Holy Warriors

by Jonathan Phillips

  As the Ottoman Empire slid into decay during the nineteenth century, so French involvement in the Middle East intensified; one consequence of this was an increased standing for the various Christian communities across the region, a change in the status quo that provoked serious discontent among the Muslims.29 In the summer of 1860 violence engulfed eastern Lebanon and an estimated eleven thousand Christians were killed. By July the trouble had extended to Damascus and a mob tore through the Christian quarter pillaging, raping, and killing the inhabitants. One eyewitness wrote of seeing hundreds of dogs who had died of a surfeit of human flesh; the district, which included churches, a monastery, and consulates, was utterly devastated. A writer in Le Correspondant suggested that this had been part of a Muslim conspiracy that planned to “exterminate all Christians” and that it was necessary for “a new crusade of Christendom and civilisation” (by which he largely meant the French) to set up an independent Christian state in the region; a proposal that bears an uncanny resemblance to the boundaries of the modern state of the Lebanon.30 Napoleon III dispatched a French fleet to fight the Ottomans and as they set out he urged the men to prove themselves “worthy descendants of those heroes who had gloriously carried the banner of Christ to those lands.”31 Several pamphlets connected the medieval and modern periods; one compared the current pope, Pius IX, to Urban II and another called for a new crusade.32

  While little came of this “crusade,” Ottoman rule in Syria finally collapsed in 1918. The next two years saw a short-lived Arab government before the League of Nations mandated French rule. Paul Pic, professor of law at the University of Lyons, regarded Syria as “a natural extension of France,” a view shared by many of his countrymen.33 Historians enthusiastically reinforced this sense of national pride and placed the contemporary occupation of the area in a continuum with their medieval territories in the Levant; in 1929 the historian Jean Longnon wrote that “The name of Frank has remained a symbol of nobility, courage and generosity . . . and if our country has been called on to receive the protectorate of Syria, it is the result of that influence.”34 This proud memory of the medieval past effectively reinforced and recapitulated the essence of mid-nineteenth-century nationalist rhetoric to produce a positive perception of the crusading period.

  At the same time as the French invasions of Algeria the notion of crusading became visible in another nationalist movement, although on this occasion the focus was inward-looking: namely the effort to create a united Italy. A leading figure among the democratic patriots was Giuseppe Mazzini, who derived huge inspiration from Francesco Hayez’s painting Peter the Hermit Preaches the Crusade, first exhibited to great acclaim in 1829.35 Mazzini was attracted to the alluring combination of religion and politics represented by crusading and he used it as a symbol or concept to draw people together in his bid for progress. He wrote that the picture showed everyone “driven on by a single, true and binding force, the thought that pervades each mind: ‘God wills it, God wills it.’ . . . Unity is felt here without being seen.”36 His Young Italy group, a secret society (albeit one with fifty thousand members), had an overt religious dimension: God desired Italy to become unified and independent, and if believers had to sacrifice their lives in the holy struggle, then so be it. This cause would have a national, ethical faith, rather than a religion channeled through the papacy—a particularly radical concept in the homeland of Saint Peter’s Church.37 Mazzini’s planned insurrections failed miserably and in 1837 he was forced to go into exile in London; eventually, however, he returned to Italy to play a part in the unification process and he continued to use the image of the crusade in his calls for liberty, nationalism, and, eventually, internationalism.38

  Mazzini was not the only nationalist to invoke the medieval past in Italy. In 1848, during an attempt to drive out the ruling Austrians and to secure the liberation of Italy, King Carlo Alberto launched a halfhearted invasion of Lombardy. Other Italian rulers joined his campaign and Pope Pius IX, who had been reluctant to fight another Catholic country, dispatched an expeditionary force led by General Giovanni Durando. In his determination to push Pius into outright support for the nationalist cause, Durando hoped to convince the public that his undertaking had complete papal— and therefore divine—sanction. His men advanced dressed as crusaders, complete with crosses sewn on their uniforms; he also issued a strident press release: “Soldiers! . . . The Holy Father has blessed your swords, which, united now with those of Carlo Alberto, must move in concord to annihilate the enemies of God, the enemies of Italy, and those who have insulted Pius IX . . . such a war of civilisation against barbarism is accordingly not just a national war but also a supremely Christian one. . . . Let our battle cry be: God wills it!” Pius was, predictably, furious at this arrogation of his authority; he promptly repudiated the war and reminded everyone that he was the head of all Christendom and not just Italy alone.39

  In this century of the birth of nations another new arrival, in 1831, was the state of Belgium. Ideas of crusading played little part in its actual formation but as the Belgians began to establish a sense of the past they seized upon Godfrey of Bouillon, the first ruler of Jerusalem, and a man whose family hailed from the Ardennes region (although some believe that he was born in Boulogne, which means that he can be a French hero as well). Godfrey was also pious (and Catholic, of course), fearless and successful, and his fame as the conqueror of Jerusalem had assured him of a place in history and literature throughout the ages; the huge equestrian statue standing in the Place de Brussels demonstrates Godfrey’s centrality to this nineteenth-century sense of self.40

  As we saw earlier, the Iberian Peninsula had a long and ultimately successful history of crusading. This, coupled with the immense residual authority of the Catholic Church, meant crusading ideas were often revived at times of turbulence and crisis. Napoleon’s invasion of 1808 and his subsequent disestablishment of the Catholic Church provoked huge resistance from traditionalists.41 One royal polemicist compared Napoleon to Sultan Mehmet II and some pressmen claimed that the war with the French was as holy as the struggle against the Prophet Muhammad. Ironically, therefore, the French, the nation with the greatest crusading heritage, became equivalent to Muslims in the developing struggle to preserve Spanish identity.

  Later in the century the restored monarchy under Don Carlos emphasized the country’s Catholic past and laid heavy stress upon the reconquista. The eleventh-century warrior El Cid was frequently invoked as a defender of Spain and Christianity. The fact that El Cid was a hired hand who sometimes fought for Muslim paymasters and that Christian Spain had several rival monarchs during his lifetime was irrelevant. From the early twelfth century the legend of El Cid had developed to satisfy the need for a national Christian hero.42 In 1859–60 the Spanish attempted to emulate the French by conquering part of North Africa, in this case, Morocco. While some disliked giving the campaign a religious edge, many pressmen enthusiastically revived past glories and called upon the spirit of their ancestors who had made “the Moorish multitude bow before the sacred sign of the cross and bite the dust.” Several poets and dramatists also made explicit references to earlier crusaders. The Spaniards’ heavy losses in Morocco and the subsequent decline of their overseas empire began to limit their enthusiasm for crusading imagery, but in 1921 the clergy described the war in North Africa as a crusade and two years later, King Alfonso XIII made a speech at the Vatican in which he offered to lead a new crusade if the pope was to call one.43 These were, however, relatively isolated instances of such language and ideology but, as the tensions between traditionalists and the modern world reached breaking point, the early twentieth century saw one further opportunity to recall the medieval age.

  In 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out and in their struggle against the Republican government the Catholic Church soon found common ground with the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco. As the conflict intensified the Catholic hierarchy formed a vital pillar in the rise and legitimization—at home and abroad�
��of Francoism. While his ideological appeal had many different dimensions there is little doubt that he enthusiastically engaged with the Church’s representation of himself and his cause as a holy crusade.44 In August 1936 a canon of Salamanca Cathedral gave a radio broadcast titled “The Lawfulness of the Armed Rising,” which concluded with a stirring call to arms: “Our war is holy. Our battle-cry that of the crusades: God wills it. Long live Catholic Spain.”45 On September 30 the bishop of Salamanca built upon a recently issued papal endorsement for the nationalists and published a text—approved by Franco himself—that presented the rebel cause as “a crusade against communism to save religion, the fatherland and the family.”46 Within weeks the archbishop of Toledo had made the same point, again calling the war a crusade and providing a further moral buttress for Franco’s party. Republican attacks on religious institutions gave the idea of fighting to save the Church a special currency because crusading tapped into a deep well of historical memory as well as giving a moral imperative to the rebels’ actions. Unlike a medieval crusade, spiritual rewards were not on offer simply for participation, although death in the Nationalist army was treated as martyrdom and the fallen were often memorialized as crusaders.

  Franco was careful—in contrast to his German and Italian allies—not to submit the Church to the authority of the state and thereby to jeopardize the backing of an institution so valuable to his fight and so vital to his self-image. In November 1937 he spoke to a French journalist about contemporary matters: “our war is not a civil war . . . but a crusade . . . we who fight, whether Christian or Muslim, are soldiers of God.”47 The caveat about Christians and Muslims is an interesting point. In spite of his identification as a crusader Franco saw no irony in employing thousands of Moroccan Muslims in his forces and it was these men who perpetrated many of the worst excesses of the war. The next month, the ceremonial swearing in of the first Consejo Nacional was an occasion heavy with historical symbolism.48 The venue was the medieval monastery of Santa María de Real de las Huelgas, near Burgos. The fifty incoming committee members swore loyalty to Franco in front of a statue of Christ and the battle standard from Las Navas de Tolosa—an immensely potent symbol of Spanish crusading success—which, as we saw earlier, had proved a seminal moment in the advance of medieval Spain.

  In April 1940, arguably at the height of his powers, and in celebration of the first anniversary of his victory in the Civil War, Franco presided over the construction of a colossal monument to dead Nationalists: the Valley of the Fallen. Once again his words reveal religious and moral justification as being at, or near, the top of his thoughts: “The dimension of our Crusade, the heroic sacrifices involved in the victory and the far-reaching significance this epic has for the future of Spain cannot be commemorated by a simple monument.”49 The general himself was also depicted as a crusader in a mural entitled Franco: Victor of the Crusade placed in the Military Historical Archive in Madrid.

  In the aftermath of World War II Franco’s ambitions had to be less grandiose although in 1955, as he unveiled a statue of El Cid at Burgos (the region where El Cid had grown up and where his tomb lies), he reflected on his own achievements and his place in history. He argued that “the great service of our Crusade, the virtue of our movimiento is to have awakened an awareness of what we were, of what we are and what we can be.” He presented El Cid as the symbol of a new Spain: “in him is enshrined all the mystery of the great Spanish epics: service in noble undertakings; duty as a norm; struggle in the service of the true God.” Thus, implicitly, he set out both his own definition of a crusade and offered himself as the modern-day Cid.50

  Britain made some use of crusading imagery during the nineteenth century; hardly a surprise given the impetus from literature, drama, and art we noted above. Not every conflict, however, was appropriate to such ideas, or produced a significant outburst of crusade-connected comment. The Crimean War (1854–56), fought between Russia and a coalition of the Ottomans, British, French, and the kingdom of Sardinia, was one such scenario. It was a matter of some irony that the “crusading” lands of Britain (itself Protestant, of course) and France fought on behalf of the Muslim Ottomans against another Christian power, Russia.51 By contrast, events in Bulgaria during May 1876 produced a surge of crusading rhetoric. The Ottomans suppressed an insurrection in which perhaps twelve thousand Christians were slaughtered. In spite of this Prime Minister Disraeli continued his alliance with Turkey and in doing so he provoked the anger of many, including the former prime minister and recently resigned leader of the Liberal Party, William Gladstone. The latter wrote a pamphlet entitled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which sold 200,000 copies. “Vindictive and ill-written—in that respect, of all the Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the greatest,” was Disraeli’s tart response.52 In contrast, Gladstone’s magnificent rhetoric condemned “a murderous harvest from soil soaked and reeking with blood.” He claimed that the Turks were responsible for scenes “at which Hell itself might blush,” and he concluded that “no Government ever has so sinned; none has proved itself so incorrigible or, which is the same, so impotent for reformation.”53 A group of clerics and men of letters formed the Eastern Question Association and held over five hundred public meetings to deplore the moral detachment of the government. High Churchmen and Catholics alike thundered against the government policy. William Stead, a northern newspaper editor, felt the “clear call of God’s voice” and did much to inflame the agitation. He wrote that the crusades were no longer an enigma to him; the historian Edward Freeman was accused of “crusading bluster” and several contemporaries such as the MPs Joseph Chamberlain, John Bright, and George Russell (nephew of former prime minister John Russell) described Gladstone’s efforts as a crusade.54 A young Oscar Wilde, then at Oxford, wrote a sonnet on the massacres and lamented “Over thy Cross the Crescent moon I see” and urged Christ to return “Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of thee.”55

  For crusading—a creation of the papacy—to survive in a Protestant country required more than an occasional resonance in foreign affairs. There was, of course, a substantial Catholic minority in Britain, but the perceived tie between crusading and Rome was partially dismantled through the cult of Christian militarism. In the course of the nineteenth century the manly virtues of fighting to extend the empire were linked to Protestant teaching—the notion of “muscular Christianity” so integral to the English public school system. Warrior-saints were important in the teachings of the Church, and the heroes of history—including Richard the Lionheart—became popular material for stories of great deeds; hymns such as “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” composed in 1864, set out a similar message.56

  The most obvious contemporary candidate to be labeled a crusader was General Charles Gordon, killed by Muslims at Khartoum in 1885. Even before his death he had been identified as a Christian knight and his “martyrdom” only confirmed this. In 1909 he featured in a book, Heroes of Modern Crusades: True Stories of the Undaunted Chivalry of Champions of the DownTrodden in Many Lands. Links between the spirit of the empire and the higher purpose of the crusades were explicitly set out by Professor J. A. Cramb of the University of London in 1909: “This ideal of Imperial Britain—to bring to the peoples of the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher justice—the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St Louis died.”57

  When it came to World War I, it was almost inevitable that the emotive pull of a crusade came to form a part (and one must keep a due perspective on this) of the Allies’ propaganda effort, although the Germans made a particular play on holy war too. In spite of the apparent paradox of Anglican clergy using the ideology of Catholic holy war, several churchmen wholeheartedly adopted the language of crusading. Presumably they felt that the moral force of their case was an appropriate parallel to that of the medieval age and this, combined with its demonstrable currency in popular and political culture over the previous hundred
years, meant that it was a potent and recognizable theme.58

  Lord Halifax called for a formal declaration of holy war against Germany, and Anglican clergy such as the bishop of London spoke of “a great crusade . . . to save the world.” Prime Minister David Lloyd George made a speech at Conway in May 1916 in which he claimed men were flocking to join “a great crusade” for justice and right and his collected speeches were entitled The Great Crusade. Others drew parallels of martyrdom and compared the sacrifice and the fears of soldiers leaving their families to those of the medieval crusaders. A young Harold Macmillan, future prime minister, fighting at Ypres in May 1916, described both the devastation of war and “the thrill of battle;” he reminded the reader (his mother) that it was easy to lose sight of the moral and spiritual strength of the Allies: “Many of us could never stand the strain and endure the horrors which we see every day, if we did not feel that this was more than a war—a Crusade. I never see a man killed but think of him as a martyr. All the men (tho’ they could not express it in words) have the same conviction—that our cause is right and certain in the end to triumph. And because of this unexpected and almost unconscious faith, our allied armies have a superiority in morale which will be (some day) the deciding factor.”59 Austen Chamberlain, then president of the Liberal Unionist Association, sketched out a detailed concept of the crusading cause, covering chivalry, morality, justice, and economic and political advantage: “[We should be wrong] if we thought we are merely embarked in a chivalrous crusade on behalf of another nation, without our interests being engaged . . . it is not for Belgium only we are fighting. It is not merely a crusade for right and for law against wrong and brute force—though it is all of that—but it is a struggle for the vital interests of this country.”60 Aside from directly invoking God, these points are all shared with the medieval crusades and represent an idealized, secular version of its forerunner.