Answering the Crusades' Critics: Part 2
Barbaric Christians vs. Enlightened Muslims
From the Enlightenment until most recently, the view of the Crusades popularized by historians has been that an expansionist Europe, or more accurately Christendom, brutalized, looted and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam. But this is not so. The Crusades were preceded, and in fact hastened, by Islamic provocations.
Beginning in the seventh century, Muslims actually made violent attempts to colonize the West by invading what was heretofore Christian territory in the Middle East, Egypt and all of North Africa, Spain and southern Italy, and major Mediterranean islands including Sicily, Corsica, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta and Sardinia. In the eighth century, Christian counterattacks liberated many of the occupied areas and foreshadowed what was to come in the Holy Land.[4] Then, early in the eleventh century Seljuk Turks conquered Armenia, Syria and Palestine, and “they destroyed some churches, murdered clergy and seized pilgrims…[making] pilgrimage to the Holy Land a difficult and often deadly task.”[5] To this we add that the Turks had also swept through Asia Minor and had almost reached Constan-tinople, prompting the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus to appeal most urgently to Pope Urban II “to encourage Westerners to help defend the Eastern Church against [them].”[6]
And what of Muslim enlightenment? First and foremost, Stark points out that the “Dark Ages” were an invention created by “Enlightenment” thinkers such as Voltaire, Hume and Diderot “in order to glorify themselves and vilify the Catholic Church.” [7] Thus it was easy to cast the knights of Christendom as the barbarian horde. In fact, “the centuries labeled as the “Dark Ages” were ‘one of the great innovative eras of mankind,’ as technology was developed and put into use ‘on a scale no civilization had previously known.’”[8] It was actually during the “Dark Ages” that European technology leapt ahead of the rest of the world.
As far as Muslim culture was concerned, it was coopted
from those they conquered. The sophisticated culture so
often attributed to Muslims (more often referred to as
“Arabic” culture) was actually the culture of the con-
quered people - the Judeo-Christian-Greek culture of
Byzantium, the remarkable learning of heretical Christian
groups such as the Copts and the Nestorians, extensive
knowledge from Zoroastrian (Mazdean) Persia, and the
great mathematical achievements of the Hindus (keep in
mind the early and extensive Muslim conquests in India).
[9]
Not only were conquered peoples the source of any Muslim science and learning, “they even did most of the translating into Arabic.”[10]
Muslim fleets were designed, built and sailed by others. “Arabic” architecture actually had Persian and Byzantine origins. “Thus, in his much-admired book written to acknowledge the ‘enormous’ contributions of the Arabs to science and engineering, Donald R. Hill noted that very little could be traced to Arab origins and admitted that most of these contributions originated with conquered populations.”[11] “Arab” numerals were in fact entirely Hindu. “Arab” medicine was in actuality Nestorian Christian medicine. “Arab” astronomy is rightly credited to Hindus and Persians. Great libraries encountered by Islamic invaders were destroyed and their books burned.
But what has largely been ignored is that the decline of
that culture and the inability of Muslims to keep up with
the West occurred because Muslim or Arab culture was
largely an illusion resting on a complex mix of dhimmi
cultures, and as such, it was easily lost and always vul-
nerable to being repressed as heretical. Hence, when in
the fourteenth century Muslims in the East stamped out
nearly all religious nonconformity, Muslim backwardness
came to the fore.[12]
Part of the myth of Muslim enlightenment has included their tolerance for other cultures and faiths. While pilgrimages to Jerusalem had been allowed since Muslim occupation in the seventh century, pilgrims still had to pay a great deal to enter the Holy Land. And what they did not pay in taxes, they paid in constant harassment and raids against their caravans on their journeys. Regularly throughout the centuries before the arrival of the Turks, “mass murders of Christian monks and pilgrims were common.”[13] On one occasion, pilgrims who refused to convert to Islam were killed; on another, they were crucified. Churches were destroyed and their monks slaughtered. Rape was not uncommon.
But if things were bad in the centuries leading up to the arrival of the Turks, they were astronomically so after. From Robert the Monk’s summary of Pope Urban II’s call to crusade:
They [the Turks] have completely destroyed some of
God’s churches and they have converted others to the
uses of their own cult. They ruin the altars with filth and
defilement. They circumcise Christians and smear the
blood from the circumcision over the altars or throw it
into the baptismal fonts. They are pleased to kill others by
cutting open their bellies, extracting the end of their in-
testines, and tying it to a stake. Then, with flogging, they
drive their victims around the stake until, when their
viscera have spilled out, they fall dead on the ground.
They tie others, again, to stakes and shoot arrows at
them; they seize others, stretch out their necks, and try
to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single
blow of a naked sword. And what shall I say about the
shocking rape of women?[14]
Next, we'll look at the crusaders themselves and see what we can learn about their motivations.
[4] Stark, God’s Battalions, 8-9.
[5] Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 5.
[6] Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades, 13.
[7] Stark, God’s Battalions, 6.
[8] Ibid., 66, incorporating part of Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1976), viii, i.
[9] Ibid., 56-57.
[10] Ibid., 57.
[11] Ibid., 59.
[12] Ibid., 61.
[13] Ibid., 84.
[14] From the account of Robert the Monk, Historia Hierosolimitana, in James A. Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary Survey (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962), 18, in Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 8-9.