Popular Misconceptions about the Crusades: A Rebuttal

Readers of this blog will be familiar with (and annoyed by) popular misconceptions about the crusades -- such as blaming the rise of the Islamic State  on the alleged "atrocities" and "aggression" of the crusaders, or lumping the crusades together with the holocaust as one of the worst crimes against humanity in human history. Nevertheless, you may find the following concise rebuttal of common myths useful in your own discussions with people who have fallen victim to persistent misinformation.

1. The crusades were not an act of genocide. There were battles and sieges, but at NO time was the extermination of any ethnic or religious group the policy or goal of the crusades.

2. The crusades were not wars of aggression. They were a response to over three hundred years of Muslim aggression in which invading Muslim armies had threatened Constantinople and nearly reached the Loire.

3. The crusades were not an invasion of traditionally Muslim territory. The Holy Land had been the home of Christianity since Christ himself, and Christianity had become the official and dominant religion by the end of the 4^th Century. At least 50% of the population of the Holy Land was still Christian when the first crusaders arrived.

4. The crusades were not wars of religious conversion. There was no attempt to force the Muslim population in the crusader states established by the First Crusade to convert to Christianity. The Church explicitly condemned forced conversions, and secular authorities found it convenient to tax non-Christians at a higher rate.

5. Except for the First, and to a lesser extend the Third and Sixth Crusades, the Christians LOST all the crusades, and were driven out of the Holy Land in a long series of brutal, bloody campaigns in which the Mamlukes repeatedly slaughtered civilians, broke truces, failed to keep their word and enslaved tens of thousands of civilians. The last crusader foothold in the Holy Land was lost in 1291 with the fall of Acre. In short, there is no need for modern Islam to revenge the crusades--they did that very effectively and brutally in the late 13th century.

Modern apologists for ISIL, however, are obsessed with pointing to the atrocities and injustices allegedly committed by the crusaders, while excusing, dismissing or simply ignoring the atrocities perpetrated by their contemporary opponents. This narrative is apparently motivated by the naïve hope that if we “confess” our “guilt” we can somehow deflect or weaken the hatred directed against us.  Or perhaps it is motivated by a desire to demonstrate the superiority of our “enlightened” standpoint over the “bigotry” of our enemy? 

Whatever the reason, most modern references to the “barbarism” of the crusaders and the “atrocities” they committed are little more than rhetoric, yet they draw their inspiration from two "facts" that have been repeated so often that most people don't know the source but accept them unthinking. 

First, the Greek historian Anna Comnena used the term “barbarian” to describe the participants of the First Crusade, and second, after finally taking Jerusalem by storm in 1099, the crusaders unquestionably sacked the Holy City and massacred the garrison.

Now, it must be remembered that the Greeks used the term “barbarian” to refer to anyone who didn’t speak Greek. This included, in a different age, the highly civilized Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians etc. Second, the Greek Emperors considered themselves the descendants and heirs to the Roman Empire—and viewed the German, French, and Norman crusaders as the descendants of the “barbarian hoards” that had over-run the Western Empire.

Furthermore, because the Byzantine Empire preserved greater continuity with Rome, it also had a very sophisticated bureaucracy and hierarchy that left the Byzantines confused and offended by the lack of formalized command structures among the crusaders. Indeed, the complete absence of a supreme commander among the crusaders was utterly incomprehensible to a society in which the Emperor was an autocrat. 

Anna Comnena certainly saw the crusaders as barbarians – that does not mean that we should. The lack of understanding for a different culture exhibited by the Byzantine chroniclers does not mean that that other culture was inherently inferior. Modern readers—particularly enlightened, tolerant modern readers
— ought to appreciate and recognize that fact.

The sack of Jerusalem, on the other hand, was unquestionably a barbaric act—from the modern perspective. It was hardly so in the eyes of contemporaries. The contemporary rules of war were clear and universally accepted: a city that surrendered could expect mercy, a city that did not could expect “to be put to the sword.” This had been the rule of war at least since the sack of Troy.

Modern sensibilities are offended particularly by the fact that Christians, allegedly fighting in the name of a peaceful, forgiving and loving Christ, could commit this “atrocity.” The fact that they did commit this act of bloodshed may be evidence that the medieval understanding of Christianity and our own diverges somewhat — but that would ignore the very sophisticated and centuries-long discussions about the nature of “just wars” and the complex theological debates about the justifications for the crusades themselves. Far more likely, by the time the crusaders at last reached Jerusalem after horrendous suffering and huge losses, they were simply not willing to curb their baser instincts -- even in such a sacred place.

Yet this does not make the crusaders “barbarians” in the contemporary context, certainly not when it is clear that most apocalyptic descriptions of the sack are exaggerations and that thousands of Jerusalem’s inhabitants survived. Nor was this in any way an exceptional atrocity, much less justify modern-day atrocities against innocent and unarmed populations inside the Islamic State, or against unarmed civilians in terrorist attacks around the world. 

My novels depict life in the crusader states: 

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"God’s Battalions" by Rodney Stark - A Review

This well-researched book with its profuse bibliography and copious notes is not a history of the crusades. Nor is it, as some reviewers suggest, an apology for the crusades. Rather this is an extended essay which refutes a number of common myths or outdated theories about the crusades and the crusader states. Stark is not a polemicist, but a professor at Baylor University, who has published extensively on religion and sociology.  In short, he is a scholar intent on paring away legend and prejudice to enable academic and popular discourse shaped by fact not fiction. Any serious scholar of the crusades and the crusader states should start with this book — and then get on with their actual research unencumbered with false notions.  Even more important, this ought to be required reading in all classes that touch on the topic of the crusades.

Stark systematically dissects and destroys the following notions about the crusades that still dominate public perceptions and debate.

• The idea that the crusaders were aggressors, who fell upon peace-loving and tolerant Muslim states without provocation.
• The equally anachronistic idea that the crusades were an early form of European colonialism.
• The claim that Jerusalem was particularly “holy” to Muslims in the period before the Crusades.
• The thesis that crusaders were primarily motivated by greed.
• The portrayal of crusaders as uncultivated barbarians fighting a “higher” civilization in the Muslim east.
• The assertion that the Christians conducted warfare in ways that were more brutal and cruel than their enemies.
• The myth that the Muslim rulers were more tolerant of other religions — and their own heretics — than Christian rulers.
• The thesis that Western/Latin crusaders fell upon Constantinople without provocation and “destroyed” the city without cause.
• The notion that bitterness over the crusades persisted (despite the Muslim’s complete and utter victory over the Crusader States in the second half of the 13^th century) to the present day.

A Medieval Depiction of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin

Stark starts by cataloguing the long list of Muslim conquests against Christian states and peoples from Syria and North Africa to Armenia, Spain and Southern France, but he also provides a chilling list of mass murders of Christian monks and pilgrims — each with dates and numbers: 70 Christian pilgrims executed in Caesura for refusing to convert to Islam and 60 crucified in Jerusalem in the early eighth century, the sack and slaughter of the monastery near Bethlehem in the later eighth century, the destruction of two nearby churches gradually escalating to multiple attacks on churches, convents and monasteries in and around Jerusalem including mass rapes in 808 and 813, a new wave of atrocities in 923, the destruction of an estimated 30,000 (yes, thirty-thousand) Christian churches including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009. So much for Muslim “tolerance.”

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher as we see it today is largely a crusader construction because the earlier Byzantine churches were destroyed.

Stark also brings considerable evidence that the alleged “superiority” of Muslim/Arab culture was largely based on accomplishments of Persian, Jewish, Indian and, indeed, Christian scholars living under Muslim rule.  Thus the alleged mathematical superiority of the Arabs came from the Hindus, the great libraries and legacy of learning came from the Greeks, Arab medicine was, Stark argues, “Nestorian Christian” in origin and so on. He then contends that the Christian west was anything but “backward” and the so-called “Dark Ages” is a misnomer that says more about the ignorance of historians than the state of civilization in the period between the fall of Rome and the First Crusade.  Stark points out that the military technology of the crusaders — from stirrups, horseshoes and crossbows to the devastatingly effective “Greek Fire” — was markedly superior to the military technology of their opponents. But it wasn’t just in military matters that the crusaders were ahead of the Saracens. In the fields of agriculture, land-transportation and nautical technology, Western technology also significantly out-stripped that of the Middle East. 

Stark is perhaps at his best in documenting the many times that Muslim victors slaughtered the garrisons and inhabitants of conquered cities — long before the first crusaders even set out from Europe. He points out the hyperbole in popular accounts of the fall of Jerusalem in the First Crusade as well. But he is most effective in countering the myth of Muslim chivalry is his account of the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the second half of the 13^th Century, where time and again the Mamluk leaders broke their word and enslaved or massacred those to whom they had promised freedom and life. One quote from a primary, Muslim source about the sack of the great Roman city of Antioch should suffice to make this point. The source is a letter to the Prince of Antioch (who had not be present in his city to defend it) by none other than the Muslim Sultan himself. Sultan Baibars gloated: “You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.” Ah, yes, Saracen “chivalry” at its best indeed.

The book does have its weaknesses, of course. Stark is covering far too great a canvas to provide any analysis or detail.  His book is structured as a rebuttal to unfounded allegations and theses, but for the most part he does not provide alternative theses.  Certainly, he does not describe personalities and their impact on events except in some rare instances. His explanations of developments are often facile, and occasionally he falls into outright errors. (For example, he claims plate armor was so heavy a knight needed a crane to mount his horse; in reality it was much lighter than chainmail and a knight in his prime could vault onto his horse without use of a stirrup much less a crane.) But the bottom line is that this book does what it sets out to do: it destroys a whole series of insidious myths that turn the crusades into an excuse for all subsequent barbarity; it clears the way for a more productive debate based on fact rather than falsehood.

My biographical novel of Balian d'Ibelin in three parts is set in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the last quarter of the 12th Century.

A Biographical Novel of Balian d'Ibelin
Book I: Knight of Jerusalem was released in September 2014.

A landless knight,
                       a leper king,
                                    and the struggle for Jerusalem.

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