by Emmet Scott
“We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first call for a crusade occurred in 846 CE, when an Arab expedition to Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter’s in Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against ‘the enemies of Christ,’ and the pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad – an attempt to recover by holy war what was lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up.”[7]
Whether or not we agree with Lewis, there is no question whatsoever that the Crusades were primarily defensive, and attempts to portray the Crusaders as the aggressors are completely unjustified. Recent works by Thomas F. Madden have taken politically correct historians to task over the issue in a spirited way, and he has pointed out that the prevailing view of the Crusaders as early European colonialists (barbarous colonialists) is one that owes far more to modern American and European anti-colonialist prejudices than to the facts of history. He too emphasizes the defensive nature of the Crusades and is extremely critical of those historians who fail to see this.[8]
War was regulated by the church, and Medieval conflicts, at least within Europe, were not nearly as violent as many imagine. As Sidney Painter notes; “Even when kings and feudal princes fought supposedly serious wars in the early Middle Ages, they were not bloody. At the great and decisive battle of Lincoln in 1217, where some 600 knights on one side fought 800 on the other, only one knight was killed, and everyone was horrified at the unfortunate accident.”[9]
There is no question that the Medieval custom of ransoming important hostages provided an economic motive for this remarkable unwillingness to use lethal force; but it is equally clear that the idea of chivalry, with its strongly Christian overtones, exerted a powerful moderating influence. Nor should we forget that during the centuries which followed the First Crusade, when we might imagine Christians in Europe to have become thoroughly accustomed to the idea of fighting and killing for Christ, there is much evidence to show that this did not happen. The idea of violence in the name of Christ was, in the words of Jonathan Riley-Smith, “without precedent” when it was first promoted in the eleventh century.[10] “So radical was the notion of devotional war,” says Riley-Smith, “that it is surprising that there seem to have been no protests from senior churchmen.”[11] Be that as it may, Christians could never be fully at ease with the idea, and enthusiasm for crusading soon waned. Riley-Smith notes that, following the success of the First Crusade, the supply of new recruits immediately dried up, even among those groups and families who had been its strongest supporters. These reverted, instead, to the traditional military pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[12] We should note too that statements like that of the English Franciscan Roger Bacon in the 1260s, who criticized the very idea of crusading, arguing that such military activities impeded efforts to peacefully convert Muslims.[13] Contrast this with the attitude in Islam, where all warriors who died in the Jihad were “martyrs” and guaranteed a place in Paradise. And the contrast is seen very clearly in the words of Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan, who was a captive of the Turks in 1354: “ … these infamous people, hated by God and infamous, boast of having got the better of the Romans [Byzantines] by their love of God. … They live by the bow, the sword, debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil … and not only do they commit these crimes, but even – what an aberration – they believe that God approves of them.”[14]
It is beyond question too that the First Crusade came as the culmination of over a century of desperate struggle against Muslims in Spain, Sicily and Asia Minor. To argue that the First Crusade was a completely new departure and unrelated to these earlier events, as do Bull and Asbridge, is unjustified. Whilst the Reconquista which had raged in Spain since the 1020s was not called “holy war,” it was clearly in direct line of descent to the Crusades. The official religious sanction for a Christian “holy war” came eventually in 1063, when Pope Alexander II gave his blessing to the warriors of the Reconquista in their struggle with the Moors, granting both a papal standard (vexillum sancti Petri) and an indulgence to those who fell in battle.
Yet it cannot be stressed to often that there always remained a deep unease within Christendom about the idea. The concept of fighting – and killing – for Christ was something quite new. In Runciman’s words, “The Christian citizen had a fundamental problem to face: is he entitled to fight for his country? His religion is a religion of peace; and war means slaughter and destruction. The earlier Christian Fathers had no doubts. To them war was wholesale murder.”[15] Runciman goes on to note that the rise of the Germanic kingdoms brought with it the glamorization of the warrior-hero and the knight, against which “the church could do little.” Nonetheless, there was still resistance, especially in the East. Saint Basil, for example, maintained that anyone guilty of killing in war should refrain for three years from taking communion as a sign of repentance.[16] In fact, as Runciman notes, the Byzantine soldier was not treated as a murderer; but his profession brought him no glamor. “Byzantine history was remarkably free of wars of aggression. … Justinian’s campaigns had been undertaken to liberate Romans from heretic barbarian governors, Basil II’s against the Bulgars to recover imperial provinces and to remove a danger that menaced Constantinople. Peaceful methods were always preferable, even if they involved tortuous diplomacy or the payment of money. … The princess Anna Comnena, one of the most typical of Byzantines, makes it clear in her history that, deep as was her interest in military questions and much as she appreciated her father’s success in battle, she considered war a shameful thing, and a last resort when all else had failed, indeed in itself a confession of failure.”[17]
The western point of view was less enlightened, and there is no question that Western Christendom, after having had to absorb the warrior ideals of the Goths, Franks and Vandals, and having then to fight a life-and-death struggle against Muslims, Vikings and Magyars, was more amenable to the idea of fighting for Christ. In Runciman’s words, “the military society that had emerged in the West out of the barbarian invasions inevitably sought to justify its habitual pastime. The code of chivalry that was developing, supported by popular epics, gave prestige to the military hero; and the pacifist acquired a disrepute from which he has never recovered. Against this sentiment the Church could do little.”[18]
We might conclude then, regarding the question of the origins of the Christian Holy War idea, that it derived in part from the Muslims and in part from the martial culture which characterized western Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries. But that is not to say that the Europeans were the aggressors, or that Crusading represented a violent outpouring of Christian fanaticism: on the contrary, irrespective of what theological justification was found for “Holy War,” the fact is that the Crusades were entirely defensive in nature and scope. In the twenty years before the First Crusade, Christendom had lost the whole of Anatolia, an area greater than France, and a region right on the doorstep of Europe. These wars were characterized by appalling atrocities, as were almost all the wars involving Islamic armies; and they sent shock-waves throughout Europe. In 1050 the Seljuk leader Togrul Beg, in conformity with the precepts of Sunni Islam, undertook jihad against the Christians of Anatolia, who had thus far resisted the power of the Caliphs. We are told that 130,000 Christians died in the war, which resulted in the complete subjugation of Armenia, a country which at that time comprised a large portion of the land we now call Turkey. Togrul Beg’s death in 1063 was viewed by the Christians of the region as a chance for freedom, and Armenia reasserted its independence. Yet Togrul Beg’s successor, his nephew Alp Arslan, was to prove as aggressive and relentless as himself. Im
mediately upon being proclaimed sultan, Alp Arslan renewed hostilities with the infidels. In 1064 the old Armenian capital of Ani was destroyed; and the prince of Kars, the last independent Armenian ruler, “gladly handed over his lands to the [Byzantine] Emperor in return for estates in the Taurus mountains. Large numbers of Armenians accompanied him to his new home.”[19] In the above sentence Steven Runciman describes a human catastrophe: the transplantation of virtually the entire Armenian nation hundreds of miles to the south and west.
But, in accordance with the holy duty of jihad, the Turkish attacks continued. From 1065 onwards the great frontier-fortress of Edessa was assaulted yearly. In 1066 the Seljuks occupied the pass of the Amanus Mountains, and next spring they sacked the Cappadocian metropolis of Caesarea. Next winter the Byzantine armies were defeated at Melitene and Sebastea. These victories gave Alp Arslan control of all Armenia, and a year later he raided far into the Empire, to Neocaesarea and Amorium in 1068, to Iconium in 1069, and in 1070 to Chonae, near the Aegean coast.
These events make it perfectly clear that the Turks now threatened all the of the Eastern Empire’s Asiatic possessions, with the position of Constantinople herself increasingly insecure. The imperial government was forced to take action. Constantine X, whose neglect of the army was largely responsible for the catastrophes which now overwhelmed the Byzantine world, had died in 1067, leaving a young son, Michael VII under the regency of the Empress-mother Eudocia. Next year Eudocia married the commander-in-chief, Romanus Diogenes, who was raised to the throne. Romanus was a distinguished soldier and a sincere patriot, who saw that the safety of the Empire depended on the rebuilding of the army and ultimately the reconquest of Armenia.[20] Within four months of his accession, the new emperor had gathered together a large but unreliable force, with which he set out to meet the foe. “In three laborious campaigns,” writes Gibbon, “the Turks were driven beyond the Euphrates; in the fourth, and last, Romanus undertook the deliverance of Armenia.”[21] Here however, at the seminal battle of Manzikert (1071), he was defeated and captured and all of Anatolia was irretrievably lost.
Any honest reading of these events leaves us in no doubt whatsoever that the aggressor was Alp Arslan and his Turks, and that Romanus Diogenes’ march into Armenia was a last-ditch counter-attack by the Byzantines aimed at protecting his Armenian allies and securing the Empire’s Asiatic possessions. Yet observe how Manzikert is described in the recently-published Chambers Dictionary of World History: “The Byzantine Emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes (1068/71), tried to extend his empire into Armenia but was defeated at Manzikert near Lake Van by the Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan (1063/72), who then launched a full-scale invasion of Anatolia.”[22]
We see in the above a graphic example of the distortion (and, we might say, disinformation) produced by modern academia’s now default political correctness, where the Christian or European must invariably be presented as the villain and aggressor.
Alp Arslan was killed a year later, and the conquest of western Asia Minor, along the Aegean coast, virtually all that was left of Byzantium’s Asiatic possessions, was completed by his son Malek Shah (1074 – 1084). These conquests left the Turks in possession of the fortress of Nicaea, on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, and the survival of Constantinople in question.
These then are the major political events which prefigured the First Crusade. Within a space of thirty-five years the Turks had seized control of Christian territories larger than the entire area of France, and they now stood poised on the very doorstep of Europe. We are accustomed to think of the Crusades as first and foremost an attempt by Christians to retake the Holy Land and Jerusalem; but this is a mistake. The Emperor Alexius Comnenus now made his famous plea to the Pope, not to free Jerusalem, but to drive the Turks from his door, to liberate the huge Christian territories in Asia Minor that had so recently been devastated and annexed by the followers of the crescent. It is true, of course, that the Turks, who had also assumed control of Syria/Palestine, now imposed a barbarous regime in that region; and that the sufferings of Christian pilgrims as well as native Christian populations in the area, described so vividly by Peter the Hermit and others, provided a powerful emotional impetus to the Crusading movement among ordinary Europeans; but the relief of pilgrims was not – to begin with at least – the primary goal of the Crusaders. Nonetheless, the barbarous nature of the Turkish actions in Palestine was a microcosm of their behavior throughout the Christian regions which they conquered. The nature of their rule in the Near East is described thus by Gibbon in his usual vivid manner:
“The Oriental Christians and the Latin pilgrims deplored a revolution, which, instead of the regular government and old alliance of the caliphs, imposed on their necks the iron yoke of the strangers of the north. In his court and camp the great sultan had adopted in some degree the arts and manners of Persia; but the body of the Turkish nation, and more especially the pastoral tribes, still breathed the fierceness of the desert. From Nicaea to Jerusalem, the western countries of Asia were a scene of foreign and domestic hostility; and the shepherds of Palestine, who held a precarious sway on a doubtful frontier, had neither leisure nor capacity to await the slow profits of commercial and religious freedom. The pilgrims, who, through innumerable perils, had reached the gates of Jerusalem, were the victims of private rapine or public oppression, and often sunk under the pressure of famine and disease, before they were permitted to salute the holy sepulchre. A spirit of native barbarism, or recent zeal, prompted the Turkmans to insult the clergy of every sect; the patriarch was dragged by the hair along the pavement and cast into a dungeon, to extort a ransom from the sympathy of his flock; and the divine worship in the church of the Resurrection was often disturbed by the savage rudeness of its masters.”[23]
The ordinary peasants of Europe may not have been fully cognizant of the danger from the east, but the ruling classes and the Church could not have been anything but alarmed. Yet even if the peasantry and artisans of Europe knew little about Anatolia, they would certainly have had some knowledge of the Muslim threat. It is Marcus Bull’s suggestion that they did not which is untenable. The advances of Abd er-Rahman III and Al-Mansur through northern Spain in the latter years of the tenth century had sent a flood of Christian refugees into southern France; and the raids even into southern France which continued well into the eleventh century sent refugees from there fleeing into central and northern France. These people would certainly have spread knowledge of the danger throughout western Europe. Granted, peasants and manual laborers would have had a very imperfect understanding of Islam and what Muslims actually believed; but that is not the point: They knew enough to know that Muslims were enemies of Christ; that they waged war against non-combatants and enslaved women and children, and that they had conquered all of Spain and threatened France.
And this is a point that needs to be stressed repeatedly: The reality is that, far from being quiescent and peaceful, by the latter years of the tenth century and the early years of the eleventh Islam was once again on the march. Muslim armies waged wars of conquest against non-believers from one end of the Islamic world to the other; from Spain in the west to India in the east; and this new aggression was not confined to the eastern and western extremities, but proceeded along the entire length of Islam’s borders. The Christian kingdoms of Armenia, Georgia and Byzantium were threatened with extinction, and Muslim armies fought with Christians in Sicily and other Mediterranean lands. Many aspects of this new Islamic thrust, particularly those which occurred around the beginning of the eleventh century in Spain and India, are reminiscent of the earlier Islamic expansion in the eighth century, when the armies of Islam swept all before them. We recall how, in Runciman’s words, the Muslims of Spain represented a “very real threat to Christendom” at the time, and how the campaigns of Al-Mansur at the beginning of the eleventh century had placed Christendom in an unprecedentedly critical position.
The idea that th
e Muslim world had been stable and passive for three centuries before the arrival of the Crusaders is nonsense.
The Crusades which followed the First need not concern us here. All we need note is that they were defensive in nature: The Muslims of Egypt and Mesopotamia never accepted the existence of Christian kingdoms in Palestine and Syria, and these came under repeated attack in the three centuries after the Crusaders founded them. There were indeed short periods of peaceful coexistence, but these were of necessity brief: Islamic law forbade the forging of permanent peace with the infidel, and a ten-year truce was the maximum permitted.
During the crusading centuries however Islam made no further gains at the expense of Christendom, and in fact the Muslim presence in Spain was reduced eventually to Andalusia in the extreme south. Yet Islam still controlled the main trading-routes, including the Silk Road, to the Far East, and Muslim pirates still made large parts the Mediterranean off limits to European merchants. For a brief period during the reigns of Genghis Khan’s successors this stranglehold was relaxed, and Europe enjoyed the luxury of free association with China and India. Significant new technologies and ideas arrived in Europe at this time.
[1] Painter, op cit., p. 191.
[2] Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (Simon and Schuster, London, 2010), p. 10.