The Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  This nineteenth-century painting by Dominique Papety shows the 1291 Siege of Acre, in which al-Ashraf Khalil’s assault drove the Franks from Acre, one of the last bastions in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

  Steven Runciman, the most read anglophone historian of the Crusades, thought the Crusades proved to be a disaster for Christendom because the Byzantine Empire was weakened as a result of the Fourth Crusade. Permanently undermined, Byzantium “could no longer guard Christendom against the Turk,” this incapacity ultimately handing “the innocent Christians of the Balkans” to “persecution and slavery.” Yet it may be worth considering that the victory of the Mamluks in the second half of the thirteenth century saved not only western Asia from the Mongols but southern and eastern Europe too. The failure of Byzantium to defend itself in 1203–04 did not augur well for any putative role as a bastion against future Turkish attacks; the occupation of parts of the Greek Empire by Franks and Venetians at least ensured lasting western investment in the later resistance to the Ottomans. Its disastrous failure to accommodate the crusaders before 1204 makes it hard to believe Byzantium left to itself would have coped any better with the Turks. While scarcely interested in the minutiae of local politics and religion, the Mongols might have proved even more disagreeable conquerors than the Ottomans. Although fatal to the Franks of Outremer, the Mamluk triumph restricted the Mongols to Persia and preserved an Islamic status quo that can only be condemned on grounds of race or religion. Precisely the same can be said of those who assume the malignity of Ottoman rule or that fractious Christian rule in the Balkans would have proved more beneficial to their inhabitants. While easy to re-fight the Crusades in modern historical or cultural prejudices, it remains unprofitable if not actually harmful. One legacy of the Crusades was the estrangement of Greek and Latin Christendom, but not the triumph of the Turk.

  This stained glass window (c. 1450) in the Musée National du Moyen Age (National Museum of the Middle Ages) in Paris, depicts Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), who preached and recruited for the Second Crusade.

  FIVE

  Holy War

  CHRISTIAN HOLY WAR, ALTHOUGH A conceptual oxymoron, has occupied a central place in the culture of Christianity. Crusading represented merely one expression of this warrior tradition. Urban II did not invent Christian holy wars in 1095; neither did they cease with the demise of the Crusades; nor were the Crusades the only manifestation of medieval religious violence. However, the Crusades have appeared almost uniquely disreputable because of the apparent diametric and exultant reversal of the teaching of Christ and the appropriation of the language of spiritual struggle and the doctrine of peace for the promotion of war, exquisitely demonstrated in the ubiquitous use of the image of the cross. In the New Testament seemingly the ultimate symbol of Christ’s explicit refusal to fight or even resist in the face of death; in the hands of crusade propagandists the cross became a sign of obedience through the physical sacrifice of martial combat, a war banner, an icon of military victory through faith, the mark of those, in the words of a charter of one departing crusader in 1096, who fought “for God against pagans and Saracens” and saw themselves as “milites Christi,” warriors or knights of Christ. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24) appears an incredible battle-cry in the context of Christ’s words in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:52-4): “Put up again thy sword… all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

  This transformation can be illustrated startlingly in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153), chief propagandist and recruiting agent for the Second Crusade, one of the most influential interpreters of Christian spirituality of the entire Middle Ages. As if to counter directly those who condemned the church’s advocacy of holy war as unchristian, Bernard took New Testament passages and radically reinterpreted them. The Epistles of St. Paul used military metaphor to emphasize the revolutionary nature of the new faith in contrast to the Roman world dominated by religiously sanctioned military systems: “We do not war after the flesh: for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (II Corinthians: 3-4). In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul descants on this spiritual military theme:

  Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood… Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace… taking the shield of faith… and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

  (Ephesians 6:11-17)

  Bernard redirects Paul in his tract welcoming the founding of the Templars, “a new sort of knighthood… fighting indefatigably a double fight against flesh and blood as well as against the immaterial forces of evil in the skies”; “the knight who puts the breastplate of faith on his soul in the same way as he puts a breastplate of iron on his body is truly intrepid and safe from everything… so forward in safety, knights, and with undaunted souls drive off the enemies of the Cross of Christ.” While not entirely new—similar transmutations of Paul’s spiritual armor date back to the eighth century at least—the volte face seems complete.

  Scripture and Classical Theory

  The ideology of crusading may thus appear casuistic in its interpretation of Scripture, if not downright mendacious. Yet the contradiction of holy war in pursuit of the doctrines of peace and forgiveness boasted long pedigrees. While remaining a utopian model, the behavior and circumstances of the Early Church soon ceased to reflect the idealism or experiences of Christianity. Although Biblical authority remained one of the cornerstones of belief, literalism proved intellectually and culturally untenable and Christianity evolved only indirectly as a Scriptural faith. The foundation texts of the Old and New Testaments needed translation, literally and conceptually, to nurture accessible and sustainable institutions of thought and observance in a context of the lives of active believers within a temporal church. The works of the so-called Church Fathers (notably Origen of Alexandria, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, and Pope Gregory I) found ways of reconciling the purist doctrine of the Beatitudes with the Greco-Roman world. A mass of apocryphal scripture, imitative hagiography, legends, relic cults, and lengthening tradition expressed, informed, and developed popular belief, while ecclesiastical and political authorities codified articles of faith, such as the Nicene Creed (325). The church’s teaching on war exemplified this process.

  The spectacular stained glass rose windows of Chartres Cathedral combine the stories and prophecies of the Old Testament with aspects of the New Testament.

  The charity texts of the New Testament insisting on forgiveness were interpreted as applicable only to private persons not the behavior of public authorities, to whom, both Gospel and Pauline texts could be marshaled to show, obedience was due. In Jerome’s Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate (c.405), which became the standard text in the medieval west, the exclusive word for enemy in the New Testament is inimicus, a personal enemy, not hostis, a public enemy. Paul, conceding that “kings and those in authority” protect the faithful in “a quiet and peaceable life,” sanctioned public violence to police a sinful world. For those justifying religious war, the Old Testament supplied rich pickings. In contrast to modern Christians not of Biblical fundamentalist persuasion, the medieval church placed considerable importance on the Old Testament for its apparent historicity, its moral stories, its prophecies, and its prefiguring of the New Covenant, as in the thirteenth-century stained glass windows in the nave of Chartres Cathedral where Old Testament scenes are coupled by their exegetical equivalents from the New. Bible stories operated essentially on two levels (although medieval exegetes distinguished as many as four): literal and divine truth. In the Old Testament the Chosen People of the Israelites fight battles for their faith and their God, who commands violence, protects his loyal warriors, and is Himself “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3). Not only
does God intervene directly, but He instructs His agents to kill: Moses enlisting the Levites to slaughter the followers of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:26–8); God instructing Saul to annihilate the Amalekites “men and women, infant and suckling” (I Samuel 15:3). Warrior heroes adorn the Scriptural landscape—Joshua, Gideon, David. In the Books of the Maccabees, recording the battles of Jews against the rule of Hellenic Seleucids and their Jewish allies in the second century BCE, butchery and mutilation are praised as the work of God through His followers, whose weapons are blessed and who meet their enemies with hymns and prayers. “So, fighting with their hands and praying to God in their hearts, they laid low no less than thirty-five thousand and were greatly gladdened by God’s manifestation” (II Maccabees 15:27–8). Many Old Testament texts, especially those concerning Jerusalem (for example Psalm 79: “O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps,” were easily incorporated into crusading apologetics and polemic, but nowhere was the idiom of crusading more apparent than in the Books of the Maccabees.

  Of course, stories regarded by some as authorizing legitimate or even religious warfare could be interpreted by others as prefiguring Christian spiritual struggle, the sense of St. Paul as well as many medieval commentators, or consigned to the Old Covenant not the New Dispensation. Trickier for Christian pacifists were the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament. The Revelation of St. John described a violent Last Judgment when celestial armies followed “The Word of God” and judged, made war, smote nations, and trod “the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God” (Revelation 19:11-15). It is no coincidence that one of the most famous and vivid eyewitness descriptions of the massacre in Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, quoted verbatim Revelation 14:20: ’And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horses’ bridles.” Apart from examples of godly mayhem, the Bible imposed a generally providential and specifically prophetic dimension on Christian holy war that is hard to underestimate. If wars are seen as God’s will, then they act as part of His scheme, either in imitation of past religious wars or, more potently, as fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, a fixation as appealing to crusaders as later to Oliver Cromwell.

  Christian holy war, therefore, derived from the Bible its essential elements: Divine command; identification with the Israelites, God’s chosen; and a sense of acting in events leading toward the Apocalypse. The historical and emotional vision of the holy warrior encompassed the temporal and supernatural. The fighting was only too material but the purpose was transcendent. However, it is difficult to see how even the most bellicose interpretation of Scripture alone could have produced such an acceptance and later promotion of warfare without the need to reconcile Christianity with the Roman state in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. While the Bible bore witness to the Law of God, old and new, the Helleno-Roman tradition had developed laws of man on which Christian writers drew to devise a new theoretical justification for war. Aristotle, in the fourth century BCE, had coined the phrase “just war” to describe war conducted by the state “for the sake of peace” (Politics I:8 and VII:14). To this idea of a just end, Roman law added the just cause consequent on one party breaking an agreement (pax, peace, derived from the Latin pangere, meaning to enter into a contract) or injuring the other. Just war could therefore be waged for defense, recovery of rightful property, or punishment provided this was sanctioned by legitimate authority, that is the state. Cicero argued for right conduct—virtue or courage—in fighting a just war. Consequently, all Rome’s external wars against hostes, public enemies, especially barbarians, were regarded as just wars.

  With the fourth-century recognition of Christianity as the official religion of the empire, Christians shouldered duties as good citizens, encouraged to fight in just wars for the defense of the Christian empire. For the Roman state, religious enemies joined temporal ones as legitimate targets for war: pagan barbarians and religious heretics within the empire who could be equated with traitors. However, no sooner had Christian writers such as Ambrose of Milan (d.397) integrated Christian acceptance of war based on the model of the Israelites with the responsibilities and ideology of Roman citizenship than the political collapse of the empire in the west threatened to undermine the whole theoretical basis of Christian just war. This conundrum was resolved by Augustine of Hippo (d.430) who, in passages scattered unsystematically through his writings, combined Classical and Biblical ideas of holy and just war to produce general principles independent of the Christian/Roman Empire. To the Helleno-Roman legal idea of right causes and ends, Augustine added a Christian interpretation of moral virtue to right intent and authority. From his diffuse comments three familiar essentials emerged: just cause, defined as defensive or to recover rightful possession; legitimate authority; right intent by participants. Thus war, inherently sinful, could promote righteousness. These attributes form the basis of classic Christian just war theory, as presented, for example, by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). But Augustine did not regard violence as an ideal, preferring the world of the spirit to that of the flesh. His justification of war looked to the wars of the Old Testament: “the commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged war on the authority of God.” Augustine was implicitly moving the justification of violence from lawbooks to liturgies, from the secular to the religious. However, his lack of definition in merging holy and just war, extended in a number of pseudo-Augustinian texts and commentaries, produced a convenient conceptual plasticity that characterized the development of Christian attitudes to war over the subsequent millennium and more. The language of the bellum justum became current, while what was often described came closer to bellum sacrum. This fusion of ideas might conveniently be called religious war, wars conducted for and by the Church, sharing features of holy and just war, in a protean blend that allowed war to become valid as an expression of Christian vocation second only to monasticism itself.

  Cicero, seen here in the façade of Rome’s Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice), defined the parameters of a just war, often waged against barbarians.

  A just war was not necessarily a holy war, although all holy wars were, per se, just. While holy war depended on God’s will, constituted a religious act, was directed by clergy or divinely sanctioned rulers, and offered spiritual rewards, just war formed a legal category justified by secular necessity, conduct and aim, attracting temporal benefits. The fusion of the two became characteristic of later Christian formulations. Where Rome survived, in Byzantium, the eastern empire of Constantinople, the coterminous relation of Church and State rendered all public war in some sense holy, in defense of religion, approved by the Church. However, Byzantine warfare remained a secular activity, for all its Divine sanction, not, as it became in late eleventh-century western Europe, a penitential act of religious votaries. Elsewhere in Christendom, while the ideals of pacifism remained fiercely defended by the monastic movement and its ideal of the contemplative life, Christians and their Church had to confront new secular attitudes to warfare consequent on political domination by a Christianized Germanic military elite and new external threats from non-Christians.

  New Defenders of the Faith in the Early Middle Ages

  War occupied a central place in the culture as well as politics of the Germanic successor states to the Roman Empire from the fifth century. The great German historian of the origins of the crusading mentality, Carl Erdmann, argued that for the new rulers of the west war provided “a form of moral action, a higher type of life than peace.” Heavily engaged in converting these warlords, the Christian Church necessarily had to recognize their values, not least because, with the collapse of Roman civil institutions, economic and social order revolved around the fiscal and human organization of plunder, tribute, and dependent bands of warriors held together by kinship and lordship. Their Gods were tribal deliverers of earthly victory and reward. It has been said that the early medieval army, the
exercitus, assumed a role as the pivotal public institution in and through which operated justice, patronage, political discipline, diplomacy, and ceremonies of communal identity, usually with the imprimatur of religion, pagan or Christian. The effect of the conversion of these Germanic peoples worked in two directions: the Christianizing of their warrior ethic and the militarizing of the Church.

  Contemporary descriptions of the conversion and early Christian kings of the new political order are peppered with martial heroes in the style of Constantine himself, such as Clovis the Frank (d.511) or Oswald of Northumbria (d.644). Conversely, Christian evangelists and holy men were depicted exercising physical aggression as God’s agents in the style of the Old Testament Moses. Unsurprisingly, Germanic warrior values infected the language of the faith being conveyed, even if only in the seedbed of metaphor. In the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, Christ is depicted as “the young warrior,” “the Lord of Victories”; death on the cross as a battle, with Heaven a sort of Valhalla. A ninth-century Old German poetic version of the Gospel story shows Christ as a lord of men, “a generous mead-giver,” his disciples a war band traveling in warships, Peter “the mighty noble swordsman.” While fiercely resisted by many academics and monks, this militarized mentality received the powerful confirmation of events.