Some Modern Myths about the Medieval Crusades

September/October 2006 Historically Speaking 21 Some Modern Myths about the Medieval Crusades Christopher Tyerman The 18th-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume remarked that the Crusades had been "the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation." Yet, he admitted, they "engrossed the attention of Europe and have ever since engrossed the curiosity of mankind." Since 9/11, his words have taken on a new relevance. It has now become fashionable to seek esoteric historic parallels for a current conflict that challenges traditional assumptions about international relations and the causes of war. The post-Enlightenment vision of a world operating according to natural laws of economics, social exchange, political competition, and technological development cannot comprehend the phenomenon of political action and ideology based on faidi. In consequence , analysts and observers have sought refuge in the language of inherent cultural contest, clashingvalue systems, and religious war. Muslim critics of liberal democratic norms, even Muslim legal systems, have been branded "medieval " by some seeking analogies from a pre-Enlightenment age, while others, including in one unguarded moment President Bush, have invoked that apparendy most characteristic example of wars between beliefs, the Crusades. Ironically, when he referred to the Crusades, President Bush was precisely, if maybe unwittingly, echoing the language of his nemesis, Osama bin Laden, who has consistendy described the involvement of Western powers in the Islamic world as a continuation of the medieval Wars of the Cross in order to highlight what he and his sympathizers wish to portray as an age-old struggle between exploitative infidel imperialists and the victimized adherents to the pure doctrine of God. Such talk, by president or terrorist, masks the serious, modern issues at stake and demeans die reality of a distant past that has few if any direct messages for the present. There may be parallels in the medieval and modern conflicts involving Christians and Muslims, and in the geographic congruency of some of the regions in dispute. But the point of parallels is that they do not easily meet. Neither can the medieval Crusades be recruited to serve or explain modern crises. What we call the Crusades—although contemporaries did not—can be traced to die call by Pope Urban II in 1095 for the arms-bearing classes of Western Europe to liberate—his word—the Eastern Church in the Holy Land and restore the Holy City of Jerusalem to Christendom. Urban was rechannelling a long tradition of Christian warfare. This Crusader church, Gethsemane, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-matpc-03566]. had its intellectual roots in the militancy of the Old Testament, the classical Roman law doctrines of legitimate public war, and the more recent 11th-century assertion of papal temporal as well as spiritual authority over Christendom. Its practical antecedents lay in the wars of Christian rulers of early medieval Europe against their non-Christian neighbours. The religious incentive lay in Urban combining his military campaign with an act of penance, a means whereby a layman could obtain full remission of the penalties of all confessed sins, effectively a ticket to paradise. The Crusades were not simply wars justified by being fought for ostensibly religious reasons. They were holy wars. The objectives may have been temporal, but the activity—logistics, plunder, fighting , killing—was regarded as spiritually transcendent "God wills it!" as the earliest crusader battle cry had it. Urban's formula proved massively popular. After a campaign of astonishing bravery, endurance, and cruelty, in 1099 the remnants of Urban's once huge armies finally captured Jerusalem from its Egyptian garrison with a massacre described even by approving witnesses in apocalyptic terms. But, as this novel form of penitential violence developed over the 12di and 13th centuries, the purpose of the Wars of the Cross was not limited to die Holy Land, but came to embrace the protection and extension of the secular boundaries of Christendom (for example, in Spain and the Baltic), the political interests of the papacy and its political allies, and the integrity of Christianity itself against European heretics. In 1204 a crusade army headed for Egypt infamously sacked and...