The Forgotten “Hero”
A perfect example of this Muslim neglect and “re-remembrance”
via Western European assistance can be found in the figure of Saladin, the Muslim general who united the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates and conquered Jerusalem in the twelfth century. Despite his achievements, in the Islamic world Saladin was mostly forgotten in the centuries after his death. Instead, the great Muslim military hero against the Christians was the Egyptian Mamluk sultan Baybars the Merciless. Baybars succeeded in stopping the Mongol advance, and he fostered the destruction of the Crusader States by sacking the city of Antioch. His complete destruction of Antioch, and the killing of the city’s inhabitants, was the worst massacre in Crusading history. His efforts ultimately led to the razing of Acre in 1291, and the end of the Crusader States. In Islam, Baybars was remembered and Saladin forgotten, but in the West it was the opposite.679
Saladin was remembered almost with fondness in Christendom through popular literature, especially in the works of Sir Walter Scott; he was presented as the “perfect heathen.”680 He was seen as a man of virtue and military brilliance, akin to great Christian monarchs such as Richard I the Lion-Hearted. Saladin’s name was even a popular choice for the parents of boys in medieval Venice.681
His reemergence in the Islamic world came about through the visit of a European ruler to the city of Damascus at the end of the nineteenth century. Kaiser Wilhelm II of the German Empire was an admirer of Saladin’s. Raised with stories of Saladin since his boyhood, the kaiser earnestly desired to see the tomb of the great general during his Syrian journey in 1899. He was shocked by what he saw. He expected to find a huge ornate tomb to the greatest Muslim general, but what he found was a dilapidated structure in a state of extreme disrepair. He laid a wreath at the tomb with a banner that read “to the Hero Sultan Saladin.” He also provided funds for the complete restoration and upgrade of the tomb with a bronze wreath emblazoned with the words, “From one great emperor to another” to show his admiration for Saladin and to commemorate his involvement in the project.682
The kaiser’s visit to Damascus and Saladin’s tomb stirred interest in the Muslim general in the Islamic world. Within twenty years of the German emperor’s visit a university opened in Jerusalem bearing the name of Saladin. As the twentieth century came to a close, the remembrance of Saladin, and his appropriation by Arab nationalists, was in full swing.
Hafez Asad, ruler of Syria, commissioned a huge equestrian statue of Saladin in 1992 that displayed Christian warriors groveling at the feet of the great Muslim general. The statue was erected less than a hundred yards from a massive portrait of Asad himself in an apparent attempt to link the two rulers, at least from a propaganda perspective. Saddam Hussein, the cruel dictator of Iraq, referred to himself as the “new Saladin,” and liked to draw attention to the fact that they were both born in the same town of Tikrit. In an action designed to link the two men even further, Hussein changed his birthdate to that of Saladin’s. It was sadly ironic that Hussein would use biological weapons against the Kurds, who tried in vain to rid Iraq of the despot—since Saladin was ethnically Kurdish. But as with all tyrants, propaganda trumped truth.
Further contributing to the false narrative of the Crusades, and cited as a source by liberal Western intellectuals to validate the myth that the Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West, is the book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, by the Lebanese-born novelist Amin Maalouf. In it he attempts to provide an Arabic narrative of the Crusades using Islamic sources, an effort made difficult due to the “paucity of contemporary Arab scholarship.”683 In seeking to provide an Islamic narrative of the Crusades, Maalouf merely succeeded in illustrating Islam’s reliance on Western research and scholarship of the Crusades.684 His myth-supporting book ends with an exaggerated statement indicative of the popular false narrative of the Crusades: “[T]here can be no doubt that the schism between these two worlds [Islam and the West] dates from the Crusades, deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape.”685
The false narrative of the Crusades, created by Europeans and furthered by Arab nationalists, changed in the 1970s. During this time, the Islamic animus against the Crusades was portrayed in religious terms, and was used by jihadis who turned their hatred and violence away from secular Muslim regimes and toward the West.
Hijacking the Crusades
The politicization of the Crusades in the Islamic world was greatly amplified by the rise of Al-Qaida and the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. Those heinous actions in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania thrust the Crusades into the minds of modernity precisely because Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaida, cited the Crusades as an excuse for his despicable actions.
The Arabian peninsula has never … been stormed by any forces like the Crusader armies, spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders … our goal is for the nation to unite in the face of the Christian Crusade … This is a recurring war. The original Crusades were brought by Richard from Britain, Louis from France, and Barbarossa from Germany. Today the Crusading countries rushed as soon as Bush raised the cross. They accepted the rule of the cross.686
Despite the propaganda of Osama bin Laden or other terrorists, the Crusades are not to blame for the September 11 attacks, or for the resurgence of militant Islam. Instead we should point to the “artificial memory of the Crusades,” fashioned into “an icon for modern agendas that medieval Christians and Muslims could scarcely have understood, let alone condoned.”687 This false presentation of the Crusades has been trumpeted as a convenient rationale for Islamic terrorists in their desire to fulfill Mohammed’s command to “fight all men until they say there is no God but Allah.”688
What if … ?
History is replete with examples of “what if” scenarios. The history of the Crusades provides many examples for this question, some of which we have already noted. The question of the resurgence of Islam weighed heavily on the mind of Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, who wrote extensively on this issue in the early twentieth century. Even though he wrote at the time when the major Islamic countries were subservient to European colonial powers and the mighty Ottoman Empire had finally succumbed, Belloc foretold the rise of Islam. He firmly believed that the grandchildren of his generation would witness the rebirth of Islam and its spread throughout the world. In his book The Crusades, Belloc posited the quintessential “what if” question on the subject, opining that had the Second Crusade succeeded in capturing Damascus, Christendom would have triumphed, and Islam would have perished:
That story [the Crusades] must not be neglected by any modern, who may think, in error, that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved—to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus.689
Unfortunately, the question is moot. The French and German Crusaders did not succeed at the walls of Damascus in 1149. They were defeated, and although the Crusading movement continued on for another 600 years, the chance to achieve ultimate victory had passed, and the contest between Islam and Christendom persisted and grew.
The Crusades and the Church in the Modern World
The Crusades have always been controversial, but since the Reformation their memory has suffered from the creation of false narratives and mythistory designed to attack the Catholic Church generally and the papacy specifically. Despite the significant work of Crusade historians and scholars over the last generation, the authentic story of the Crusades remains, for the most part, locked within academia. There are many reasons for the sustainment of the myths about the Crusades, since “misconceptions about the past can persist for centuries, despite the diligent work of historians, either because vested interests b
enefit from the distortions or because the fanciful version is more fun.”690 But the time has arrived to change this narrative and present to the modern world the authentic story of the Crusades.
For that to occur, Catholics must first learn for themselves the authentic story of the movement that was an integral part of the Church’s history for six centuries. Too many see the Crusades as an aberration in Church history, a sin that should be forgotten and never discussed, swept into the dustbin of history along with equally misunderstood historical cases such as the Inquisition, Galileo, and Pius XII and the Jews. For many Catholics, “the wars of the cross have become like a lingering bad smell in a lavishly refurbished stately home.”691
The Crusades were an inherently Catholic undertaking. They were promoted by the papacy, encouraged by the clergy, and fought by Catholic warriors. An authentic understanding of the Crusades, rooted in a contemporary perspective, is best achieved by those who believe today what the Crusaders believed. Catholics are uniquely positioned to understand the glory of the Crusades, and to help those outside the Church begin to see it.
The false narratives about the Crusades, so deeply ingrained in the modern world and for too long ignored or blindly accepted by Catholics, can only be overcome by study and knowledge, charity and courage. It is time to reclaim the true story of the Crusades and of the Catholic Faith. The fate of the Church, the West, and the world depends on it.
670 Prayer from a thirteenth-century knight in Tyerman, God’s War, 921.
671 Quote from the man who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in May 1981. Carole Hillenbrand, “The Legacy of the Crusades,” in Crusades—The Illustrated History, ed. Thomas F. Madden (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 208.
672 Tyerman, God’s War, 918.
673 Andrew Curry, “The First Holy War,” U.S. News & World Report, March 31, 2002. Accessed February 2, 2014.
674 Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World, 2nd edition (New York: Random House, 2001), xiv, in Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions, 245. For Armstrong’s self-description as a “freelance monotheist,” see “The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong”, transcript of an interview with Krista Tippett on the show “On Being,” May 8, 2008. http://www.onbeing.org/program/freelance-monotheism-karen-armstrong/transcript/4487. Accessed February 2, 2014.
675 Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 217.
676 Emmanuel Sivan, Modern Arab Historiography of the Crusades (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1973), 12, in Stark, God’s Battalions, 247.
677 Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 150.
678 Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 220.
679 One scholar maintains that Muslims remembered Saladin in the centuries after his death, although the argument is not overwhelmingly convincing. Diana Abouali, “Saladin’s Legacy in the Middle East before the Nineteenth Century,” Crusades, vol. 10, The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 175–189.
680 See Scott’s 1825 novel, The Talisman.
681 Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 219.
682 Ibid.
683 Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 239.
684 Ibid.
685 Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 266.
686 Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 307.
687 Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 222.
688 Muhammad ibn Umar al-Waqidi, Kitab al-Maghazi, vol. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 1113, in Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 19.
689 Belloc, The Crusades, 5.
690 Piers Paul Read, Foreword, in Regine Pernoud’s The Templars—Knights of Christ, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 7.
691 Tyerman, God’s War, 917.
Timeline of Crusades and Other Major Events
Dates
Crusade
Pope
Christian Warriors
Opponents
Events
Locations
1096–1102
First
Bl. Urban II
Hugh of Vermandois, Raymond of Toulouse, Robert of Normandy, Stephen of Blois, Robert II of Flanders, Godfrey de Bouillon, Bohemond, Bishop Adhemar
Kilij Arslan, Kerbogha
Liberation of Nicaea and Antioch. Battle of Dorylaeum, Liberation of Jerusalem, Establishment of Crusader States
Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), Syria, Holy Land
1147–1149
Second
Bl. Eugenius III
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, King Louis VII of France, Conrad III of Germany
Zengi, Nur-al Din
Siege of Damascus
Damascus
1187
Urban III
King Guy de Lusignan, Raymond III of Tripoli, Reynald of Châtillon, Balian of Ibelin
Saladin
Battle of Hattin, Fall of Jerusalem
Outrémer
1189–1192
Third
Gregory VIII
Frederick Barbarossa, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Philip II Augustus
Saladin
Conquest of Cyprus, Siege of Acre, Battle of Arsuf
Cyprus, Anatolia, Syria, Outrémer
1201–1205
Fourth
Innocent III
Thibaut III of Champagne, Enrico Dandolo, Boniface of Montferrat, Alexius Angelus
Alexius III, Alexius V
Sieges of Zara and Constantinople
Venice, Dalmatia, Constantinople
1218–1221
Fifth
Innocent III
King John of Brienne, Cardinal Pelagius, St. Francis of Assisi
al-Kamil
Siege of Damietta
Egypt
1228–1229
Sixth
Gregory IX
Frederick II
al-Kamil
Jerusalem
Outrémer
1248–1254
1st Crusade
of St. Louis IX
Innocent IV
St. Louis IX
Turan Shah
Siege of Damietta, Mansourah
Egypt, Outrémer
1269–1272
2nd Crusade
of St. Louis IX
Clement IV
St. Louis IX
Baybars
Tunis
North Africa
1291
Nicholas IV
King Henry II of Jerusalem, Amalric
al-Mansur Qalawun, al-Ashraf Khalil
Fall of Acre
Outrémer
1453
Nicholas V
Constantine XI
Mehmet II
Fall of Constantinople
Constantinople
1565
Pius IV
Jean de La Valette
Suleiman the Magnificent, Mustapha Pasha, Piyale
Siege of Malta
Malta
1571
St. Pius V
Don Juan of Austria
Selim II, Ali Pasha
Battle of Lepanto
Gulf of Lepanto
1683
Bl. Innocent XI
Emperor Leopold I, Rüdiger Starhemberg, King Jan Sobieski
Mehmet IV, Kara Mustapha
Siege of Vienna
Austria
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