Crusaders

The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands

By Dan Jones

For all the enthusiasm for holy war that swept through Western Europe in the 1090s – whether spread by Urban and his official preachers or the freelance efforts of Peter the Hermit and other demagogues – an awkward paradox lay at its heart. How could the followers of Jesus Christ contemplate going to war in the name of a man whose whole ministry was ostensibly founded on forgiveness? In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ said: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.” Yet here were God’s would-be children mustering a war band on a scale unheard of in the history of the Church. The fact that they did so with so little disturbance to their collective conscience tells us much about the astonishing plasticity of thinking that had become a hallmark of Christianity in its first millennium.

Jesus of Nazarth was a man of peace. Worldly when he needed to be, and even prone to fits of anger, the Christ described in the Gospels repeatedly stated his preference for meekness over aggression and suffering over revenge. Yet as Urban understood well, Christ’s personal interest in turning the other cheek did not entirely override the vast Judeo-Christian literature produced over thousands of years that advocated precisely the opposite.

For all Christ’s soothing words, the Old Testament, which was still a profoundly important text to medieval Christians, depicted a jealous God, forever smiting oppressors and demanding spectacular punishments for the iniquitous: eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth and stoning to death for gluttons, drunkards, Sabbath breakers and sodomites. A popular book like Maccabees, which narrated the adventures of a dynasty of Israelite freedom fighters, presented a world in which guerilla warfare, forcible circumcision and mass slaughter were go-to tactics for God’s warriors. Stories like these seemed to demonstrate that while a servant of God could look like Christ, he might equally well resemble Judas Maccabeus: “In his armor, he was like a giant. He took up his weapons and went to war; with his own sword he defended his camp. He was like a ferocious lion roaring as it attacks.”

Nor was militarism confined to the Old Testament. Saint Paul, reformed sinner, apostle and letter writer extraordinaire, was deeply fond of martial analogies. His epistle to the Ephesians encouraged them to be Christlike in all their doings by taking up “the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit.” Paul’s message, pacifist as it was, nonetheless adopted a violent analogy that was easily misconstrued. And Paul was no outlier. John of Patmos’s book of Revelation was positively gleeful about the bloodbath he thought would accompany the end times (which at the beginning of the second millennium seemed to lis just around the corner). In one lurid comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them … for three and a half days some from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.” The two prophets were eventually resurrected. But once more the tone was set. Christ may have abhorred violence, but warfare, killing, bloodshed and even genocide nevertheless remained familiar parts of Christian exegesis.

Several hundred years after Paul and John’s deaths, the problem of marrying Christian faith with worldly violence had not gone away. Rather, it had been crystallized by the fact that Christianity was taken up in 380 CE as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Now urgent triangulation was required between the amiable character of Christ’s teachings and the realities of statecraft in an empire that existed by virtue of military conquest, subjugation and war. Plenty of serious minds applied themselves to this task, drawing upon a history of political thought going back at least to Aristotle (d. 322 BCE), from which had emerged the concept of the “just war”: violence that was regrettable but legitimate and even moral, so long as it was undertaken to protect the state and would ultimately serve to produce or restore peace.”

(Jones 2019, pp. 45-46)

After Columbus, the future for Europe lay to the west, not the east. And gradually, all the energy, excitement and terrible, merciless, zealotry that had inspired previous generations to make perilous journeys to the Holy Land flooded back, as Christian adventures fell over themselves to strike out in the opposite direction. It had taken a long time, but at last the realms of Western Christendom had found their new Jerusalem.

Although Columbus made it plain that his chief goal in undertaking such an ambitious mission was profit, he was also explicit about the godly rationale for his journey, which chimed with all the patterns of thought that had been developed out of the crusading movement. Even the flattery he piled upon his royal sponsors belied four centuries of crusader zealotry. “Your Highnesses as Catholic princes and devoted propagators of the holy Christian faith have always been enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies.” On Saturday May 12, 1492, five months after the Alhambra fell, Columbus set out from Granada, charted a course south to the Canary Islands, then on August 3 struck out into the Atlantic Ocean.

On March 4, 1493, he returned, his boats limping home through the last gales of a “cruel storm” and coming into port in the mouth of the river Tagus at Lisbon. He brought with him strange people, unseen exotic objects and tales of the immense riches that lay in the lands he had seen: the Americas. The sheer quantities of spices, gold and slaves that might be taken there almost defied his powers of description, as did the number of heathen souls whom he thought could be converted to Christianity. Announcing his return he wrote to recommend that Ferdinand and Isabella “should hold great celebrations and render solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity with many solemn prayers, for the great triumph which they will have, by the conversion of so many people to our holy faith and for the temporal benefits which will follow, for not only Spain, but all Christendom will receive encouragement and profit.”

Needless to say, Columbus’s journey in 1492 changed the world. His announcement of new territories full of things to trade or steal, and teeming with people to subjugate, convert or kill, helped to usher in a new phase of global history. After Columbus, the future for Europe lay to the west, not the east. And gradually, all the energy, excitement and terrible, merciless, zealotry that had inspired previous generations to make perilous journeys to the Holy Land flooded back, as Christian adventures fell over themselves to strike out in the opposite direction. It had taken a long time, but at last the realms of Western Christendom had found their new Jerusalem.

They swarmed across the sea there in their thousands, as though God himself had willed it.

(Jones 2019, pp. 364-365)

Of course, al-Qaeda and Islamic State did not invent the idea of co-opting crusader memories for their own ends. In October 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany rode around Jerusalem on a white horse, wearing absurd faux-medieval costume, as though he were the reincarnation of Frederick II Hohenstaufen in 1229. (He later laid a large bronze wreath with a pompous Arabic inscription on Saladin’s tomb in Damascus.)

Nearly two decades later, in December 1917, toward the end of the First World War – for which the kaiser was largely responsible – Jerusalem fell to an assault by troops of the British Empire. In contrast with the kaiser, the British general Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot. He most likely did not say, as has often been reported, that “the wars of the crusades are now complete.” But the jingoistic British press immediately said it for him. The British government, sensitive to the fact that perhaps 100 million Muslims lived in the empire, had warned sternly but vainly of “the undesirability of publishing any article paragraph or picture suggesting that military operations against Turkey are in any sense a Holy War, a modern Crusade, or have anything whatever to do with religious questions.” The fact that they needed to make such a proclamation showed how prevalent the attitude was. And soon after Jerusalem fell, the same government ignored its own advice when the Department of Information commissioned a propaganda film about the campaign against Ottoman Turkey entitled The New Crusaders.

To rehearse the myriad uses and misuses of crusading memory in the last hundred years would take up more space than remains here. It would necessitate ranging from the battle of Tannenberg in 1914 – seen by many in Germany as revenge for a defeat of the Teutonic Knights by Poles and Lithuanians in roughly the same region in 1410 – to General (later, President) Dwight D. Eisenhower’s insistence that the campaign he led to liberate Europe from the Nazis in 1944 was “a great crusade.” It would require us to analyze crusade appropriation ranging from the late American evangelist Billy Graham’s “crusade” preaching tours to the former British prime minister David Cameron’s fatuous proclamation in 2015 of a “national crusade to get new homes built.” It would, in short, be well beyond the scope of this work.