Weekly Column: crusades

THE CRUSADES ARE OVER AGAIN

By William Urban

Now that Muslims are too busy killing one another to remember what the topic of the day was ten years ago, it gives us a moment to think back on that era, when Jews in Israel were portrayed alternatively as crusaders and Nazis, and Americans in Iraq as crusaders. It is worth remembering this, because the theme will return again, if the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel riots in European capitals don’t mean that it hasn’t come back already. There is some continuity in this: the first crusaders started out their “pilgrimage” by murdering every Jew they encountered.

I’ve been thinking about this. In fact, it fits right with the central theme of my next book — that people on the peripheries of states are often unhappy that their way of life, especially their system of morality and their religion, is being undermined by what they see in the distant, evil cities. This has little to do with religion, except that it is convenient to portray the conflict in religious terms. Armed resistance is justified by claiming that the dominant culture is encouraging women to go to school and to shave their legs.

Muslims have long told one another that western interference in their affairs is a revival of the crusades, or a continuation of them. This has long puzzled Americans, who think of crusades as organized efforts to cure cancer or stop crime.

Europeans know about the crusades, but they don’t see that medieval Christianity has anything to do with their modern secular states. Nobody wants to recover the holy places in Jerusalem, least of all the pope.

The crusades have been misunderstood or used as propaganda for so long that the myths are deeply embedded. Twenty years ago even historians portrayed them as Christian aggression or European imperialism. That has changed — I had a part in this by persuading several textbook writers that 19th and 20th century imperialism were efforts to acquire natural resources or strategic bases, while the crusades wanted to drive back the Turks from Constantinople and to reopen the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem. (The usual correction was to reduce the space given to the crusades.) Non-historians only remember that they were bad.

Imperialism certainly had its faults. But lumping missionaries and do-gooders together with the exploiters and explorers results in a pretty soggy interpretation of what it was. I particularly objected to using any inaccurate version of history in a debate about modern politics. One can say correctly that Arabs and other Muslims have a view of their history that collapses the present into the past. That is easy wherever societies remain mentally and emotionally where they were centuries ago. The Middle East may in a complex time-warp, with people killing one another over who was supposed to be Mohammed’s successor, but the West of today resembles the Middle Ages very little.

The crusades began as a response to the Turkish invasion that was about to overrun the [Eastern] Roman Empire that we today call the Byzantine Empire. The emperor had asked the pope to recruit mercenary soldiers so that he could drive the Turks back from his capital. This was an unusual request in that he usually considered the pope the equivalent of the anti-Christ, but he was in a desperate situation. Pope Urban II (a name that readers might easily remember) could not call on the Holy Roman emperor because he was trying to make him subordinate to the Church, so he went to France and called for the liberation of Jerusalem. That is how all crusaders became known as Franks.
Western pilgrims had long worked fairly easily with the Arabs, but after the Turks overran the holy city, that changed. The Turks were less accustomed to pilgrims and they disdained the Arabs, many of whom were Christians. The Arabs fought back, so the whole region was in chaos.

This meant that a relatively small Christian army was able to take most of what they called the Holy Land; they properly considered it a miracle. The problem then was how to consolidate the gains and protect them. The distance from Europe to Jerusalem meant that by the time a danger was perceived, it would already be upon them before any armies could be raised in Europe, much less marched to the rescue.

It was an impossible situation, but time and again attacking Muslim armies were driven back, and several times Christian chances for great victories were squandered by incompetent leaders. After a century, the West had only one foothold left: Acre. It fell in 1291. Soon Turkish armies and navies were moving against Europe. In time Tatars were raiding Russia and Poland; the Turks overran the Byzantine Empire, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, and Hungary; and Muslim pirates were descending on coasts from Italy to Iceland. Only in Portugal and Spain were the Christians winning victories. Europeans from that era would have laughed at the thought that they were oppressing Muslim peoples.

This began to change when the Portuguese rounded the Cape and drove Muslim merchants from their bases in Africa and India, then were followed by Dutch, French and British fleets. That, however, had little impact on the ongoing wars in the Balkans and the Ukrainian steppe.

The 1683 coalition of Protestant and Catholic armies that saved Vienna from falling to the Turkish siege (described in my book Bayonets and Scimitars) was as unlikely as the original conquest of Jerusalem. Totally improbable, yet it happened.
Two lessons came out of this long unhappy experience. First, people eventually tire of wars that seem hopeless. Second, that even the most hopeless situation can be turned around.

Most politicians lack the stomach for hard decisions. They like public adulation, and thrive on the symbolisms of power. Few have Churchill’s certainty of being right, and some who do are just flat wrong.

One lesson for us is might be, first, to reject any false comparison of modern politics to the past, then to remember that pulling out of a conflict does not mean that it is over.

Another is to recognize that the jihadists have moved on from complaining about the crusades. Now they take their inspiration from the seventh century blitzkrieg of Mohammed and his successors. It is now once more: convert, or pay taxes, or die. For Jews and Americans they prefer the third choice.

Review Atlas (August 28, 2014), 4.

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