Twentieth-century academic reassessment of the crusades may have suited the times, but it exerted limited public impact. The popular image of the crusade, in the west as across Islamic Asia and Africa, remained stubbornly traditional: undefined fanaticism, avaricious motives, brutal and mercenary conquests. The whole enterprise was assigned to an inferior past world of irrationality, almost in disregard of the brutality of the twentieth century. The crusaders still stood, as they did for Walter Scott, as energetic barbarians blundering with varying degrees of sincerity into the sophisticated Orient (itself a crude unhistorical Orientalist construct), a brute example of culture wars. This view received apparently scholarly affirmation in Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades (1951–4), by far the most read and socially cited work on the crusades of the twentieth century, the most popular study since Michaud’s Histoire with which it shares not a few characteristics: moral certainty, literary imagination and historical invention.
Runciman, a Byzantinist and scholar of the medieval Balkans, relied heavily for his epic narrative on secondary sources for his factual structure, ideas and details, especially French scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s, to which he added an inimitable stylish gloss. He expanded the traditionally hostile view of the crusaders as barbaric disrupters of the sophisticated Muslim Levant to include Byzantium, promoting the crusades as a central feature of Byzantine history. By undermining the eastern Christian empire, the crusaders’ misplaced zeal betrayed the allies they had initially come to assist and so – in terms familiar to previous writers as far back as Knolles and Fuller – allowed the Ottoman conquest of eastern Europe, a circumstance Runciman instinctively assumed to be deplorable. However, Runciman reached beyond the crusades in a threnody for a lost world of reason, twentieth century no less than medieval. The crusades bore witness to the eternal dangers of unbridled ideological passion pitted against civility. This was not an attack on religion but on cultural philistines, demagogues and self-righteous, intolerant followers of totalitarian systems of belief, religious or secular – by implication nationalism, communism, fascism or capitalism. Like Gibbon, he lamented the damage caused by untempered enthusiasm. Like Walter Scott, whose novelist’s skill he shared in creating believable scenes of action, Runciman saw little admirable in the crusades except individual courage and endeavour. From a vertiginous pose of confident intellectual eminence, Runciman passed timeless adamantine judgements, none more so than his famous condemnation of the crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204: ‘there never was a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’, a verdict delivered in 1954, just years after the principle of crimes against humanity had first been defined and internationally accepted in the aftermath of the atrocities of the Third Reich, Japanese imperialism, the Holocaust and the Second World War. The immediate contemporary resonance was deliberate: in Runciman’s memoirs of 1991, ‘crime’ had changed to ‘tragedy’.17
Modern Politics
Runciman’s History of the Crusades sustained a familiar attitude to the crusades (and the Middle Ages in general) as irrational and materialist, destroyers of the superior and peaceful worlds of Byantium and Islam, impressive but essentially shameful. While this opinion may be of only cocktail-party interest in western countries, it becomes more significant when exported to the political arena. Modern responses to the crusades can retain a presentist political tinge, implied or deliberate. In First World discussion, while the neo-colonial view still persists, the rise of Christian fundamentalism of various hues has encouraged a rejection of the materialist interpretation of crusader aggression and Muslim victimhood in favour of an insistence that the crusades were a legitimate defence against Islamic invasions, even part of a supposed age-old clash of civilisations. Such a Manichean view is mirrored in parts of the Islamic world. General cultural responses to the crusades which, over the centuries, have proved as local, varied, complicated and shifting as those in the west, have been lent a sharp modern edge through propagandist exploitation by two distinct Near Eastern groups: secularist regimes eager to wrap themselves in the legitimising robe of pan-Arab champions (Saladin was a public hero alike for Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Hafez al-Assad of Syria); and their domestic, especially Islamist opponents (such as the Muslim Brotherhood or al-Qaeda), who use the continued western incursions into the region as standing condemnation of the existing status quo.
160. Saladin as modern Arab hero: President Hafez al-Assad’s statue of him in Damascus.
This use of the memory of the crusades to assert Muslim unity and identity, while offering a critique of existing rulers, echoes some of the oldest traditions of Near Eastern reactions to the historical crusades. Each generation writes its own version of the crusades to suit contemporary interests. As in the west, there has never been a uniform ‘Muslim’ view of the crusades. Historically, Near Eastern Muslim responses have displayed flexibility on a spectrum including twelfth-century Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese refugees; time-serving jihad-promoting apologists of Zengid, Ayyubid or Mamluk rulers; critics of supposedly supine Islamic governments; promoters of ideal Koranic rule; and writers who regarded the Franks as little different to other invaders of the dar al-Islam and who expressed little concern, especially after the final expulsion of the Franks from the Levant mainland in 1291. These diverse views were held concurrently as well as sequentially, with perspectives inevitably differing in Iraq, Syria or Egypt. Whilst heroes such as Nur al-Din, Saladin and Baibars entered street folklore across the eastern Mediterranean into the early modern period and beyond, the ultimate victory over the crusaders, the long rule of the Mamluks and Ottomans, and the absence of aggressive western intervention in the region until Napoleon in 1798–9, consigned the crusades to popular memory and antiquarian footnote. Until the late nineteenth century, there was not even a specific Arabic word for the crusades. Even then, the need for one (e.g. al-hurūb al-Şalibiyya, the cross wars, or harb al-Şalib, the war of the cross) was generated by Ottoman and Egyptian writers drawing parallels between current western European colonialism and the crusades. Ironically, the idea of the crusades as a colonial adventure was encouraged by a direct import from the west, for example the translation of Michaud’s Histoire des croisades into Turkish (1866–7). Thus the west’s own vulgar politicisation of the crusades spawned a toxic legacy made more virulent with the shameless French assertion of historic claims to mandates in Syria and Lebanon at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.
161. Saladin enters Jerusalem in 1187: a modern Egyptian image.
As a strand in modern polemic, the crusades possess obvious attractions for those in the Near East wishing to portray themselves as victims of western aggression. Hence the dismay in Europe (although not so obviously in the United States) at George W. Bush’s ill-judged use of the term in describing his ‘war on terror’ as ‘this crusade’ (17 September 2001), shortly after 9/11. The crusades and hostility to the State of Israel, with its apparent geographic and demographic parallels with the European settlement of the medieval kingdom of Jerusalem, have been harnessed by groups such as al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS in the shorthand of ‘crusaders and Zionists’, a historical oxymoron. Yet studies of how the crusades are portrayed in school textbooks suggest subtler distinctions, with a range of attitudes from balanced historicism (e.g. in Lebanon) to Manichean confrontation and Muslim supremacism (e.g. in Egypt and Saudi Arabia). With Israelis also reassessing attitudes to the crusading Franks in the context of inherited space and shared antagonists, across the region images of the crusades continue to resonate and divide, even as Arabic scholarship establishes distinctive academic credentials.18 Western historians’ focus on the crusades’ origins, ideals, motives and organisation scarcely helps to obscure the perception of the political and territorial reality of the original invasion of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Near East is not the only crusade frontier of contested memories. The Spanish crusades had been folded into
the reconquista mythology of national identity and power, a vibrant symbol of the union of Church and State that long excluded the past dispossessed (Jews and Moriscos) and modern dissidents (socialists and democrats), especially under the Franco regime. In the Baltic the legacy was harder to accommodate. The Teutonic Knights had created Prussia, until its abolition in 1945 a major cultural as well as political constituent of German nationalism. In 1701, Frederick I, the first king of Prussia, was crowned at the Teutonic Knights’ Königsberg Castle. Further east, in the less Germanised former Teutonic Knights’ state of Livonia (Latvia and Estonia), shifting political regimes – German, Swedish, Russian – determined how the crusaders were perceived: civilising Christian liberators or confiscating tyrannical invaders who destroyed the primary freedoms and culture of the indigenous people. The interpretation of the crusades played out between alternate sympathy for the Germans as modernisers, Russians as allies against the German yoke, or a nascent local nationalism. Since the end of the Cold War, Scandinavian and Baltic medievalists have sought to escape these stereotypes, looking towards links with Europe beyond the awkward Russo-German duopoly.19 The crusades have provided a means to achieve this, by associating the far north with developments and policies derived from and pursued by interests at the heart of medieval European Christendom, in its way a mirror to the region’s increasing ties with the rest of Europe through NATO and the European Union. However, this approach in turn runs the risk of concentrating on the dynamic of invasion (which is where the written sources come from) in a teleology of conquest and integration. Recent archaeology has raised questions of the nature, wealth and complexity of the silent conquered communities, research that accidentally or not accords with the post-Cold War and newly independent eastern Baltic. Thus in Estonia as in Egypt and across the globe, the crusades, as for centuries past, remain contemporary.
POSTSCRIPT
DO THE CRUSADES MATTER?
The crusades offer features to fascinate and disturb modern audiences. Surviving evidence – literary, archival, archaeological, visual and material – allows access in some detail to individual experiences as well as large movements, to perpetrators but also to opponents and victims. Much of the western historical record of the Levant crusades presents a rare instance of history written by losers. The physical legacy is extensive. The drama of events involving armed conflict across vast geographic distances and sharp cultural, communal and faith boundaries, together with the claims made at the time and later about their significance, have made study of the crusades highly sensitive to intellectual, cultural or political fashion. Each generation writes its own crusades, so current western scholarship now pays attention to memory, memorialisation, inter-faith and cross-cultural community relations, race, popular religious belief, identity and gender, as previous observers concentrated on politics, war, cultural supremacy, colonialism or religious value judgement. For many modern audiences the essential strangeness of the phenomenon still intrigues.
The crusades disturbed patterns of life in startling and bewildering ways, for those who experienced them as much as for later observers. The earnest violence and disruption of long-distance campaigns mirrored the emotional and ideological force of the driving ideals. While crusading shared psychologies with other wars for perceived good causes, it depended on an especially stark legitimacy. ‘God wills it!’ is not only unprovable; it is also unanswerable, free from customary social or legal considerations and constraints, or even the discipline of failure. Behind its theological, liturgical and canonical trappings, crusading displayed a bleak binary model of human belief and behaviour. Its strenuous self-righteousness enshrined a formal intolerance and rejection of empathy, a devotional observance that shackled crusaders to performing a series of expiatory acts with no final resolution except in the unknowable fate of individual souls or the collective providence of the Apocalypse and Last Judgement. That many crusaders saw themselves as acting out of charity for their faith and fellow Christians in a willing sacrifice of self-interest for a higher transcendent purpose adds to the fascination. To attempt empathy with crusaders is not to approve or disapprove but to accept an imaginative challenge, to recognise the existence of very different, possibly rebarbative systems of social values. To these, the material witness bears direct witness.
How important were the crusades to medieval contemporaries? Active participation in crusading was always a minority activity, appealing to different sections of society in different ways in different places and at different times, or even differently to the same groups in the same places and at the same time. There were always voices in the crowds decrying the crusade as there were devotees profoundly moved by it. Established as a normative feature of Catholic Christian teaching and observance by the early thirteenth century, taxation, almsgiving, liturgical performances and vow redemptions lent crusading wide social and imaginative presence. Increasingly, dissemination of crusading stories and images across artistic genres and social borders created its own atmosphere, inseparable from the air men breathed.1 Among certain royal and noble families and in certain cities, traditions of involvement became entrenched, producing generations of recruits and particular habits of ecclesiastical patronage. For centuries, western European diplomacy rang with calls and commitments to aid the Holy Land, fight the Moors, combat heresy or resist the Ottomans. For the ruling elites, and for those aspiring to join them, the Jerusalem war of 1096–9 provided a new, precise and lasting model of respectable violence, religious obedience and chivalric glamour. However, the crusades were far from all-consuming. They reflected as much as formed concurrent mentalities. The traction of crusading among the majority, serving populations can chiefly be surmised only through the testimony of their social masters. Only occasionally, as during the Third Crusade, did crusading exert more than a temporary or marginal effect on major diplomacy or domestic politics. Success on crusade could enhance fame and reputation, but these could be, and were, won in many other settings. For much of the time, even for enthusiasts, the crusade, lit by a glorious past, always remained for the future, the next thing to be done, or the one after that. Away from the campaigns themselves, crusading added a tone and a flavour to Christian culture, politics and society in western Europe, not a determining causal principle.
Nonetheless, the wars and conquests in the guise of the crusades helped shape the political map of Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to north-eastern Germany and the eastern Baltic. They remain flecked across cultural memories in Scandinavia (as in the myth of the Dannebrog, the flag of Denmark), regions of eastern Europe and the Balkans. They provide national heroes (and villains) in France, Germany, Italy (notably in Venice) and England. For certain zealots, the crusades present a relevant model of religious conflict. For others, the crusades prove the alien quality of the past: impenetrable, irrational, inferior and conveniently distant. The Roman Catholic Church has even taken steps towards apologising for the effects of the crusades. Ironically, outside polemics, in the Levant, imposing ruins apart, only the Maronite Christian Church of Lebanon, officially united with the papacy since 1181, survives as a significant living heir of the crusading era. Besides physical remains and a few place-name elements (e.g. Qala ‘at Sanjil in Tripoli – castle of St Gilles’, i.e. Raymond of St Gilles who built a fort on the site in 1103), in Syria and Palestine the crusades have only left shadows and contested memories.
Yet the crusades still claim attention, not as precursors to modern political or religious conflict nor yet as David Hume’s ‘most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’.2 They deserve consideration for their own sake, as prominent features of half a millennium of European and Mediterranean history, as witnesses to the present’s complex and conflicted relationship with the past, and as testimony to the challenges and contradictions of the human experience. Some of the material evidence illustrated here invites direct historical contemplation and contact with a past on its own terms, not our
s. The crusades occupied a real world that it is too easy to claim we have lost. Much remains; much still to be examined and disputed. This is as it should be. It is called history.
CHRONOLOGY
c. 400
Augustine of Hippo outlines a Christian theory of just war
638
Jerusalem is captured by the Arabs under Caliph Umar
800
Charlemagne the Frank is crowned Roman Emperor of the West
9th century
Holy wars proclaimed against Muslim invaders of Italy
11th century
Peace and Truce of God movements in parts of France mobilise arms bearers to protect the Church
1053
Leo IX offers remission of sins to his troops fighting the Normans of southern Italy
1050s–1070s
Seljuk Turks invade Near East; occupy Syria and Palestine; become sultans in control of caliph of Baghdad
1071
Seljuk Turks defeat Byzantines at Manzikert; they overrun Asia Minor and establish a capital at Nicaea
1074
Pope Gregory VII proposes a campaign from the west to help Byzantium against the Turks and to liberate the Holy Sepulchre
The World of the Crusades Page 48
