The Crusades and Historical Charity

Still working through this history of the Crusades, which I find to be fascinating. In general it is an incredible idea, and whatever one thinks today about the Crusaders or the ideology that launched such an endeavor, it is hard not to be a bit amazed and what was accomplished by a disparate group of Europeans.

A group of 20,000 or so, knights, princes, and peasants marched some 2,000 miles, laying siege to various Muslim outposts along the way, and eventually broke through the formidable gates of Jerusalem and laid claim to the city, holding it despite erratic support from the West for nearly 200 years. For some perspective, 200 years ago in American history James Madison was president and we were still fighting the British over this or that. In other words, it is a long time. Were their motives always pure? Nope. Were some greedy for gain? Yep. Was their senseless slaughter? Definitely. Do I wish for something like this to happen again? Hell no. But I think it is a fault of the imagination and a failure to acknowledge subjectivity in human experience to demonize a whole contingent of past humanity for failing to live up to present--and relatively new--ideals. Blaming the Crusaders for violence is like blaming them for being opposed to gay marriage. The idea is so modern, it is absurdly anachronistic to judge something that happened 1,000 years ago as if they operated by the same moral and social codes.

When Tolkien was having conversations with the impenitent C.S. Lewis about Christianity he told him that the Christian story would have immense appeal to the story-loving Lewis if it didn't carry the emotional/historical/doctrinal baggage that Christianity presents to someone reared in our culture. In other words, the story of God made man, his birth heralded by angels and swains alike, his monastic life, his temptation in the desert, his betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection would all seem wonderful to Lewis if they could be casually dismissed as mythology, but became considerably more complex when he was asked to not only appreciate the artistry and beauty of the story, but also to believe that it was true and to attach his faith to the G0d-man as his savior. 

While I don't want to conflate these two very different issues, I feel like something similar is at work in how we approach the Crusades. If they were simply a story we read in an adventure novel, the story of a great journey with heroes and villains and iconography and visionaries and deception and luck and bravery we would love to read of it. But there is something so grounded about the Crusades. We are not merely confronted with a great story (I use the term great broadly), but one that actually happened, one that in many ways is constitutive of the way we Westerners see ourselves. A similar story set in the Far East would likely not provoke as visceral of a reaction. The Crusades feel personal, somehow, and we have been trained from a young age to feel very guilty about them. And I carry that tendency as much as anyone. 

But reading the other day about the siege at Antioch it was hard to remember the way we have been trained to feel about the Holy Wars. The Crusader army had laid siege to the city and broken through the walls. They were unable to capture the citadel, backed up against a mountain and it remained in Muslim control. Immediately upon their breakthrough at Antioch the Crusader army was besieged itself by the Muslim army of al Afdal. The Crusaders found themselves vastly outnumbered and running low on supplies. Rather than wasting away behind the walls, they decided to attack. One morning, at the break of day, they did just that. In his account, Asbridge seems careful to be clear that most of the Crusaders were motivated by genuine piety, not lust or greed. And there, in the midst of the battle, priests moved among the troops chanting prayers and giving them encouragement. The Crusaders, bolstered by faith, routed the Muslim army who was unprepared for their sudden attack. They returned to Antioch and were free to press on toward Jerusalem.

There is something about that image--the priest moving among the tumult of battle, chanting and praying--that despite the fact I find it theologically ridiculous, is entirely romantic to me. And if it were simply a story in a book I would love it. But understanding that the Crusaders weren't simply barbarians and that many were motivated by genuinely held religious feeling and that they were products of their culture doesn't mean that what they did was not often objectively wrong. Subjectively justifiable decisions can still be objectively wrong. I am not here trying to make the Crusades sound hunky-dory or not that big of a deal. I do think, though, that they are different than we are commonly led to believe--more complicated--and that our distance from this time ought to give us pause before blithely passing judgment.

The culture that spawned the Crusades and sustained them for 200 years might not bear much resemblance to our own, but they operated by a different set of values, not without values. We can rightly condemn the actions of much of the wars as incompatible with the teachings of Christ, but I am hesitant to condemn the values underlying the wars: bravery, faith, and the willingness to fight for what is important.

History Ain't Simple

In all of my years of reading the title of this post represents one of only a very few solid conclusions that I have been led to believe without qualm. Nothing is as easy as we would like it to be: no one, with very few exceptions, is either as noble or as villainous as we have either been conditioned to believe or just sort of implicitly feel. John Calvin was a great man—one of my heroes—and he ordered that a heretic be executed in his city of Geneva for advancing anti-Trinitarian views. Does this mean that nothing Calvin wrote is of any value? Of course not. But it is something you have to deal with when praising (justly) Calvin. Did the Founding Fathers of this nation establish our country on largely Christian principles, having in mind the structure of our nation to be contingent upon Christian believers? Yep. Did a lot of them believe heterodox things about Christianity or God or merely utilize Christian morality as a convenient rallying point? Yep. Which is merely to say that they were not twenty-first century evangelicals.

I was thinking about this one solid historical dogma—nothing is simple—as I read the introduction to Thomas Asbridge’s single volume history of the Crusades, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (on whose authority, sir?). Asbridge is very careful in refusing to attribute pat motives to either the Christian or Muslim factions that fought the two century war for control of the Levant.

In other words, there is no one explanation for Christian aggression at the end of the eleventh century. Today we seem to ascribe to the Crusades the worst possible motivations, making the Church out to be greedy, land-hungry, manipulative and bent on destroying the cultured Muslims of the Near East, even when there is little evidence for this claim. We choose to take Saladin, the genuinely noble Muslim commander, as representative of all the Muslim commanders, ignoring the hellacious warlord Zangi, who would kill any Muslim, Byzantine, or Frank in brutal fashion for the slightest offense.

But there are charitable possibilities: Muslim armies did, after all, conquer Jerusalem from the Byzantines in the seventh century, and it is not crazy to imagine that Christians genuinely wanted to recover control of their holiest sites. There is also some evidence that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being attacked, robbed, and even murdered by Muslim groups before being able to reach Jerusalem. St. Augustine had theorized the possible circumstances justifying a war—proclamation by a legitimate authority, a just cause, and right intention—paving the way for popes and other leaders of the Christian world to advance a military cause in good faith.

Another charitable option is just really bad theology. Medieval preoccupation and concern for avoiding hell was ubiquitous. The power of the pope, never a secure hold at this time, enlisted their belief that they were spiritually responsible for the fate of every soul under their care. Promoting a holy war that functionally cleanses one of the guilt of sin could then be seen as an altruistic act, opening up the door to salvation for more and more members of the flock. While someone like me reads this and scoffs and mutters under my breath a quick prayer of thanks for Martin Luther, granting the intense fear at the time of the fires of hell and the uncertainty of salvation, it only makes sense to advance surefire ways to guarantee one’s spot in the celestial realm (believers of various stripes believe the same thing to today).

In any event, whether one subscribes to a charitable explanation or merely chooses to believe that all Christians of the time were bloodthirsty murderers bent on conquest, less subjective elements, sometimes referred to as facts, throw a bit of cold water on the Church=bad equation. For one, the goal of the sanctioned Crusades was limited: reclamation of the Holy Land. The project, as Asbridge notes, was not “to eradicate Islam, or even convert Muslims to the Christian faith. Rather, it was a consequence of Islam’s dominion over the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem” (17).

Whether or not this goal is noble, and I really don’t have much of a dog in this fight, we have to be careful, self-righteous as we tend to become at a distant historical remove, to not always assume the worst either because that is what we have been taught or that is what is most easy to believe. Every Christian at one point or another has been asked to defend their fidelity to a faith that propagated the Crusades. This is fair enough as it goes, but the next time someone asks me for my defense I am going to simply ask them just what it is they know about the Crusades. If their answer is something other than Church=bad than I will engage them on the subject. If not, they are not really looking to be convinced anyway. It can be snug, after all, to have one’s head in the sand.