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 s a child I was
given the stories of Alfred Duggan to read. Duggan, who lived from
1903 to 1964, was an English eccentric and playboy, a college acquaintance
of Evelyn Waugh's. Through the 1950s and early 1960s he produced
a stream of vivid historical novels, none of them, I think, set
any later than the 13th century. One of my great favorites was Knight
with Armour, in which Roger de Bodeham, landless second
son of an obscure Anglo-Norman family, goes off with Robert of Normandy
on the First Crusade. Roger makes it all the way to Jerusalem, taking
part in the final, victorious assault on the city. While fighting
on the walls, he suffers an unlucky stroke from an enemy's sword
and falls to the street below, breaking his back.
Dazed, sick
and dying, he raised himself on his sound right arm and looked about
him. To right and left the ramparts were black with pilgrims; someone
had tied one end of a rope round a merlon, and was sliding down
inside the city. He landed just beside Roger, waved his sword in
the air, and uttered a great roar of "Ville Gagnée!"
["The city is won!"] Roger was scarcely conscious now,
but that familiar triumphant cry raised a feeble echo in his mind;
"Ville Gagnée," he groaned in answer, as his head
fell forward and his spirit took flight.
The pilgrimage was accomplished.
We have been
hearing rather a lot about the Crusades recently. Our bearded adversary
Osama bin Laden, in his taped speeches, never fails to warn the
faithful that the Western world is intent on a new crusade, on breaking
into "the abode of Islam," seizing Muslim lands and forcing
our odious way of life on the pious adherents of the Prophet. In
1998, he dubbed his network of terrorist groups the "International
Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," using
"Crusaders" here as a synonym for "Christians."
Even in the West, the word "crusade" dwells in the shadow
of political incorrectness. George W. Bush's offhand remark on September
16 that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take
a while" met with a storm of indignation, not all of it from
Muslims. A stern editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reminded the president that the Crusades were "the equivalent
of Christian jihads" and that "through centuries of bitter
fighting, the word 'crusade' became freighted with intolerance and
religious persecution." Bush promptly apologized for his use
of the word, which has now been expunged from the White House vocabulary.
It is extraordinary
that events of seven and eight hundred years ago should still excite
passions. Were the Crusades really such a brazen assault on the
integrity of the Muslim world? Or were they what the fictional Roger
de Bodeham believed them to be: pilgrimages, in which brave men
selflessly took it upon themselves to bring the holy places of Christianity
back under Christian rule? If, as seems to be the case, we have
to take some sort of position on the Crusades, what position should
we take?
We can begin
by noticing that Duggan killed off his hero at an opportune moment,
just before the First Crusade got nasty. Having entered Jerusalem,
the Crusaders sacked the city with terrible gusto. They killed every
Muslim they found, man, woman, and child. The Jews were all burned
alive in their synagogue, whence they had fled to escape the terror.
(Crusaders generally did not distinguish between Jews and Muslims
in Palestine.) When Raymond of Aguilers went to visit the Temple
area the following morning he had to pick his way through corpses
and blood that reached to his knees.
Even worse was to follow in the nearly 200 years of crusading in
the Holy Land. During the assaults on Egypt after the fiasco of
the Second Crusade, a Frankish army took the town of Tanis in the
Nile delta and slaughtered its inhabitants — practically all
of whom were Coptic Christians. And yet worse: In the Fourth Crusade
a combined force of Franks and Venetians sacked Constantinople,
the very seat of Eastern Christianity. They looted the Hagia Sophia
cathedral of everything with value, and seated a French prostitute
on the patriarch's throne to entertain them with ribald songs as
they drank from the altar-vessels. A senator of Byzantium who witnessed
the events thought that the city would have fared better if it had
fallen to Saladin.
It would seem
as though the Muslims, and also Christians of the Eastern confession,
and even the guardians of political correctness, have a point in
damning the Crusades as a blot on Western civilization. There are
other charges brought against the Crusaders, too: Were they not
mostly, like Roger de Bodeham, junior sons left landless by the
custom of primogeniture, gone on Crusade to find a fief for themselves
in the East? Was it not all, therefore, little more than an exercise
in greed? Is there anything at all redeeming that can be said about
these sorry episodes?
The
Large Picture
Well, yes. The massacres, though appalling, were not sensational
in their time, and were matched by the Saracens at Antioch and Acre.
Even before the First Crusade showed up, in fact, Palestine had
been consumed by savage wars between the Turkish (and Sunni Muslim)
Seljuks and the Arab (and Shiite Muslim) Fatimid dynasty, with massacres
by both sides. Before that, the mad Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim, who
ruled 996-1021, had wantonly persecuted both Jews and Christians,
leveling the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem and even destroying
the cave that was supposed to be the Holy Sepulchre itself.
It must also
be remembered that Palestine — and Syria, and Egypt, and North
Africa, and Spain too — had long been Christian before the
Muslim armies seized them in the 7th and 8th centuries, as Urban
II pointed out when he preached the First Crusade. The Crusaders
sought to recover by force one small part of what had been taken
by force.
Nor do the
accusations of land-greed stand up well under modern scholarship.
In his recent book A
Concise History of the Crusades, Thomas Madden refers to
computer-aided analyses of documents relating to the men and women
who took up the cross. Of those men of knightly rank, the vast majority
were not spare sons, but lords of their estates. Says Madden: "It
was not those with the least to lose who took up the cross, but
rather those with the most." Alfred Duggan was wrong to assume
that a typical Crusader would have been a second son. He was, however,
right to make the last thought in Roger's mind: "The pilgrimage
was accomplished." The Crusades were, above all, pilgrimages,
with a much higher spiritual quotient than is commonly assumed.
This was one reason that the Crusader kingdoms could not be sustained.
In contrast with colonialists, who emigrate to stay, pilgrims, when
their pilgrimage is accomplished, go back home, and that is what
all too many of the Crusaders did. In fact, thirty years before
the First Crusade, a huge pilgrimage of 7,000 Germans had made its
way to the Holy Land without any intention of conquest. They had
met with brutal mistreatment at the hands of the Fatimids. Gibbon
says that only 2,000 returned safely.
Above and beyond
this, if we are to take sides on the Crusades after all these centuries,
we should acknowledge that, for all their many crimes, the Crusaders
were our spiritual kin. I do not mean only in religion, though that
of course is not a negligible connection: I mean in their understanding
of society, and of the individual's place in it. Time and again,
when you read the histories of this period, you are struck by sentences
like these, which I have taken more or less at random from Sir Steven
Runciman's History of the Crusades: "[Queen Melisande's]
action was regarded as perfectly constitutional and was endorsed
by the council." "Trial by peers was an essential feature
of Frankish custom." "The King ranked with his tenant-in-chief
as primus inter pares, their president but not their master."
If we look
behind the cruelty, treachery, and folly, and try to divine what
the Crusaders actually said and thought, we see, dimly but unmistakably,
the early flickering light of the modern West, with its ideals of
liberty, justice, and individual worth. Gibbon:
The spirit
of freedom, which pervades the feudal institutions, was felt in
its strongest energy by the volunteers of the cross, who elected
for their chief the most deserving of his peers. Amidst the slaves
of Asia, unconscious of the lesson or example, a model of political
liberty was introduced; and the laws of [the Frankish Kingdom
of Jerusalem] are derived from the purest source of equality and
justice. Of such laws, the first and indispensable condition is
the assent of those whose obedience they require, and for whose
benefit they are designed.
No sooner had
Godfrey of Bouillon been elected supreme ruler of Jerusalem, eight
days after the Crusader victory (he declined the title of "king,"
declaring that he would not wear a crown of gold in the place where
Christ had worn a crown of thorns), than his first thought was to
give the new state a constitution. This was duly done, and the Assize
of Jerusalem — "a precious monument of feudal jurisprudence,"
Gibbon calls it — after being duly attested, was deposited
in the Holy Sepulchre (which had been reconstructed some decades
before).
That is what
they were like, these men of Western Europe. Brutish, coarse, ignorant,
often insanely cruel — yes: but peer into their inner lives,
their thoughts, their talk among themselves, so far as it is possible
to do so, and what do we find? What were their notions, their obsessions?
Faith, of course, and honor, and then: vassalage, homage, fealty,
allegiance, duties and obligations, genealogies and inheritances,
councils and "parlements," rights and liberties. The feudal
order is easy to underestimate. In part this is because feudal society
was so at odds with many modern ideals — the ideal of human
equality, for example. In part, also, I believe, because the sheer
complexity of it, and of its laws and customs, deters study and
sometimes confounds analysis. (Define and differentiate the following:
champerty, maintenance, embracery.) A certain dogged application
is required to get to grips with feudal society, and few who are
not professional historians are up to the task, Karl Marx being
one honorable exception. Yet it is in this knotty tangle of heartfelt
abstractions spelled out in Old French that can be found, in embryo,
so much of what we cherish in our own civilization today.
Other Players
None of the other players in the great drama of the Crusades had
anything like this to show. The Fatimids were a degraded and lawless
despotism, in which none but the despot had any rights at all. The
aforementioned caliph Al-Hakim, for example, took to working at
night and sleeping in the daytime. Having embraced this habit, he
then imposed it on his subjects, forbidding anyone in his dominions,
on pain of death, from working during daylight hours. He also, to
enforce the absolute confinement of women, banned the making of
women's shoes. (Thirteenth-century Muslims were just as shocked
by the freedom and equality of Western women as fundamentalist Muslims
today are.) The Seljuk Turks, who held Jerusalem from 1078 to 1098,
were very little better. They still retained some of the vigor and
independence of their nomadic origins, and the rough honor code
of the steppe, but of debate and compromise they had only the sketchiest
notions. Of the separation of spiritual and secular jurisdictions,
they had no notion at all, any more than any other Muslim had. This
latter point, so crucial in the development of medieval European
society, was also lost on the Byzantines, whose ruler was stuck
in the late-Roman style of "Pontiff-Emperor," the font
of ecclesiastical as well as of temporal authority.
Man for man,
there is little to choose between the Crusaders and the Saracens.
Saladin, for example, was a true natural gentleman: courteous, chivalrous,
brave, and pious. When his mortal enemy Richard Lionheart was lying
sick of a fever in August of 1192, Saladin had him sent peaches
and pears, and snow from Mount Hermon to cool his drinks. Contrariwise,
the crusader Reynald of Châtillon was a thuggish sociopath,
no better than a brigand. (Saladin had the pleasure of decapitating
him personally.) Yet the virtues of men like Saladin rose as lone
pillars from a level plain. They were not, as the occasional virtues
of the Crusaders were, the peaks of a mountain range. The Saracens
had, in a sense, no society, no polity. Says the Marquis to the
Templar in another great Crusader novel, Sir Walter Scott's The
Talisman: "I will confess to you I have caught some
attachment to the Eastern form of government: A pure and simple
monarchy should consist but of king and subjects. Such is the simple
and primitive structure — a shepherd and his flock. All this
internal chain of feudal dependence is artificial and sophisticated."
Well, artificial and sophisticated it may have been, but in its
interstices grew liberty, law, and the modern conscience.
If we are to
have the Crusades thrown at us by the likes of Osama bin Laden,
let us at least not abjure them. It is true that we can barely recognize
anything of ourselves in the Crusaders. They were coarse and unwashed.
Most of them were illiterate. Of the physical world, they were ignorant
beyond our imagining, believing the earth to be flat and the sky
a crystal dome. Such medicine as they had was far more likely to
kill than to heal — Richard Lionheart and Amalric, sixth king
of Jerusalem, were both killed by the ministrations of their surgeons.
Their honor was often truculent, their loyalty sometimes fickle,
their piety was barnacled with the grossest kinds of superstition.
We turn in disgust from the spectacle of them wading through blood
to the Holy Sepulchre of Christ, and wonder if we would not have
found their enemies — the silk-clad viziers of Islam, or the
suave, scented courtiers of Constantinople — more to our liking.
Well, perhaps we would; but let us at least acknowledge that these
rough soldiers carried with them to the East the germ-seeds of modern
civil society. Palestine proved to be stony ground: but that is
the East's loss, as the eventual flowering of those seeds elsewhere
was all of humanity's immeasurable gain. In spirit and in values,
though at an immense distance, the Crusaders were our kin. While
not forgetting their many transgressions, we should weep for what
they lost and remember with pride their few astonishing victories.
Ville gagnée!
EDITOR’S
NOTE: For
more on the Crusades, see Thomas Madden’s “Crusades
Propanganda”
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