at the time of the Third Crusade, portrayed Saladin as the ‘noble savage’, gallant and wise, while presenting King Richard I as a rather tempestuous thug. Scott’s book, along with works including Ivanhoe (1819), and those by other authors, helped to engender a vision of the crusades as grand, daring adventures.9
Around the same time, some European scholars began to engage in historical parallelism–the desire to see the modern world reflected in the past–depicting the crusades and the creation of the crusader states in triumphalist terms as commendable exercises in proto-colonialism. This trend started the process of separating crusading (and the very word ‘crusade’) from its religious and devotional context, allowing the war for the Holy Land to be celebrated as an essentially secular endeavour. Writing in the early nineteenth century, the French historian François Michaud published a widely disseminated, three-volume account of these holy wars (along with four further volumes of sources), peppered with misleading statements and misrepresentations of history. Michaud applauded the ‘glory’ earned by the crusaders, noting that their objective was ‘the conquest and civilisation of Asia’. He also identified France as the movement’s spiritual and conceptual epicentre, stating that ‘France would one day become the model and centre of European civilisation. The holy wars contributed much to this happy development and one can perceive this from the First Crusade onwards.’ Michaud’s publications were both a product of, and further stimulus to, potent sentiments of French nationalism–a drive to formulate a national identity that saw the war for the Holy Land dragged into a fabricated reconstruction of ‘French’ history.10
Romanticised, nationalistic enthusiasm for the crusades was by no means the preserve of France. The newly created state of Belgium adopted Godfrey of Bouillon as its hero, while, across the Channel, Richard the Lionheart was embraced as an iconic English champion. Both men were immortalised in striking equestrian statues in the mid-nineteenth century. Godfrey’s image stands in Brussels’ Grand Place, while Richard sits astride his horse, sword raised, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Throughout the nineteenth century the tendrils of interest spread far and wide. Benjamin Disraeli, the future British prime minister, was fascinated by the crusades–travelling to the Near East in 1831, even before he was elected to Parliament; and later publishing a novel, Tancred: or The New Crusade, about a young nobleman with a crusading heritage. The American writer Mark Twain also toured the Holy Land, visiting the battlefield at Hattin, and was much impressed by the sight of a sword, once reputedly owned by Godfrey of Bouillon, which stirred ‘visions of romance [and the] memory of the holy wars’.
In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany went to extraordinary lengths to enact his crusading fantasies. Decked out in mock-medieval regalia during a visit to the Levant, he processed on horseback into Jerusalem and then journeyed to Damascus to pay his respects to Saladin, whom the kaiser regarded as ‘one of the most chivalrous rulers in history’. On 8 November he laid a wreath on the Ayyubid sultan’s rather dilapidated tomb and later paid for his mausoleum’s restoration.11
Of course, not all western study of the crusades in this period was coloured by fanciful notions of romanticism and nationalistic imperialism. Through these same years a strong trend towards a more precise, detached and empirical approach was gathering pace. But even in the 1930s, the French crusade historian René Grousset made comparisons between France’s involvement in the crusades and the return of French rule to Syria in the early twentieth century. And it was the more impassioned and intemperate accounts that exerted most influence over popular perceptions. The potency and potential perils of such facile modern parallelism became apparent in the context of the First World War. In the course of this conflagration, France was granted a mandate to govern ‘Greater Syria’ by the League of Nations–and French diplomats sought to reinforce claims to this territory by citing crusade history.
The British, meanwhile, were mandated to administer Palestine. Arriving in Jerusalem in December 1917, General Edmund Allenby was evidently conscious of the offence which might be caused within Islam by any tinge of crusading rhetoric or triumphalism (not least because there were Muslim troops serving in the British Army). In stark contrast to Kaiser Wilhelm, Allenby entered the Holy City on foot, and was said to have issued strict orders forbidding his troops from making references to the crusades. Unfortunately, his caution did not prevent sections of the British media from revelling in the event’s supposed medieval echoes. Indeed, the satirical English periodical Punch published a cartoon headed ‘The Last Crusade’, depicting Richard the Lionheart looking down on Jerusalem from a hill-top, with the caption: ‘My dream comes true!’ Later, an apocryphal, but nonetheless enduring, rumour spread that Allenby had himself proclaimed: ‘Today the wars of the crusades are ended.’
In fact, even then, the word ‘crusade’–already disassociated from religion–was starting to be detached in the English language from its medieval roots. In 1915 the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George described the First World War as ‘a great crusade’ in a rallying speech. By the time of the Second World War, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s D-Day orders, issued for 6 June 1944, contained the exhortation to Allied troops: ‘You are about to embark on a great crusade.’ Eisenhower’s 1948 account of the war was entitled Crusade in Europe.12
Modern Islam and the crusades
After a sustained period of marked disinterest, the Muslim world began to exhibit the first flickers of renewed curiosity about the crusades in the mid-nineteenth century. Around 1865, the translation of French histories by Arabic-speaking Syrian Christians led to the first uses of the term al-hurub al-Salabiyya (the ‘Cross’ wars) for what before had been known as the wars of the Ifranj (the Franks). In 1872, an Ottoman Turk, Namik Kemal, published the first ‘modern’ Muslim biography of Saladin–a work seemingly written to refute Michaud’s triumphalist history that had recently been translated into Turkish. Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1898 visit to the Near East either coincided with, or perhaps fuelled, another burst of interest, for in the following year the Egyptian scholar Sayyid ‘Ali al-Hariri produced the first Arabic history of the crusades, entitled Splendid Accounts of the Crusading Wars. In this book al-Hariri wrote that the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1908) recently had sought to characterise western occupation of Muslim territory as a new ‘crusade’, and al-Hariri stated that the sultan ‘rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a crusade against us in the form of a political campaign’. Around the same time, the Muslim poet Ahmad Shaqwi wrote a verse questioning why Saladin had been forgotten by Islam until the reminder provided by Kaiser Wilhelm.13
In the years that followed, Muslims from India to Turkey and the Levant began to comment on the similarity between medieval crusader occupations and modern western encroachments–a comparison that, of course, had been espoused vocally and enthusiastically in the West for decades. A gathering fascination with Saladin as a heroic Muslim figurehead is also evidenced by the opening of a new university in Jerusalem named after t
he sultan in 1915. These two related phenomena were accelerated by events towards the tail end of the First World War: the establishment of the British and French mandates in the Levant; the extensive reporting of Allenby’s supposed reference to the crusades; and the widespread popularisation of historical parallelism in Europe. By 1934 one prominent Arabic author was moved to suggest that ‘the West is still waging crusading wars against Islam under the guise of political and economic imperialism’.
The critical change came, however, after the Second World War, with the UN-mandated foundation of the state of Israel in 1948–the realisation of what has been called Zionism. That October, the commentator ‘Abd al-Latif Hamza wrote that ‘the struggle against Zionists has reawakened in our hearts the memory of the crusades’. From 1948 onwards, the Muslim world engaged in an increasingly active re-examination of the medieval war for the Holy Land. Arab-Islamic culture already had a long tradition–stretching back to the central Middle Ages and beyond–of seeking to learn from the past. It is not surprising, therefore, that across the Near and Middle East, scholars, theologians and radical activists now started to refine and affirm their own historical parallels; to harness crusade history for their own purposes.14
The principles of ‘crusade parallelism’
This process of historical appropriation continues to this day. The crusader period was, and is, exceptionally well suited to the needs of Islamic propagandists. Having come to an end almost 800 years earlier, the precise events of this era are sufficiently cloudy to be readily reshaped and manipulated: useful ‘facts’ can be selected; any uncomfortable details that do not correlate with a particular ideology are easily discarded. The crusades can also be used to construct a valuable didactic narrative, because they encapsulate both ‘western’ attack and eventual Islamic victory. Jerusalem’s role likewise is critical. In reality, the political and even the devotional importance accorded by Muslims to the Holy City varied and wavered in the course of the Middle Ages, even as it did in later centuries. But the medieval struggle for dominion of this site helps modern ideologues to cultivate an idea of Jerusalem–and most especially of the Haram as-Sharif, or Temple Mount–as a sacred and inviolable stronghold of the Muslim faith.
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 69