The Real History of the Crusades contd [5] [... One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brants The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled Of the Decline of the Faith: Our faith was strong in th Orient, It ruled in all of Asia, In Moorish lands and Africa. But now for us these lands are gone Twould even grieve the hardest stone.... Four sisters of our Church you find, Theyre of the patriarchic kind: Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antiochia. But theyve been forfeited and sacked And soon the head will be attacked. Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy. [At that point crusades were no longer waged to rescue Jerusalem, but Europe itself.] Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The Sick Man of Europe limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East. From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islams rivals, into extinction. Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of numerous works, including The New Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. This special version for the ARMA was reprinted by permission of Crisis Magazine, crisismagazine. End note: Regarding the modern day reference to the crusades as a supposed grievance by Islamic militants still upset over them, Madden notes: “If the Muslims won the crusades (and they did), why the anger now? Shouldnt they celebrate the crusades as a great victory? Until the nineteenth century that is precisely what they did. It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades. During the peak of European colonialism, historians began extolling the medieval crusades as Europes first colonial venture. By the 20th century, when imperialism was discredited, so too were the crusades. They havent been the same since.” He adds, “The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.” “The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances,” Madden observes. Commenting on the recent scholarship of Oxford historian Christopher Tyerman in his recent, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford, 2005), Professor Steven Ozment of Harvard writes how Tyerman: “maintains that the four centuries of holy war known as the Crusades are both the best recognized and most distorted part of the Christian Middle Ages. He faults scholars, pundits, and laymen on both sides of the East-West divide for allowing the memory of the Crusades to be ‘woven into intractable modern political problems,’ where it ‘blurs fantasy and scholarship’ and exacerbates present-day hatreds.” Ozment notes how Tyerman also views “the Crusades as neither an attempt at Western hegemony, nor a betrayal of Western Christian teaching and practice.” As Tyerman explains, the warriors who answered the pope’s call to aid Christendom in the Holy Land were known as crucesignati, “those signed with the cross.” Professor Tyerman considers the Crusades to have largely been “warfare decked out in moral and religious terms” and describes them as “the ultimate manifestation of conviction politics.” He points out the Crusades were indeed “butchery” with massacres of Jews Muslims and Jews, and that even among their contemporaries, crusaders had mixed reputations as “chivalric heroes and gilded thugs.” However, as Ozment observes, Tyerman adds that rather “than simple realpolitik and self-aggrandizement, the guiding ideology of crusading was that of religious self-sacrifice and revival, and directly modeled on the Sacrament of Penance.” See: Steven Ozment’s “Fighting the Infidel: the East-West holy wars are not just history” at: findarticles/p/articles/mi_m0RMQ/is_40_10/ai_n14791827. Whereas as support for the crusades was far from universal within Christendom, in contrast Medieval Muslim expansion through the military conquest of jihad as dictated by the Koran was directly supported by Islamic scholars, who provided a spiritual imperative for violence. For example, Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), who wrote: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.” And by Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), who declared, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” (See: Robert Conquest’s, Reflections on a RavagedCentury, reviewed at: victorhanson/articles/thornton100406.html). Classical scholar, historian, and commentator, Victor David Hanson, reviewing Christopher Tyerman’s recent 1,000-page history of the Crusades, God’s War (Belknap Press 2006), notes how Tyerman is careful beforehand to declare the political neutrality of his work: “This study is intended as a history, not a polemic, an account not a judgment…not a confessional apologia or a witness statement in some cosmic law suit.” Tyerman’s history then points out, as Hanson then succinctly summarizes, that “it was not merely glory or money or excitement that drove Westerners of all classes and nationalities to risk their lives in a deadly journey to an inhospitable east, but rather a real belief in a living God and their own desire to please him through preserving and honoring the birth and death places of his son.” For the crusaders, religious “belief governed almost every aspect of their lives and decision-making. The Crusades arose when the Church, in the absence of strong secular governments, had the moral authority to ignite the religious sense of thousands of Europeans—and they ceased when at last it lost such stature.” Noting the widespread ignorance of the true history this subject among most modern Westerners, Hanson comments on how absent “is any historical reminder that an ascendant Islam of the Middle Ages was concurrently occupying the Iberian peninsula — only after failing at Poitiers in the eighth century to take France. Greek-speaking Byzantium was under constant Islamic assault that would culminate in the Muslim occupation of much of the European Balkans and later Islamic armies at the gates of Vienna. Few remember that the Eastern Mediterranean coastal lands had been originally Phoenician and Jewish, then Persian, then Macedonian, then Roman, then Byzantine—and not until the seventh-century Islamic. Instead, whether intentionally or not, post-Enlightenment Westerners have accepted [Osama] bin Laden’s frame of reference that religiously intolerant Crusaders had gratuitously started a war to take something that was not theirs.” (See: victorhanson/articles/hanson032107.html) Though revisionist scholarship over the past few decades has taken a decidedly politically correct view of the these conflicts, trying to apply certain modern value systems onto the vastly different historical conditions and attitudes of the time, the goals of Crusaders from the 7th to 11th were to recover regions that had originally long been Christian kingdoms until being conquered during the first of many waves of Islamic Jihad. Failure to appreciate the physical and cultural environment of the people involved when examining this topic has become a common mistake. As historian Raymond Ibrahim writes when discussing modern views toward the Crusades: “Medieval man was not modern man. While all men throughout all time have been prone to hypocrisy, greed, violence, etc., Medieval Christians, as opposed to their 21st century (secularized) counterparts, were, by default, much more guided by faith (whether this faith was misplaced or not is hardly the point). ’Secularism’ was never an option; Christians firmly believed in heaven and hell, God and the devil. And these were motives…One need not believe in God and religion; but one should still give them their due when discussing the Medieval world.” (“The History Channel’s Distortion of the Crusades”by Raymond Ibrahim, June 6, 2009. See: victorhanson/articles/ibrahim060609.html) *For further material echoing this piece see Proffessor Christopher Tyerman on the crusades: NPR interview here and audio transcript here. ...]
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 23:15:40 +0000