Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  In Orthodox Christian eyes there was perhaps little to choose between Catholic or Muslim rapine. But there was nonetheless a subtle distinction in the language used to describe the perpetrators of these bestial horrors. The Muslims were implicitly evil: “son of iniquity,” “the fiercest of wild beasts,” “inhuman barbarians,” “the infidel.” Much was also made in Ducas’s account of the sodomitical perversion of the Ottomans. Mehmed, drunk at a banquet after the fall of the city, demanded that Lukas Notaras, one of the surviving Byzantine officials, should send him his handsome younger son. Notaras replied: “It is not our custom to hand over my own child to be despoiled by him. It would be far better for me if the executioner were sent to take my head.” When the executioners came, he bolstered his sons’ courage with an appeal to their Christian and patriotic zeal.38 This was not just the martyrdom of Notaras and his family, but of the great Christian city.39

  These themes of destruction and martyrdom and of the rampant bestiality of the Ottomans were built upon earlier perceptions of Islam. For many Western Christians the capture of Constantinople and the slaughter that accompanied it became a catastrophe on a par with the loss of Jerusalem in 1187. Conversely, for Muslims the final capture of the city seemed both an emblem and a guarantee of the ultimate triumph of Islam. Where “Jerusalem” had been a dominating trope of the Middle Ages, the loss of Constantinople, the last outpost of Christendom in the East, with all its holy sites, became both a political and religious motif for the following four centuries, in both western and eastern Europe. With the capture of the “New Jerusalem,” the Ottomans became the cynosure for the Christian world. But any element of admiration was equaled by a sense of terror, and both were firmly rooted in reality. Constantinople under Ottoman rule—or Istanbul, to give it its Turkish name—was infinitely grander in its splendid new buildings, in its vast wealth, in a greatly enlarged population, and above all in military and political power far superior to its decayed Byzantine predecessor. Equally, under the Ottomans it seemed to contain all the qualities of lust, perversion, sinful luxury, and cruelty against which Christian scholars had inveighed for centuries.40 These Turks, in Christian eyes, now epitomized the infidel, logically enough perhaps because it was the Turks whom they had been fighting since the First Crusade.

  What is a Turk? a celebrated Austrian preacher asked rhetorically late in the seventeenth century. His answer was: “He is a replica of the Antichrist … he is an insatiable tiger … he is a vengeful beast; he is a thief of crowns without conscience, he is a murderous falcon … he is oriental dragon poison; he is an unchained hellhound; he is an Epicurean piece of excrement; he is a tyrannic monster. He is God’s whip.”41

  THE CRUSADING DISCOURSE HAS MUTATED THROUGHOUT ITS LONG history. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century it took a variety of new forms.42 I have suggested how the Spanish cruzada against the Moors extended during the sixteenth century into a string of conquests in North Africa and in the new territories of the Americas. Now we should cast our net wider. From the eighteenth century, the missionary “crusade” became a Protestant venture, acquiring a new life in the British colonial conquests of India and Africa during the nineteenth century (and beyond). Many enthusiastic Christian evangelists found it natural to use the vocabulary of the “crusade,” which for them exemplified a spiritual war against evil. Hymnals and religious songbooks, such as Hymns Ancient and Modern (first published in 1861), were best sellers by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and many people knew the words and tunes of the most popular hymns by heart.43 These hymns exhorted the faithful to “Fight the good fight / With all thy might” (John S. B. Monsell, 1863), or to see themselves as soldiers in God’s cause. The most successful of these calls to action was “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to War / With the Cross of Jesus, going on before” (1865), written by the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould because he “wanted the children to sing when marching from one village to another, but couldn’t think of anything quite suitable; so I sat up at night, resolved that I would write something myself. ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ was the result.”44

  Gradually, the common meaning of “crusade” in the English language became a metaphor for a sustained and powerful action in a good cause.45 But the older sense of the cross and holy war was still a potent symbol. Nor was the specific enmity to Muslims completely lost. I remember singing at school a hymn by J. E. Neale, which had been popular since first published a century before. Neale had reworked a text by Andrew of Crete.

  Christian, dost thou see them

  On the holy ground?

  How the troops of Midian

  Prowl and prowl around?

  Christian, up and smite them,

  Counting gain but loss;

  Smite them by the merit

  Of the holy cross.

  I wondered idly at the time who the “troops of Midian” might be. It was only much later that I discovered that the hymn’s author would have known “Midianites” as a synonym for Arabs or “Saracens.”46 And plainly, the “holy ground” for Andrew of Crete was Jerusalem and the Christian sites of the Levant—in Neale’s day under the rule of the Ottomans.

  However, Neale’s usage was atypical, and he later produced a more anodyne version. The “troops of Midian” were transmuted into “the powers of darkness.” Perhaps he considered this more appropriate to the mission fields? Likewise, “infidel,” which had still been in use in the early nineteenth century, fell out of favor with hymn writers.47 “Heathen lands” and “pagan darkness” replaced the wastelands of the infidel. Perhaps “infidel” was too precisely associated with Mediterranean Islam? However, in 1911, Robert Mitchell returned directly to the language of “crusade” in its original bellicose sense:

  Hark to the call of the New Crusade,

  Christ over all will King be made;

  Out to the world let the challenge ring:

  Make Christ King!

  His refrain elaborated the theme:

  Hail to the King of kings! Triumphant Redeemer!

  On march the soldiers of the New Crusade.

  This is the battle cry: Christ made the King!

  And to our Sov’reign we allegiance bring;

  Prince, Guide and Counsellor He shall be.

  Carry the standard to victory!

  Hail to the call of the New Crusade:

  Make Christ King!

  Strong is the foe of the New Crusade,

  Sin in its armour is well arrayed;

  Into the fight we our best must fling:

  Make Christ King!

  There were hundreds of missionaries to the Holy Land at the time that Mitchell wrote, but the big battalions of evangelism directed their attention elsewhere.48 Nevertheless, the essential terminology of “crusade” and conquest remained a constant presence in Christian discourse and activity.49

  Nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicals crusaded, as they believed, for a spiritual victory, not for territorial conquest. But the word does not allow so facile a separation. This ambiguity between a holy war in a spiritual sense and a victory over the temporal forces of darkness had a long pedigree. Two seventeenth-century near contemporaries, John Bunyan and Thomas Fuller, both wrote books entitled The Holy War. Bunyan’s allegorical intentions were clear from this title: The Holy War Made by Shaddai upon Diabolus for the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World or The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul. It was published in 1682. Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre was equally popular. First published in 1639, and reprinted four times between 1640 and 1651, it was rarely out of print. Fuller’s work was a historical account—the first full description of the medieval Crusades in English. Bunyan’s elaborate allegory also drew on images of the infidel. He used a perception of the alien common in his day: his villain was King Diabolus, whom he described as “king of the blacks, and a most raving prince.” He had “a Luciferian heart,” as “insatiable, and enlarged as hell itself.” These were descriptions frequ
ently applied to the Turks.

  Unlike Bunyan, who was the son of a tinker, Fuller had a more settled and comfortable position in society. He was a clergyman of the Church of England, a moderate Royalist, and chaplain to General Sir Ralph Hopton during the Civil War. Although his Holy Warre was first published before fighting broke out in 1642, his description of the Crusaders struggling with the armies of the infidel seemed to have a particular resonance for both sides in the increasingly bitter internecine war. Both the Royalist and Parliamentary causes saw the infidels, and enemies of the true faith, in their opponents. Allegory, history, and current events were thus inextricably bound together.

  Popular histories of the Crusades also appeared in other European languages. But it was the turn of the twentieth century before Muslims came to write their own histories of the Crusades in the Levant. By then, Christian missionaries believed they had converted the concepts and vocabulary of “crusade” into a spiritual war on sin and evil. But now Muslims rediscovered the harsh consequences of the events of the eleventh century: the desecration and despoliation of their holy places. For them, the Crusades became a contemporary event, not something mellowed by the passage of 800 years. The Arabic word for Crusade and Crusaders—al-salibiyyun (“the people of the cross”)—was used in a translation of a French military history in 1865. The earliest full-scale text written in Arabic (and from Arabic sources), entitled The Splendid Story of the Crusading Wars, was published in Cairo by Sayyid Ali al-Hariri in 1899.50 The word for the Christian cross had existed in Arabic in earlier times, but it was not until the twentieth century that it acquired this new and hateful connotation.51 From that point onward, new meanings proliferated. The neologism al-salibiyyun came to mean protocolonialists, exploitative agents of Western imperialism, enemies of Arab nationhood and of Islam.52 New political meanings of the West merged with the older tropes of contamination and despoliation formed from the Muslim experience of the Crusades centuries before.

  IT WAS NOT ONLY MUSLIMS WHO WERE REEVALUATING THE ERA OF the Crusades. France began a new “crusade of conquest” early in the nineteenth century. By the 1820s the French Bourbon monarchy had returned to power after the final defeat of the Napoleonic empire in 1815. Louis XVIII became preoccupied with North Africa, inheriting a tradition where his distant ancestors’ glory was associated with the East. An immensely popular Histoire des Croisades by Joseph-François Michaud had appeared in the latter years of the Napoleonic empire, and the author had been rewarded with the Légion d’Honneur for his efforts. But the restored Bourbons, especially Louis’s successor from 1824, Charles X, concurred with Michaud’s view that “what is the most positive of the results of the first crusade is the glory of our fathers, this glory which is a real achievement for a nation.”53 The Crusades rapidly became the first example of France’s national grandeur. Michaud’s work was constantly reprinted and led to an ambitious collection of original sources in five languages—Recueil des historiens des croisades—which began in 1824; further volumes appeared at regular intervals thereafter under the auspices of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. When King Charles X came to the Chamber of Deputies formally to announce intervention in Algeria, he justified it as “for the benefit of Christianity.”54 His ministers had calculated more cynically that success in North Africa might divert attention from the rising political crisis at home. It did not, and the Bourbon monarchy fell from power.

  However, if Louis-Philippe, the victor of the 1830 Revolution, did not share his predecessor’s exalted Catholicism, he was nonetheless addicted to national glory. He saw a direct connection between the heroic France of the First Crusade and the triumphs of the new crusade and conquest in Algeria of the 1830s, in which his sons played an active part. The essence of this new crusade was later painted by Horace Vernet, a particular favorite of the new king, in The First Mass in Kabylia, which depicts a field service. The troops kneel respectfully as the celebrant holds up the host for them to see; symbolically the body and blood of Christ subdue the lowering mountains which form the background, while a group of Arabs sit sullenly in the foreground. In 1837, as the conquest advanced, Louis-Philippe began to remodel the great palace of Versailles to create a national history museum celebrating the many centuries of French military triumph. Vernet’s work would feature prominently among the vast canvases that covered the walls.

  The first rooms of the king’s museum depicted the Crusades, with a mock-Gothic style of decoration and a long list of the French Crusaders, the first heroes for France. Then came the other great figures of French military history, culminating in Napoleon’s supreme achievement. But the story of glory continued after the emperor. The final galleries, the Salle de Constantine and the Salle de la Smalah, honored the new crusade in Algeria. The official guidebook to the museum left no doubt as to what was the message the visitor was intended to receive:

  We there find again, after an interval of five hundred years, the French nation fertilising with its blood the burning plains studded with the tents of Islam. These are the heirs of Charles Martel, Godfrey de Bouillon, Robert Guiscard and Philip Augustus, resuming the unfinished labours of their ancestors. Missionaries and warriors, they every day extend the boundaries of Christendom.55

  Soon a steady stream of colonists began to settle in the nascent French Proconsulate of Algeria, providing a Christianizing presence in a terrain formerly “infidel.” A diocese was created in Algiers in 1838, which became an archdiocese in 1866, with two subsidiary bishoprics at Constantine and Oran. Two years later a new missionary order called the White Fathers was founded with the aim of carrying the Christian message into Kabylia and south into the desert. Dressed in a white robe, or gandoura, with a mantle, they looked more like Algerian Arabs than Frenchmen. Under the direct authority of the Congregation of Propaganda in Rome, in their ardor, discipline, asceticism, and energy the White Fathers resembled the Jesuits in their exultant heyday centuries before.56

  This preoccupation with North Africa survived Louis-Philippe, continued through the rule of Napoleon III, and on into the Third Republic that followed him. By the end of the nineteenth century, writers could look back at a constant extension of French conquest: in Algeria, in a French Protectorate of Tunisia, and in the French (and Spanish) partition of Morocco in the 1890s. The theme of the crusade remained popular. Michaud’s History had became a school textbook in 1844, with eighteen editions published by the end of the century, and in 1877 a new luxury edition appeared, which was illustrated with a set of magnificent engravings by Gustave Doré representing Christian power and dominance. This rhetoric and image of crusade in the first half of the nineteenth century was usually a mask for grubbier enterprises, but it is wrong to regard it with complete cynicism. French Algeria may have been a colony created first by accident, and then as a device to counter the unpopularity of successive governments in Paris. But many of the migrants to Algeria and even of the soldiers who fought there, and certainly the missionaries laboring in the deserts, often believed that they were following a higher calling. Nowhere else in the Islamic lands had there been such a reprise of the medieval Latin Kingdom. Once again a Christian community had been implanted among the infidels. All patriotic citizens of France should rejoice that their nation, which had won Jerusalem in the First Crusade, had now brought Christian power back to the southern shore of the Mediterranean. This had been the great mission of St. Louis, the nation’s patron saint, which was finally fulfilled some seven centuries after his death.

  Nor did France ever intend to leave. Algeria became an integral part of metropolitan France, and its existence an exemplar of France’s civilization and cultural destiny. That “civilizing mission” was taught in every school in France and in the schools of the empire beyond the seas, and this unifying ideology gradually replaced the sectarian vocabulary of crusade, except in high Catholic circles. But support for French Algeria transcended the gulf between clericals and anticlericals. Many believed with an absolute conviction in Fr
ance’s mission in North Africa and were prepared to use any means to sustain it. Other colonial territories, such as Indochina, could be abandoned or bargained away in the 1950s. Ironically, it was Algeria, the first fruit of the civilizing mission, a land reconquered by crusade, that ultimately destroyed the Fourth Republic and ushered in the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. The recriminations over the abandonment of l’Algérie française continue to this day.

  If any one individual embodied the renaissance of the French spirit of crusade it was Charles de Foucauld. Born in 1858, orphaned in 1864, he later became an army officer. It was a natural career, for the names of his ancestors who had fought in the Crusades were inscribed on the walls of Louis-Philippe’s museum at Versailles. But he was a hopeless soldier, until he discovered a love of the desert and a zest for exploration. In 1887 his pioneering study, La reconnaissance au Maroc (“The Discovery of Morocco”), was published. Then two years later, still a hero in Paris, he entered a Trappist monastery and openly proclaimed his yearning for martyrdom. In 1901 he traveled as a missionary into the Sahara. Fifteen years later he was murdered, or as some claimed, martyred. This career, lurching from one extreme to another, echoes that of the young Englishman T. E. Lawrence. However, there was a direction to Foucauld’s erratic path. Like his ancestors, he was driven by many forces, but strongest was a true spiritual crusading zeal, lacking in Lawrence. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the ideal of the crusade had become an antiquarian interest, or the subject of rousing tales for boys, such as the novelist G. A. Henty’s successful For the Temple: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem (1904).57

  THE VOCABULARY AND IDEOLOGY OF “CRUSADE” SOMETIMES CAME just as easily to Christians engaged in war against Muslims as the terminology of jihad came to Muslims resisting them. In neither case were theory and practice very close. No pope ever authorized France’s “crusade” in North Africa in the 1830s and many of the jihads called against the Europeans in the same region were technically dubious in the eyes of the Ottoman religious authorities in Constantinople. By that point both Christian and Muslim holy wars looked back to their earlier origins but had moved beyond them. The language of holy war had become a means of mobilization, unconstrained by the limits of law. Talking of either “crusade” or jihad sounded a powerful chord, an irresistible call to arms. It was a deep conditioned memory of fanatical zeal and heroism given new life each time its language and ideology were revived. By the modern era, it was no longer a matter of what either word meant in precise legalistic terms, but rather the response that each of them called forth.