Answering the Crusades' Critics: Part 1
Introduction
Opinions, and even myths, abound concerning the Crusades. As Rodney Stark observes, a cynical take on crusade history states, “Far from piety or by concern for the safety of pilgrims and the holy places in Jerusalem, the Crusades were but the first extremely bloody chapter in a long history of brutal European colonialism.”[1]
“More specifically,” says Stark, “it is charged that the crusaders marched east not out of idealism, but in pursuit of lands and loot; that the Crusades were promoted by power-mad popes seeking to greatly expand Christianity through conversion of the Muslim masses; and that the knights of Europe were barbarians who brutalized everyone in their path, leaving ‘the enlightened Muslim culture… in ruins.’”[2] Jonathan Riley-Smith echoes these findings and points out that critics believe “the crusaders were taking on opponents who were culturally their superiors, [that] the crusades were generated as much by economic as by ideological forces; and the best explanation for the recruitment of crusaders was that they had been motivated by profit, [and] the settlements in the Levant were proto-colonialist experiments, aspects of the first expansion of Europe.”[3]
But does the evidence support these views or are there perhaps explanations that are a better fit for the events surrounding the Crusades? For our purposes, we are not interested in rehashing Crusade history, or at least we are interested in the history only insofar as it informs us on these and related issues. Cynical or not, the above conclusions may hold up; herein we will assess them and see how they fare.
Next up, barbaric Christians versus enlightened Muslims.
[1] Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 4.
[2] Ibid., incorporating part of Thomas Madden, “The Real History of the Crusades,” Crisis Magazine (online edition), April 1, 2002.
[3] Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2009), xv.