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THE CRUSADES by Jonathan Riley-Smith
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE
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Contents The Popular Conception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 When were the Crusades? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Christian Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 What were crusades? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 The Military Orders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 The Church and the Management of Crusades . . . . . . .35 Crusaders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43 Weighing Crusades in the Balance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 Select Booklist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63 Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65
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The Popular Conception Ask anyone, anywhere in the world, from a Hollywood film-producer to a radical Islamist jihadi, about the crusades and you will get roughly the same reply. Crusades were aggressive wars against Islam, which were motivated by greed and Christian fanaticism. The crusaders were eventually defeated, but only after they had severely damaged a culture superior to their own. Their legacy among those peoples who had suffered from their brutality has been an enduring bitterness. Although wrong in most of its particulars, this historical vision has been popular for quite a long time. It originated in a convergence of traditions of thought, which were rooted in two very different works of the early nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Talisman, which was published in 1825, and Joseph François Michaud’s six-volume Histoire des croisades, which appeared between 1812 and 1822. At the heart of Scott’s The Talisman is the story of a friendship between an apparently poor Scottish knight serving on the Third Crusade, who turns out to be a prince and wins the love of the lady he admires, and the Muslim sultan Saladin, who appears in a bewildering
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array of disguises, including that of a skilled physician who cures King Richard I of England. Scott was an heir of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, which had despised and derided the crusades, and he portrayed the crusaders as courageous and vigorous, but intemperate and childish, crudely assailing more sophisticated and civilized Muslims. His image of Saladin as a type of liberal European gentleman in fauxoriental clothing has had an abiding influence, not least on the Muslim public, which had almost forgotten him when Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who had been brought up on Scott by his English mother, paid him overblown homage on a visit to his tomb in Damascus in 1898. A year later the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi asked how it could be that Saladin’s greatness had been ignored by Muslim writers until they had been reminded of it by Kaiser Wilhelm. Crusades and Imperialism The epic Histoire of Joseph François Michaud was imbued, on the other hand, with a passionate nationalism. A fervent royalist who had begun his researches under a Napoleonic régime he despised, Michaud argued that crusading had enriched all the European nations engaged in it. His belief that France had been the main beneficiary went down well with his countrymen, among whom his
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Histoire generated patriotic fervour. Under his influence the French began to describe their imperialist ventures in crusading terms. Their occupation of Algeria in 1830 was portrayed as a crusade. Their military campaigns in south-east Asia in the 1850s were bathed in crusading rhetoric and when the government decided to intervene in Lebanon on behalf of the Maronites in 1860 there was talk of actually proclaiming one. Charles-Martial Allemand-Lavigerie, archbishop of Algiers from 1867 and cardinal from 1882 until his death ten years later, whose brain was saturated with crusading imagery, drew up a Rule for a new military order which was to operate in North Africa. France was by no means the only country to develop a myth of national crusading history in the nineteenth century and to associate it with the imperialist present. Belgium adopted Godfrey of Bouillon. Norwegian nationalists looked to King Sigurd. Germany had eight crusading rulers, above all Frederick Barbarossa. Spain had the glories of the Reconquest, a national war of liberation fought against the Moors, with heroes like Ferdinand III of Castile; its invasion of Morocco in the 1850s was also described as a crusade. England had Richard Coeur de Lion. Feelings were running so high over reported massacres of Bulgarians in 1876 that the author of a pamphlet written for English Catholics had to
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explain why a crusade could not be launched against the Turks. Thirty-six years earlier Sir Richard Hillary, an enthusiastic member of the body which was to become the Most Venerable Order of St John, publicized an impractical project for the liberation of the Holy Land and its government by the Knights of Malta (the heirs of the Knights Hospitallers of St John). As the English Order of St John spread throughout the British Empire, it propagated a sanitized but imperialist vision of the crusades. These descendants of Michaud believed that the crusaders’ achievements were now being replicated and that backward Muslim societies were going to benefit from Christian rule. Their conviction was reinforced by the First World War and its aftermath. The occupation by the British and the French of Palestine and Syria-Lebanon under mandate from the League of Nations generated a wave of French historical literature, one theme of which was that the achievements of the crusaders provided the first chapter in a history which had culminated in modern Imperialism. Crusades and Islam Imperial ideology, however, was already in decline and its decay opened the way for profound changes in the tradition. The crusades began to be interpreted in social and economic terms by Liberal economic historians, who had inherited from Imperialism the belief that crusading
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was an early example of it. The lines descending from Scott and Michaud, from the Enlightenment and from Imperialism, began to come together in the 1920s and 1930s to give birth to the neo-imperialistic and materialistic orthodoxy which is commonly held today and which I have already described. This had inherited from Scott the image of an inferior culture barging its way into a more sophisticated region and from Michaud the belief that the motivation for this had been a protocolonialist one. It soon found its way into the works of Muslim historians, whose writing of crusade history had originated in the 1890s. At that time the Ottoman empire was crumbling under western pressure and the reaction of Sultan Abdulhamid II had been to turn to Pan-Islamism, an ideology enshrining the unity of all Muslims under the caliphate, to which he laid claim. He publicized his conviction that the Europeans had embarked on a new ‘crusade’. He was only echoing the rhetoric that had washed round western Europe for more than half a century, but his language was taken up by the Pan-Islamic press and in the first Muslim history of the crusading movement, published in 1899, Sayyid ‘Ali al-Hariri wrote that ‘Our most glorious sultan, Abdulhamid II, has rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a crusade against us in the form of a political campaign’.
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Far from inheriting from their medieval ancestors bitter memories of the violence of the crusaders, the Muslims had not hitherto shown much interest in them. They believed, after all, that they had beaten them comprehensively. They had driven them from the lands they had settled in the Levant and had been triumphant in the Balkans, where they had occupied far more territory than the crusaders had ever conquered in the East. But now, aroused by an authoritative statement by the caliph that crusades were still in train, they were presented with the two western constructs, which were in the course of being reconciled and which struck a chord in Arab Nationalism, emerging in response to the British and French occupation of much of North Africa and the Levant and the settlement of Jews in Palestine. Muslim historians began to describe how barbarous and destructive crusaders, morally and culturally inferior, had faced civilized and modern-thinking Muslims and had benefited by absorbing their values while at the same time leaving a trail of wreckage in their wake. The crusades, they maintained, had been manifestations of western colonialist avarice, conducted under the guise of religion, and the heirs of the crusaders, who had lost the first round, were returning to complete the work their ancestors had begun. For many Nationalists modern ‘crusading’ was not only greedy, but also sought revenge for past reverses and the assistance given in the 1940s to
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the creation of the state of Israel, on the very ground occupied by the ‘crusader’ kingdom of Jerusalem, had been an act of vengeful malice. From the 1970s onwards the Nationalists were challenged by a renewed and militant Pan-Islamism, which adopted their interpretation of crusade history but globalized it. Whereas the Nationalists’ vision of a crusading past and present underwrites an Arab struggle for freedom from colonial oppression, to the militant Islamists western aggression and, above all, infidel penetration into any part of the Islamic world justifies the waging of jihad or holy war. They apply the term ‘crusading’ to any offensive, including a drive for economic or political hegemony, against Islam anywhere by those who call themselves Christian or are in the Christian tradition and to any aggressive action by their surrogates, among whom they include Zionists and Marxists. Indeed ‘international Zionism’ and ‘international Communism’ are ideologies employed by the Imperialism of the outside world to mask its ‘Crusaderism’, which is the ambition of the old Christian enemy to subvert Islam and destroy believers. Apologising for the Crusades It is notable that in its responses to jihadi terrorism the West has not tried to counter this radical vision of history. Although the notion of Crusaderism as a background
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force obviously plays no part in its thinking - very few westerners know even of its existence - it looks back on crusading in very much the same way, with the difference that it is shame-faced rather than defiant. Even before the jihadi atrocities had impinged on public consciousness there were calls for the Church to apologize for the crusades. There is a general belief that the pope did so, but the order of service on 12 March 2000, ‘The Day of Forgiveness’, contained no reference to them, although there was an expression of contrition for ‘sins committed in the service of truth’ and the papacy later said sorry to the Orthodox Church for the crusaders’ behaviour during the sack of Constantinople in 1204. It will become clear why it would have been impossible for the Church to have gone further in this matter than it did, but in any case an apology would have been futile as far as the Muslims are concerned. Since they are convinced that western crusading is still in train, conducted in more sophisticated and effective ways than in the past, expressions of contrition for events long ago would be rather like a marksman firing at his opponent with a Kalashnikov while expressing regrets for his ancestor’s use of a bow and arrow. One might add that there is little point in apologizing for something if you do not know what it is.
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When were the Crusades? * The crusades were launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II on a preaching tour through France. By the following spring recruits were assembling for what has come to be known as the First Crusade (1096-1102), the climax of which was the capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. Jerusalem could not be held in isolation and its occupation inevitably led to the establishment of western settlements in the Levant: the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, and the counties of Tripoli (Lebanon) and Edessa. As these came under pressure, military expeditions were organized to assist them and crusades were in action in 1107-8, 1120-5, 1128-9, 1139-40 and 1147-9; the last of these campaigns has come to be known as the Second Crusade. Meanwhile, the movement had been extended to Spain, the reconquest of which from the Moors had already been equated by Pope Urban with the liberation of Jerusalem. A crusade there was being organized in 1122, when Pope Calixtus II proposed a war on two fronts with armed forces also serving in the East. Calixtus’s initiative was developed by Pope *
See timeline on page 65
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Eugenius III in 1147, when he authorized an expedition against the Wends across the north-eastern German frontier at the same time as crusaders were being called to serve in the Iberian peninsula and in Asia. The Second Crusade was a fiasco, and although there were three further crusades in Spain before 1187, possibly one in northern Europe, and a few expeditions, notably that of 1177, to Palestine, the thirty years that followed were in many ways the lowest point the movement reached before the fifteenth century. The Loss of Jerusalem Everything changed, however, with the consternation that swept Europe at the news of the loss of Jerusalem and nearly all of Palestine to Saladin in 1187. The Third Crusade (1189-92) and the German Crusade (1197-8) recovered most of the coast (and conquered Cyprus), ensuring the survival of the western settlements for the time being. Enthusiasm was to be found at every level of society throughout the thirteenth century. Feelings among the masses were expressed in the Children’s Crusade (1212) and the Crusade of the Shepherds (1251), while military forces sailed for the East in 1202-4 (the Fourth Crusade, diverted to Constantinople, which the crusaders took, together with much of Greece), 1217-29 (the Fifth Crusade, which ended with the recovery of Jerusalem for
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a time by the western emperor Frederick II), 1239-41, 1248-54 (the first crusade of King Louis IX of France, inspired by the final loss of Jerusalem in 1244), 1269-72 (Louis’s second crusade) and 1287-90. Crusading armies invaded Egypt in 1218 and 1249, and Tunisia in 1270. Crusading in the West There was also a renewal of activity in Spain between 1187 and 1260, when the crusade was briefly extended to Africa; the highpoints were the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) and the conquests of Valencia (1232-53), Cordoba (1236) and Seville (1248). Crusading in Spain resumed in the early fourteenth century and again in 1482-92, after which, with Granada and the entire peninsula in Christian hands, it spilled into North Africa and led to the establishment of beachheads as far east as Tripoli (Libya). In the Baltic region crusades were launched in support of Christian missions in Livonia (approx. modern Latvia) between 1193 and 1230, after which the Teutonic Knights took over, and in Prussia, where they ran a ‘perpetual crusade’ from the order-state they established until early in the fifteenth century. Crusades were also waged in Estonia, Finland and Poland. From 1199 onwards they were being fought against political opponents of the papacy in Italy - they were endemic there between 1255 and 1378 - Germany
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and Aragon, while the Great Schism generated others in Flanders and Castile. The first one to be preached against heretics, the Albigensian Crusade, was in action in southwestern France between 1209 and 1229; others were waged in Bosnia, Germany, Italy and Bohemia, especially against the Hussites between 1420 and 1431. Crusades were also launched in 1231 and 1239 against the Greeks, who were trying to recover Constantinople; against the Mongols from 1241 onwards; against the Orthodox Russians in northern Europe from the thirteenth century; and against the Protestant English in the sixteenth (the Armada of 1588). The Later Crusades But the chief field of activity remained the East. The loss of the last Christian beach-heads in Palestine and Syria in 1291 gave rise to another wave of enthusiasm, finding expression in crusades of the poor in 1309 and 1320. Expeditions sailed regularly to the eastern Mediterranean. One sent to Mahdia in North Africa in 1390 was followed, as the threat to Europe from the Ottoman Turks grew, by disastrous forays into the Balkans, the Crusades of Nicopolis (1396) and of Varna (1444), although the Turkish advance was temporarily halted at Belgrade in 1456. In 1332 a new expression of the movement - an alliance of interested powers in a crusade league - had
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come into existence. There were to be many of these leagues, the most successful of which were those which won the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and recovered much of the Balkans from the Ottomans between 1684 and 1697, although there were also conventional crusades to North Africa in 1535, 1541 and 1578. Crusading, however, was petering out from the late sixteenth century onwards, although the Hospital of St John (the Order of Malta) still functioned as a military order in its order-state of Malta until that island fell to Napoleon in 1798.