Hooray for the Crusades! Piers Paul Read presents a radical new view

THE PREVAILING VIEW of the Crusades has, until now, been damning. The philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who dismissed Christian belief as superstition, ridiculed these wars fought in the name of Christianity. The Scottish skeptic, David Hume, thought them "the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation." Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie, published in 1772, said they were inspired by greed, imbecility, and "false zeal." The same strain of contempt continues through Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to our near contemporary, Sir Steven Runciman, who concluded his monumental History of the Crusades with the judgement that they were "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."

Are these judgements fair? And, more pertinently, can they be sustained by the evidence available to dispassionate historians? Following the events of September 11, it was the clear objective of Osama bin Laden--an objective aided by the careless use of the word crusade" by President Bush--to present the Allied Armed Forces as Christian crusaders intent on destroying a rival religion, Islam. His call resonated in the Muslim mind, because the brutality of the Latin warriors in the Holy Land is well-established in the collective memory of the Arab peoples (they think of Richard Coeur de Lion as a west European might think of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun); and because this collective memory is fused with a resentment against the "imperialistic" incursions into the Middle East of Western nations that followed the collapse of the Turkish Empire in 1918.

This pincer movement of sneering historians on the one hand and resentful Arab Muslims on the other has led to an apologetic attitude towards the Crusades by modern Christians--exemplified at the turn of the millennium by an "apology" from Pope John Paul II. It is worth noting that the Vatican's own panel of historians refused to endorse this apology; saying that it was the product of what they called "anachronism": viz., judging the past by the standards of the present and therefore failing, as the conscientious historian should, to empathize and understand.

THE FIRST POINT to be made in defense of the Crusades is that they were initially a response to Islamic aggression. Islam, from its inception, had espoused the use of force. Where Jesus had died for his beliefs, the Prophet Mohammed had wielded a sword. Though Christianity was later to be exploited for political ends, the Christian religion as such had, in the first three centuries of its existence, spread peacefully--thriving, in fact, on the blood of its martyrs. I say this not to score a point in favor of Christianity but to emphasize an historical truth: The spread of Islam from the Arabian peninsula to southwestern France in the eighth century; and to the gates of Vienna in the seventeenth, came as a result of conquest by Islamic armies.

The First Crusade was a response to one phase in this Islamic expansion. Christendom was then divided into the western Holy Roman Empire--for various reasons largely led by the popes in Rome--and the Eastern Byzantine Roman Empire with its capital in Constantinople. Toward the end of the tenth century; the Seljuk Turks, fighting in the name of Islam, invaded the Byzantine Empire and threatened Constantinople. The Byzantine emperor called for help from the West, sending his ambassadors to a Church Council in Piacenza. The Pope, Urban II, responded with a call to arms at Clermont in France the following year.

What modern historians such as Jonathan Riley-Smith of Cambridge University have now established is that the motive of the knights who responded to this call was not greed for material benefits but a craving for spiritual ones. They believed--as do Catholics today--that the pope had inherited the powers given by Christ to St. Peter to "bind and loose" their sins--in this case to compensate them for their services as warriors by letting them off the punishment due for their sins in the world to come. The prospect of booty, and even of establishing principalities which they could then rule, was an added incentive, but at the time was hardly controversial: It was universally accepted that to the victor should go the spoils. However, the expense of mounting such a complex expedition, and the extremely poor odds in favor of survival, made material profit implausible as a motive for going to war.

Of course, nothing is black and white. It is possible that Pope Urban not only wanted to help the Byzantine emperor but also liked the idea of getting the quarrelsome Frankish knights to stop fighting one another and fight the Muslims instead. He was also skilled at "spin": To motivate the crusaders, he made their objective the liberation of the holy city of Jerusalem, already at that time a place of pilgrimage for European Christians.

The First Crusade was also marred by many atrocities such as the massacre of the Jews in the Rhineland and after the taking of Jerusalem: These were recognized as such and condemned by Christian churchmen at the time. The sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade was also a scandal, though the judgement of Sir Steven Runciman, writing post-Auschwitz, that "there was never a greater crime against humanity," exposes the irrational animus against the Christian religion of this influential Crusade historian.

It also prompts us to question whether the post-Enlightenment era of human history has been quite as enlightened as we like to think. Were the Middle Ages really so bad? We may look back with horror to the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, and the Crusades; but do they compare so unfavorably in the scales of human suffering with the trenches, the gulags, and the concentration camps, products of the supposedly enlightened twentieth century? Today; as throughout human history, ideological zeal is often used to justify the amoral pursuit of selfish interests. We in the West may feel confident that, on balance, our values of liberty and democracy are superior to those of fundamentalist Muslims such as Osama bin Laden: But can we be wholly confident that our rulers are clear in their own minds where the demands of justice and national self-interest coincide--and where diverge?

Piers Paul Read is author of The Templars, an account of the most powerful military order of the Crusades, just published in paperback by De Capo Press.

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