God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  The most attractive of them all was Sir Richard Hillary, who took up the cause of the Knights long after the Rhodes scheme had foundered. Hillary, once an equerry to the Duke of Sussex, had founded an organisation on the Isle of Man for rescuing victims of shipwreck, which evolved into the RNLI. Late in life and in ill health because of his personal efforts rescuing victims, he thought of the Knights of St John landing again in the Holy Land and acting as guarantors in a scheme to make it Christian. He was disturbed by an episode in which the Royal Navy played a part in suppressing rebellions against the Ottomans, at that time British allies, and subsequently handing back Beirut and Acre to the sultan. Why, he mused, should the sultan continue to rule in the Holy Land? Could it be returned peacefully into Christian hands, paying rent to the sultan and allowing both Muslims and Christians to enjoy the fruits of commerce? Christian nations might quarrel over who should take the leadership and the revived Order of St John would be better placed to do so, having a high repute and being a supra-national organisation. Hillary was still canvassing for his scheme when he died in 1847. The Order had captured his imagination far back in time, when as an observer he had attended the inauguration of Holpesch as Grand Master in 1797, and the magnificence of the occasion, the attendance of aristocrats and the splendid uniforms had greatly moved him. Echoes and memories of Hospitaller life in its heyday continued to hold sway in Britain.

  In 1858 the Catholic Order finally repudiated the British Knights, and they mutated into a chivalric order, bearing the title of the Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in England, inaugurated under the British Crown and given a charter in 1888, adding to the title Grand Priory; they held meetings, sponsored charities and finally acquired Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, as Grand Prior. At a memorable costumed ball held by the Duchess of Devonshire in 1897 on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria he appeared in the uniform of a Knight of the traditional past. In the twenty-first century Queen Victoria’s chivalric order remains in friendly contact with the traditional Catholic order in Rome.

  The romance of crusading and the repute of the Hospitallers saw the launch of the St John Ambulance Brigade, an offshoot of Queen Victoria’s order, with a uniform bearing the Maltese cross of the traditional Order. It had success probably quite unforeseen at its inauguration in 1877 and spread across the British Empire, its members a familiar and reassuring presence on public occasions in Britain to this day. Its prime original purpose was to provide emergency first aid in Victorian factories and on the railways, where the absence of adequate safety devices and the habitual overworking of employees led to many accidents. It was an example of the loose use of crusading, giving romance to medical work, and justly recalled the healing work of the Order, well known in its heyday for its generosity in tending all-comers, Muslim or Christian, in its hospital in Jerusalem.

  Meanwhile the traditional order began to revive, acquiring a hospital in Rome, establishing once again a novitiate and caring for the wounded in Prussian wars – beginning with the campaign against Denmark in 1864 and continuing in the campaigns of 1866 and 1870 under the influence of Catholic noblemen. In 1879 Pope Leo IX gave recognition to a Grand Master, the first to be accepted by the papacy for many years. He also listened to a proposal by Archbishop Lavigerie of Algeria to revive a fighting function for Knights under vows. At first the archbishop had hoped to interest the traditional Order of St John in returning to their military past but he was politely rejected by the Grand Master, who preferred it to continue with its work with the wounded. In place of this Lavigerie suggested grafting on to his existing missionary orders, the White Fathers and White Sisters, founded by him in 1868 and 1869 respectively, a military wing to fight the slave trade in Africa.

  Lavigerie had much in common with Michaud, reacting against anticlerical parents who refused to support him in his seminary education. Pope Leo regarded him with great affection and was sympathetic to his scheme for fighters to wear uniforms, white with red crosses, and protect his missionaries. Anger at the slave trade and the abuse of African labour was widespread, and Lavigerie had initial support not only from Cardinal Manning in England but also from the Anglo-Catholic University Mission to Central Africa. It foundered, for, sympathetic as all these were, they felt that the use of arms was the function of governments; moreover, Lavigerie became aware that Leopold II of Belgium, a vicious abuser of African labour, was planning to take over his scheme. Then, learning of a scheme for France to acquire a colony in north-west Africa, he tried to set up his warriors in the Sahara desert. That failed too. He had abandoned his Institut des Frères Armées just before his death in 1892. His missionary order, however, lived on and has to this day a high reputation for devotion to their cause and understanding the peoples whom they seek to convert. Melisende’s church of St Anne is their headquarters church; repaired by the French and existing in unpolluted air, it stands as an example of a Gothic church shining white, as English cathedrals would once have looked, and stirs the imagination because of its extraordinary history, passing from a church built for crusaders and dedicated to using arms against Muslims to being one of Saladin’s madrasas and ending as a church for a modern order dedicated to peaceful missionary work.

  Pope Leo’s sympathy buoyed up the traditional order, which has survived to the present, consisting of little more than a platoon of celibate knights of high aristocratic lineage and wealth, supporting themselves for their charitable work and, while retaining their centre in Rome, making use of the Fort Sant’Angelo in Malta. They stand as a bulwark of tradition, using Latin for Lauds and Vespers, never compromising in their determination to remain a sovereign order with its Knights of Justice and their insistence on high aristocratic descent and their own Cardinal Protector. They narrowly escaped centralising endeavours under Pope Pius XII and rejected Eva Peron’s attempt to pay her way into their ranks. Their achievement is a surprising one. It lies in imparting romance to fundraising and charitable work while associating with the celibate Knights of Malta a class of Knights of Obedience and Donats of Justice who, although married, follow the spiritual direction of the Order. Below that stands a mass of National Associations linked to the Order and including Knights and Dames, ranks conferred on married associates who show great generosity in giving to charitable works.

  In all, the nineteenth century saw a culture of using crusading and jihadi history, whether positive or negative, as a means to galvanise support and justify present actions by looking at the past. One part of the Order of St John’s activities, the care of the sick, has flourished, while its military and maritime work has disappeared. In both the Venerable Order of St John in Britain and the traditional Catholic Order and its Associations, the romance of crusading, so often arbitrarily used and misused in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has lived on to inspire much good work for the benefit of humanity.

  * The wreath was confiscated by T. E. Lawrence at the end of the First World War and now lies in the Imperial War Museum in London.

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  REFLECTIONS

  Crusade mounted by Christians in order to recover and reoccupy Jerusalem was an episode in Western European history, very influential in its time, long-lasting and a force for change, but now dead. Today in scholarly circles, popular writing and the media there is a widespread tendency to look askance at the whole crusading movement, the injustices it brought with it and the damage it inflicted on Judaism, on Byzantium and, above all, on the Islamic world.

  By contrast, jihad understood as holy war in the defence of Islam still lives. It arouses many passions and is open to fierce disputes and has been used as a reason for warfare, not only against those seen as invaders but also against fellow Muslims who are seen as heretics. It has had an extraordinarily varied history.

  In both cases the call to crusade or jihad as armed conflict has galvanised men into achieving extraordinary feats on the battlefield against overwhelming odds. One only has to think about th
e Muslim success at Yarmuk or the Christian capture of Jerusalem, where the forces were all but written off by their opponents but religious zeal and the conviction of the rightful nature of their mission tipped the balance in their favour.

  Preoccupation with the evils of crusading has blurred the vision of modern analysts and led them to be less than objective in assessing the history of Western Christianity and of Islam. It has led, for example, to a failure to convey to the reading public the massacres of Muslims by Muslims in the bloodstained eleventh century. Crusades had no monopoly of atrocities. This discrepancy may be due to the fact that historians see the First Crusade as a finite event which can be studied, whereas Muslim atrocities do not fit into any easy time-scale. The history departments of modern Muslim universities have naturally been preoccupied with the events of the First Crusade and its aftermath but have not been investigating what was happening independently of these events in the Muslim world. Two distinguished modern authorities, British and French, have regretted the absence of translations of Muslim sources by Islamic scholars working within the epoch of the crusades. Study of this side of the hill at present rests on much too narrow a base and it is generally felt there may well have been distortions. Popular Muslim writing has taken up Abdul-Hamid II’s ingenious device for saving his empire and is stuck with the idea that Western powers are crusaders all over again. Unable to make the distinctions necessary for true history writing, they pander to crudely nationalist and religious passions. Hence objective historical writing about the Islamic past, particularly in the time of the crusades, can be difficult. Readers deserve better of their Muslim historians.

  As compensation for the very real evils of the crusading movement, Western writers have been inclined to exaggerate Muslim achievement. A case in point is the belief that Islamic medicine was superior to that of the West. It is quite untrue, yet so long believed. Battlefield surgeons on the two sides had an expertise that was of equal standard. Surgeons were of low status, artisans without academic training, but they developed practical skill in amputations and, on the Western side and no doubt the Eastern too, a pragmatic ability to check infections. Physicians were a different matter. Both East and West were trained in the Hippocratic tradition of the elements and the balance of the four humours. They were expensive to employ and it is known that Western aristocrats and kings had Muslim physicians, but it is equally true that Eastern caliphs similarly employed Christians and Jews. Leaders who could afford physicians were entirely pragmatic and were happy to use talent from any tradition. The acceptance of the belief that Islam had superiority in medicine long held sway because of an assumption that the ‘mysterious East’ had powers which the West had not. It has a whiff of Scott’s Talisman.

  The debt the West owed to Islamic scholars, largely in Spain, came through their knowledge of scientific and philosophical classical learning which had been completely lost in Western Europe after the destruction wrought by the Germanic invasions. Here is an example of the peaceful contact between the two worlds which went on despite the aggression of crusading and jihad and which has certainly been underestimated.

  Commentators have been backward in recognising benefits brought to the West during the crusade epoch. Those who went on the First Crusade had scant knowledge of their antagonists and were little inclined to learn more: the chaplain who wrote the Gesta Francorum was interested in Seljuq methods of warfare but otherwise remarkably incurious. Similarly in Islam. The First Crusade for the Muslim world was just thought of initially as another attack, to be dealt with like those made by fellow Muslims, and which could be easily contained. Crusading over the years broadened horizons in the West. Shared experience of prolonged danger in alien territory brought men from different cultures and backgrounds into contact, carried them out of the closed world of the mouvances and its petty battles and began to create a new sense of Christendom. Settlers learned about Muslim personalities and their quarrels, ethnic and religious divisions, because such knowledge was crucial to their survival: they knew they had to have allies and exploit enemy differences in order to survive. Such working knowledge did nothing to dissipate the prejudice overall about Muslim belief, but it did not prevent individuals establishing working relationships and common interests in trade, luxury goods and working the land. Similarly in the Muslim world there were those who were keen to escape oppressive rulers and who sought a sense of security and protection – a haven where trade could be carried out peacefully. Hospitallers in their care of the sick, opened their facilities to Muslims on equal terms and these were used.

  The West faced a challenge in the crusading epoch. Driven by expansion into unknown territory, coming into contact with peoples totally unknown and dependent on unfamiliar territory for survival, the crusaders travelled hundreds of miles to a destination many had only heard about – initially, that of Jerusalem. Crusading brought broader knowledge and some acquisitions, incorporating pagan east Germany and claiming back the Iberian peninsula for the Christian West; the search for a counter-weight to Muslim power brought knowledge of the Mongol heartland and of a world religion, Buddhism, hitherto unheard of; a once hemmed-in society was given a prolonged geography lesson. Inevitably the large numbers who went on crusade meant that, despite heavy losses, many survived and returned home to tell the tale and stimulate interest. Warfare, particularly under the auspices of the Hospitallers, contributed to Western advances in shipbuilding, the use of the broadside and weaponry and the making of ocean-going vessels, which brought the West into a position of superiority in the Eastern spice trade and an ability to look for new markets in the New World. The East was a forcing-ground for techniques in land warfare and produced some of the greatest castles ever built. The conversion of Muslims played no part in the First Crusade but gained ground as public opinion in the West became aware of the immensity of the task of recovering Jerusalem after its fall to Saladin in 1187. It was, however, never completely dissociated from the use of force. A great canonist, Innocent IV, stimulated by the contact with alien peoples and religions brought about by the crusading movement, made decisions about the right of Christian rulers in cases where a Christian right to preach was refused, to compel alien rulers to allow their people to listen. This decision was abused by the conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century to justify wholesale plunder and forced conversions. It was one of the worst effects of crusading, as B. Z. Kedar has well reminded us.

  A quite unexpected by-product of crusading lay in the field of finance. The immense volume of crusading taxation increased international liquidity, turned the Templars and Hospitallers into bankers and made the papacy into a financial power – albeit not always to its long-term advantage. However, financially, as far as Muslims were concerned, poverty was important. Wealth could be and was acquired, but personal wealth was not seen by the devout as a legitimate by-product of jihad. The powerful, it was thought, should be ready to spend generously for poor fellow-religionists and for the good of Islam. Neglect of this has led to many inner conflicts and the formation of new, radical Islamic groups.

  The crusading movement was unequivocally disastrous for Judaism, from the earliest whispers of an expedition to free Jerusalem, as chroniclers’ speculations issued in pogroms; anti-Semitism continued with the exploitation of Jewish moneylenders by Godfrey of Bouillon and forced baptisms associated with the People’s Crusade. Riots at the coronation of Richard Lionheart issued in attacks on Jews and the tragic episode of betrayal and murder in York. The association between warfare to recover Jerusalem from the enemies of Christ and attacks on Jews, however illogical, long had its effect. Innocent III’s decree requiring them to wear the yellow star was echoed by Nazi legislation. Edward I of England was distinguished for his commitment to crusading and it may not be an accident that he expelled Jews.

  The belief that jihad, striving in the path of God, meant combat and that all able-bodied males had a duty to fight at caliphal command prevailed against the dissident views of ind
ividual scholars emphasising peaceful striving, perseverance in prayer and the struggle against evil passions in the soul.

  But the errors of Abbasid caliphs and the disorders within the Islamic world created by self-seeking atabegs came to occupy centre stage. Warlike jihad faded. Only the coming of the crusaders brought it back, and it did so slowly. Even the massacre in Jerusalem in July 1099 had no immediate impact. Western settlers established Crusader States displacing Muslim rulers and Templars built their stables onto the al-Aqsa mosque with impunity. Only the abortive siege of Damascus by the immense army of the Second Crusade changed the attitudes of rank and file Muslims. As the army threatened, crowds in the Great Mosque threw ashes over their heads in repentance for the sins which they believed had allowed crusaders to flourish. Passions were excited by the iconic bloodstained Quran of Caliph Uthman, and scholars rode out to martyrdom under the hooves of the crusaders’ horses. Thereafter, combat jihad prevailed and carried Muslims forward to recapture Jerusalem under Nur al-Din and Saladin.

  Although jihad faltered as the heirs of Saladin fell to quarrelling after his death, reaction against the intervention of the Mongols reunited the Muslim world and, after the critical battle of Ain Jalud in 1260, brought to power the most gifted and ferocious general the Muslims ever had, Sultan Baybars. His Mamluk slave-soldiers, devoted to holy war, dominated battlefields, culminating in the capture of the last Christian stronghold of Acre in 1291 by one of Baybars’s successors.