The Truth About the Crusades, 101

First Principles Journal (an excellent periodical that I've enjoyed reading for many years) has just posted an essay, "Four Myths about the Crusades" by Paul F. Crawford:

In 2001, former president Bill Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown University in which he discussed the West’s response to the recent terrorist attacks of September 11. The speech contained a short but significant reference to the crusades. Mr. Clinton observed that “when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem [in 1099], they . . . proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount.” He cited the “contemporaneous descriptions of the event” as describing “soldiers walking on the Temple Mount . . . with blood running up to their knees.” This story, Mr. Clinton said emphatically, was “still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”

This view of the crusades is not unusual. It pervades textbooks as well as popular literature. One otherwise generally reliable Western civilization textbook claims that “the Crusades fused three characteristic medieval impulses: piety, pugnacity, and greed. All three were essential.”¹ The film Kingdom of Heaven (2005) depicts crusaders as boorish bigots, the best of whom were torn between remorse for their excesses and lust to continue them. Even the historical supplements for role-playing games—drawing on supposedly more reliable sources—contain statements such as “The soldiers of the First Crusade appeared basically without warning, storming into the Holy Land with the avowed—literally—task of slaughtering unbelievers”;² “The Crusades were an early sort of imperialism”;³ and “Confrontation with Islam gave birth to a period of religious fanaticism that spawned the terrible Inquisition and the religious wars that ravaged Europe during the Elizabethan era.”⁴ The most famous semipopular historian of the crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, ended his three volumes of magnificent prose with the judgment that the crusades were “nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”⁵

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

Read all about the four myths.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Excerpts:

• Rethinking the Crusades | Jonathan Riley-Smith | The Preface to the fourth edition of What Were the Crusades?
• The Crusades 101 | Jimmy Akin
• Were the Crusades Anti-Semitic? | Vince Ryan
• Crusade Myths | Thomas F. Madden
• Urban II: The Pope of the First Crusade | Régine Pernoud
• The Truth About Joan of Arc | Régine Pernoud
• Mistakes, Yes. Conspiracies, No. | The Fourth Crusade | Vince Ryan

Comments

[LJ]

Just finished watching (again) the old 1997 series (BBC and A&E production) of Ivanhoe. Even Sir Walter Scott was a little more circumspect in the novel, but among other things the story did, perhaps unintentionally, was refute Paul Crawford's second myth, because the great accusation against Richard Lion-Heart was the bankrupting of England to finance his crusading, causing John's heavy taxes in his absence.

However, I had forgotten the abysmal lack of knowledge of the sacraments of the Church when they described the sacrament of "penance" as distinct from "confession" and one which could be only done once in a life-time. And in enacting it, part of the sacrament was receiving of the body and blood of Christ, which as we know is the sacrament of the Eucharist.

And of course there were the obligatory fat bishops and abbots and the lean priests (other than Friar Tuck of course, the round jolly perpetually inebriated hermit).

The funeral rites for Lord Athelstane are a curious mix of pagan and Christian ritual, seemingly sanctioned by the Saxon priest present. And the portrayal of the Knights Templar was predictable.

But it did open up another myth about the Inquisition as well, while not explicitly stated as a reference to the Inquisition. The Church authority, in this case the Grand Master of the Knights Templar was the one railroading the innocent Jewish maid in a charge of sorcery and witchcraft, twisting her words and those of witnesses in a superstitious lynching, while the reasonable one was Prince John, the attending secular authority.

The reality, we know, was the reverse, such that the reason for the Inquisition in the first place was to bring sanity, knowledge and authority to the out of control secular courts who condemned people for heresy on any kind of spurious evidence or accusation.

It has been awhile since I read Ivanhoe, but that was before I was Catholic so much of the distortion of the crusades would not have caused my notice. It conformed well with the public school version of such events.

[MaggieG45]

There is a wonderful series on EWTN (which I don't have access to but my friend does) by Jaime and Joanna Bogle called "The Military Orders and the Crusades." We purchased the DVD, a bit pricey but very worth it, so we can watch it again and again, as it contains a wealth of information.

A blurb from the cover: "This illuminating documentary series is sure to captivate you, as we examine the causes and geopolitical situations that led to the Holy Wars. Furthermore, this EWTN Home Video will expand upon the military orders that were established to defend Christian interests."

MaryMargaret Goff (Maggie)

[Sandra Miesel]

That's an excellent article. Let me add that the mad Caliph of Egypt who destroyed the Holy Sepulcre, el-Hakim, was the son of a Christian mother and came to be revered as a manifestation of God by the Druze.

[Robert Miller]

Crawford's destruction of the maligners of the Crusades is beautifully succinct.

The Crusade is a pilgrimage -- an armed pilgrimage, to be sure. But its fundamental structure remains pilgrimage.

It is an expression of the foundational mission of Christendom to defend and share the Faith.

The Crusade embraces the historicity of Christ and draws from that fact the imperative of reinstating the Cross in concrete locales that have been "christened".

More: as Crawford demonstrates, the nation of Islam has been a clear and present enemy and danger to Christendom for almost 1,500 years, besieging Vienna as late as 1683 and New York as late as 2001. For the leading "lights" of the West, however, there was a 300-year era of forgetting of the menace to Christendom -- partly because the West gained superiority in military technology, and partly because the leading lights themselves were leading the charge to deconstruct Christendom.

And so, here we are in 2011, mired in wars and upheavals in the Middle East, frantically denying that we are "Crusaders". And of course we're not, and more's the pity.