Fr Sean Fernandez: Look closer at Crusades and be shocked

It might seem tempting to argue that the Crusades occurred in a more violent world than our own.
It is not a position that, I think, can be maintained. Check a newsfeed or, if you must, read a newspaper – violence and bloodshed aplenty. Indeed the weaponry we have at our disposal is far more destructive than that of a millennium ago. The difference may be that most of us are not directly involved in violence; it is the preserve of professionals, wielded by police, employed on our behalf by professional soldiers in distant lands.
In the mediaeval period it was ubiquitous, especially as structures of governance formed, broke down and reformed. Historians have described the orgy of destruction which engulfed parts of Europe as local lords struggled for power. The Church was very concerned with trying to limit, if not eliminate, violence – Church leaders tried to ban fighting on holy days and during penitential periods; codes of conduct were developed enjoining warriors to protect women, children, the defenceless, clergy and Religious. Chivalry was born of the Church’s attempt to catechise a warrior class. Does this not contrast with our easy acceptance of ‘collateral damage’ in modern warfare? The mediaeval Church sought to bring about a more peaceable society, but how could the nobles be expected to beat their swords into ploughshares when skill at arms was integral to their sense of identity?
The Crusades, therefore, represented a radical shift in teaching and practice for the Church. What lay behind this? In this article, I, very much an amateur, seek to understand a little better the birth of Crusading and to clear up certain misconceptions. I am not arguing that the Western view of Islam was correct; I am seeking to understand what took place.
If you want to do further reading I would recommend any number of very interesting books by Jonathan Riley-Smith including his lauded The Crusades; John V. Tolan’s The Saracens explores Christian perceptions of the Arabic invaders; Norman Housley’s Contesting the Crusades offers a useful survey of Crusade – historiography.
I suspect that some of our contemporaries have a view of noble Saracens or Arabs reclaiming what was theirs from savage Christians. Or they may think of rapacious Western magnates trying to carve out territory for themselves in the East. Both views are unfortunate caricatures. The Arabs were foreign invaders, admittedly part of a long line of invaders. Much of the Levant had come under Roman rule around 63 BC. In the AD 135 a Jewish revolt against Roman rule was crushed, places sacred to Jews and Christians were desecrated and Hadrian renamed the city Aelia Capitolina (see Henry Chadwick’s The Church in Ancient Society). Constantine restored holy sites to the Christians and built the first great church on the burial place of Christ around AD 326. After the final division of the Roman Empire in AD 395, the city came under the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Emperor. Byzantium, the great Christian kingdom, with its centre in Constantinople was to become something of a bulwark against growing Muslim powers.
The Persians had occupied Jerusalem for a short while in the sixth century and much Christian blood had been spilt before it had been wrenched back from them. But in 638 it fell to the Saracens. Christendom made the psalmist’s lament its own: ‘O God, the heathen have come into thy inheritance; they have defiled thy holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. They have given the bodies of thy servants to the birds of the air for food, the flesh of thy saints to the beasts of the earth.’ (Psalm 79). In 1009 the Holy Sepulchre was vandalised and Christian pilgrims were attacked. There was fulmination against this, but nothing else besides though it did did provide fuel for the crusading fire. When the Crusades were finally launched it was in response to an aggressive drive into Byzantine territory by the newly ascendant Turks in the eleventh century. The Byzantine Emperor appealed to his Christian brothers for aid and the Popes responded. Pope St Gregory VII proposed a military response, but it was Blessed Urban II in 1095 who galvanised the West with a call to save the Christian East and liberate the Holy Places.
Churchmen saw this as an opportunity to channel the energy of their martial contemporaries into a good cause. Preachers called on the milites to fight for their brothers and sisters in Faith rather than amongst themselves. The Crusades were a golden opportunity to turn the warrior into a warrior-pilgrim and penitent. This brings us to an interesting aspect of the crusading movement and that is the spirituality which underlay it, a spirituality which Riley-Smith has documented in many works. The Crusades required a great commitment of resources in addition to the risk to life and limb. There was little material benefit to be expected; the Crusading nobles in the main hoped to return to their homes in the West, not carve out fiefdoms in the east.
The Crusades allowed them to put their skills at the service of God and his Church and to hope thereby that their sins might be forgiven and that they might attain salvation. Shocking, isn’t it? They were not, on the whole, venal, grasping men.
The Crusades were penitential pilgrimages; the Crusaders were enjoined to have the right disposition and were called on to embrace the sacrifices required by the pilgrimages for the good of their souls. They had to enter into the work motivated by love of God and their neighbour; the Crusaders also entered a regimen of prayer, fasting and other penances on top of all the normal hardships of warfare in foreign lands. In 1147 Louis VII prepared for his imminent departure with a brief sojourn in a leper house; this, in an age when leprosy was dreaded, was an almost incredible act of penance. Louis IX appointed friars to enquire into complaints against his own officials before leaving on crusade (The Crusades, Christianity and Islam by J. Riley-Smith). The two kings felt the need to embark on the dangerous and arduous journey with the right spirit.
I am painting an over-rosy picture perhaps, but deliberately in order to counter prejudices.
There were saints amongst the Crusaders as well as discreditable men. Their behaviour on the march and in battle was not as it should have been, but better than it might have been. Alas, anti-Semitism seems to have been a real aspect of the crusading movement and I shall discuss this in a later article. But the hardships to which the Crusaders exposed themselves in the ‘service of the Cross’ shame us who can more peaceably live out our vocations.
There were many Crusades undertaken over centuries and the legacies of some were more grievous than others. None, however, matched the success of the first which led to Christian reconquest of the Holy Land and the establishment of the crusader kingdoms. These were to fall before resurgent Arab armies. In 1291 when the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem fell, Riccardo of Montecroce wrote of the beauty of Baghdad yet of his sadness at ‘the massacre and capture of the Christian people.
“I wept over the loss of Acre, seeing the Saracens joyous and prospering, the Christians squalid and consternated: little children, young girls, old people, whimpering, threatened to be led as captives and slaves into the remotest countries of the East, among barbarous nations” (quoted in John V Tolan’s Saracens).
Can you not see why the Christians of the West saw it as their duty to rescue not only the places where the Saviour lived, died and rose from the dead, but also their co-religionists from ‘pagan’ hands?
The Crusades have to be understood as creations of a particular time and place. It is not imagery appropriate for our milieu or for contemporary conflicts. The Church today is engaged in dialogue with Muslim scholars and nations. This is not without its difficulties, but Pope Paul VI bids us in Ecclesiam Suam to take the way of dialogue, a dialogue which “must take cognizance of the slowness of human and historical development, and wait for the hour when God may make it effective. We should not however on that account postpone until tomorrow what we can accomplish today. We should be eager for the opportune moment and sense the preciousness of time. Today, every day, should see a renewal of our dialogue. We, rather than those to whom it is directed, should take the initiative.”
Our time presents us with different opportunities and challenges from that of our forebears. We should not be supercilious, but grateful.