What About the Crusades?

In these notes on the Crusades I am not attempting to defend the indefensible. Rather, I am attempting to place the Crusades in context, to correct simplistic explanations for the crusades such as one I recently heard: “The Crusades were nothing but a land-grab.”  Some historians have said there was no reason for Europeans to feel threatened but these critics are usually not specialists in the period.   Some crusade-bashers might even be playing the currently popular game, “Blame the West.” To such historians, eleventh-century Europeans might respond, “Maybe you had to be there.”

Even a more balanced view of the Crusades as an inappropriate response by adherents of one religion (Christianity) to the inappropriate actions by the adherents of another religion (Islam) concerning which of these two religions would control Jerusalem misses important matters.

Understanding the Crusades:

Even before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the pilgrimages to holy places (Bethlehem, Jerusalem, etc.) had become popular, though some prominent Christian writers—Augustine, Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nyssa, for example—would variously mock the practice or question its Biblical justification.  By the eleventh century taking an arduous and sometimes dangerous trek to a sacred site was believed to procure spiritual benefit, even a reduction of time in Purgatory. During the centuries following the fall of Jerusalem, the city’s Muslim rulers allowed pilgrimages to continue.  In time, however, the journey to the Holy Land became more difficult, especially after the Seljuk Turks captured the Levant. Recapturing Jerusalem would once again open the channel of blessing.

So, on one level, to understand the Crusades we must begin by acknowledging the heart of every Christian who eagerly packs to head off to a small middle-eastern nation to “walk where Jesus walked” harbors impulses distantly-related to those giving birth to the Crusades.

Getting Jerusalem back into Christian hands was an important goal but the Crusades also were inspired by perceived threats to European civilization

Had we been in Western Europe, during the five centuries prior to the crusades, we would have heard accounts of what Christians in the East were experiencing.

The Byzantine Empire had been a place of cultural wonder; Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia was widely acclaimed as the most beautiful church in the world.  All seemed well until the beginning of the seventh century. Lars Brownworth sketches how the events of that pivotal century hit the Eastern Christians like an emotional and spiritual Taser. The Byzantine Empire

… had been the dominant power of the Mediterranean, stretching from Spain to the Black Sea, the proud and confident repository of Christian culture and civilization. …. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything had changed. A bewildering enemy had erupted from the desert sands and carried all before them. Two-thirds of the empire’s territories had vanished in the flood, and half its population had disappeared. Arab raiders plundered the remaining countryside, and the cities were mere shells of what they had been in happier times. Whole populations fled the uncertainty of urban life and retreated to the more defensible safety of mountaintops, islands, or otherwise inaccessible places. Refugees impoverished and ruined by Muslim attacks roamed Constantinople’s streets, and prosperity dried up. The once-powerful empire had shrunk to Asia Minor, and was now poorer, less populated, and far weaker than the neighboring caliphate.

The Byzantine world was left deeply traumatized. The armies of [Mohammed] had clashed with the Christian empire whose ruler was the sword arm of God, and yet it was the banner of Christ that had fallen back. In only eight years, the Muslims had conquered three of the five great patriarchates of the Christian Church—Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—and neither prayers, nor icons, nor steel had been able to stop them. An arrogant caliph had seized Christendom’s holiest city and built the Dome of the Rock, boasting that Islam had superseded Christianity. (https://erenow.com/ancient/lost-to-the-west-the-forgotten-byzantine-empire-that-rescued-western-civilization/15.html. Accessed 30 August 2018.)

The new enemy seemed relentless. In the year 800 there were more Christians east of Damascus than west of the ancient city.  By the end of the eleventh century many of those Christian communities had disappeared and the remaining Christians had little influence; until the late twentieth century the West would be the stronghold of Christianity.  From 1000 to 1027, Turkish Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India seventeen times.  Although his goal was primarily to seize the subcontinent’s wealth, his invasions gave Islam a foothold in the primarily Hindu nation. Muslim advances toward the east seemed unstoppable. 

To the north, Armenia, the first nation to officially adopt Christianity (301), faced continuing warfare with Islamic forces until it finally fell to the Seljuks in 1064. With the help of the Byzantine emperor, Armenian leaders set up a government-in-exile in Cilicia; the area became a staging ground for some Crusader activity. 

Scarcely thirty years before the call for the first crusade, the Byzantine armies fell to Muslim forces, foreshadowing the end of Christian rule in Asia Minor. Constantinople was a prize waiting to be taken; though the city had repelled Islamic forces repeatedly, the task of defending the city was becoming increasingly difficult.  The Byzantine ruler’s appeal to the west for help in defeating the Seljuk Turks helped inspire the Crusades.  

In short, many Europeans believed it would only be a matter of time before Muslim conquerors turned their eyes further westward.  Indeed, the Moors had been ruling most of the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 400 years when Urban called for the first crusade; although Spanish Christians were beginning to push back against the Mooris, the last of the Moors would not be expelled from Spain until 1492.

St Louis University historian and crusades scholar Thomas F. Madden wrote:

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. (https://www.crisismagazine.com/2002/the-real-history-of-the-crusades-2)

Not only were the crusaders motivated by concern over perceived threats to their own homelands, they also were motivated by the perceived plight of fellow Christians in far-off lands. Christians in Western Europe believed Christians in lands under Muslim control were being subjected to horrendous atrocities. In his speech calling for a crusade, Urban spoke of how Christians were being forcibly circumcised, used as target practice by Muslim archers, and beheaded in a game to see who could behead an infidel with a single stroke.  He spoke of Christian women being raped and Christian men being disemboweled in ways that would make an abattoir seem compassionate. That these stories may have been untrue or exaggerated is unimportant; those who heard the stories believed them.  After all, the reports came from the pope (who likely believed them) and shouldn’t you believe the pope?    

Just over a century ago, in the days prior to England’s entry into the First World War, reports of atrocities committed by conquering German soldiers were widespread.  The most heinous accounts concerned the rape of dozens of nuns in Belgium.  While post-war research showed these reports to have been false, in 1914 the rumors were believed, fanning the desire to defeat “the Hun” and restore Christian civilization.

In the same way, reports of outrages against Christians in the Middle East impelled the first crusaders to act. Even if some reports were untrue, there is little doubt others were. According to Schmidt, a massacre of Armenian Christians in 1096 provided evidence to justify the First Crusade.  (That massacre was the first of several targeting Armenian Christians over the next millennium, the best known being the 1915 “Armenian genocide.”)

If modern Britons—in the age of telegraph and telephone—could be persuaded to believe the worst about Germans only a few miles across the North Sea, surely we can understand how eleventh century Christians in France, Germany, Italy, and England might have believed the worst about Muslims thousands of miles away.

Of course, they knew Christians under Islamic ruler were treated as second-class citizens.   Severely taxed and allowed to practice only a limited form of their faith, these Christians lived under pressure.  Sometimes conversion to Islam seemed the only way to relief.  So, again, a swift and sure rescue mounted by Christians with greater resources seemed to be the Christian thing to do. Philip Jenkins in The Lost History of Christianity explains how constant, unrelenting pressure led many Christians to give up their faith and embrace the comparatively easy way of Islam, challenging those Western Christians—who’ve never known persecution—who cavalierly claim the church benefits from persecution. This may not perpetuate the notion of the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the church but it does reflect reality.

So, in addition to national self-interest we may add compassionate outrage to the motives of the crusaders.    

One further motive needs to be mentioned, one that may puzzle the typical evangelical.  

The crusaders sought to change their spiritual destiny.  Fighting for the freedom of the holy land became a means of grace.  Taking the cross—becoming a crusader—brought absolution for sin; any who might die on a crusade was assured a place in heaven.  The promise of plenary indulgence or remission of their sins was important to the crusaders since many were guilty of the grave sin of murder.  Killing another, even in battle, was considered a violation of the sixth commandment, such a terrible sin there was almost no hope of forgiveness; many of those taking the cross had bloodied their swords fighting other Christians, making their actions even more damning.  Becoming a crusader could expunge that guilt. The special situation allowing this was explained, in part, by revisiting the theory of “the just war,” a concept largely neglected since Augustine.

If we who have benefited from the promulgation of evangelical theology with its emphasis on grace should wonder how our eleventh-century forebears could have believed this, we need to remember many who took the cross were illiterate. Those who could read probably had little access to the Bible.  All belonged to a church claiming the absolute right to interpret the Bible. That right would not be seriously challenged until at least two centuries later.   So, when these desperate souls were told God willed the crusades and fighting in a crusade might be their best hope for salvation they believed.

The course of the crusades.  Any good general text on church history will give a useful overview of the crusades, there number, goals, and accomplishments.  Therefore, I won’t attempt to discuss each of the seven or eight—depending on who is counting—crusades extending from 1095 to 1271.  The first was the most successful, though that success did not last; the fourth crusade didn’t even reach the Holy Land but saw the crusaders turn their fury on fellow Christians.  The crusaders knew some victories but more defeats; of greater significance were the acts of inhumanity and utter folly done in the name of Christ, actions that did more to discredit Christianity than promote it.  Today, we recall these actions far more often than we recall “many of the crusaders had the sincere desire to win people to Christ.” (Robert Tuttle, The Story of Evangelism: A History of the Witness to the Gospel, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006, p. 206.)  Sadly, in pursuing this goal the crusaders were more often led by the spirit of the age than by the Spirit of Christ.

To acknowledge this is not necessarily to agree the Crusades were a concerted effort to colonize the Middle East.  While so-called “Crusader Kingdoms” were formed they were not colonies in the modern sense (“modern” as in post-sixteenth century): they were not subject to the authority of London, Paris, or any other European capital.  These kingdoms would be gone long before Portugal claimed Brazil, Spain claimed Mexico (and a lot more), or Britain and France squabbled over what would become Canada.  They functioned as independent venues.  True, under the Crusaders the Augustinians turned the Dome of the Rock into a church and the Knights Templar turned the Al-Aqsa Mosque into the headquarters for the order but this is not quite the same as Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr True, under the Crusaders the Augustinians turned the Dome of the Rock into a church and the Knights Templar turned the Al-Aqsa Mosque into the headquarters for the order but this is not quite the same as Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah destroying the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the events precipitating the Crusades in the first place.

The following observations put the reprehensible aspects of the crusades into context. Though they do not excuse them.

·      The nature of medieval warfare was brutal. Look at the period’s tapestries and murals, such as the Bayeux Tapestry showing the Norman Conquest. Dead soldiers litter the battleground, many of them beheaded.  An axman attacking a mounted knight seems to be targeting the horse, perhaps so he might be able to dispatch the knight once he had been thrown from his mount.  At the same time, a depiction of the Battle of Qadisiyya between Muslim Arabs and the Persian forces shows just as much brutality on the part of the conquering Muslims. The battle gave the Islamic forces control of Persia.  Bloodthirstiness was not the sole province of “Christian” soldiers.  Even Saladin, whom Hollywood presents as more enlightened than his Christian counterparts, was once entertained by the public execution of captured crusaders.

·      Some accounts of “Christian” barbarity are questionable.  Hyperbole filled the victors’ reports.  Without doubt some victorious crusaders displayed almost unbridled violence when they captured Jerusalem in June/July 1099.  Yet, historian Rodney Stark says “no sensible person” will believe the reports of the blood around the temple mount being so deep it reached the horses’ knees.  (God’s Battalion’s: The Case for the Crusades, Harper, p. 159) Moreover, the often repeated charge that the crusaders burned a synagogue filled with frightened Jews is questionable: a letter from a Jewish eyewitness (discovered in the 1950s) written only two weeks after the city’s fall confirms the burning of the synagogue but does not mention anyone dying in the fire.  Since Jews fought alongside the Muslims there’s no doubt many died but it seems most Jews were allowed to leave the city.   Elsewhere, in lands now ruled by the occupying forces, some Arab peasants seemed to have preferred their Christian rulers to Muslim rulers—taxes under the Christians appear to have been lower.

·      Not all European Christians endorsed the crusades.  In 1219, a weak and sickly Francis of Assisi visited Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade in an attempt to obtain peace or martyrdom; he failed at both. While he did not overtly reject the concept of the Crusades, Francis believed the best solution to the conflict would involve the Muslim’s turning to Christ, so his strategy included presenting the gospel to the sultan.  Taking the example of his order’s founder, Ramon Llull (c. 1232-c. 1315), a Franciscan, became a vocal critic of the Crusades; Llull devoted himself to evangelizing the Muslims and the Jews, believing the two groups could best be reached by love and reasoned argument.  Although accounts of his death lack solid evidence, Franciscan tradition says Llull was martyred by a crowd angered by his preaching.  Again, while they were not effective in opposing the Crusades, they attempted to show a better way to deal with the conflict between the Cross and the Crescent. 

·      Perspectives on the Crusades are complex and varied, something to keep in mind when Christian apologists answer questions about what the church was up to in the Middle East from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century (when the Crusaders’ control of Jerusalem ended). To some historians, the Crusades were elements of  “a defensive war” protecting Western Europe from Islamic incursion.  To others, the Crusades were “a land grab” conducted by the greedy rulers of France, Germany, and England.  To still others, the Crusades represented an opportunity to reestablish Christian hegemony in the land where Christ was born and where many of the Faith’s most influential thinkers had lived.  And, to some, the Crusades were a humanitarian effort to relieve fellow Christians living under a repressive regime.  It is possible to marshal evidence supporting each of these interpretations, though the first and last have the support of specialists in the field.            

As a Christian, I regret the Crusades; the crusaders’ behavior too often failed to demonstrate Christian love.  Yet, I’m not sure how much weight my apologizing for them carries. I cannot confess and seek absolution for the sins of another, certainly not those of another generation.  As an amateur historian, I know circumstances existed making the Crusades seem an appropriate response to the situation in the Levant.  So, unless I am willing to take the position of total pacifism, the best I can say is that the Crusaders often failed to act as Christ’s people should act.  On this matter, Warren Larson says:

I think an apology  [for the Crusades] is in order.  But having said that, I think we have to hold Muslims accountable too.  They might forget or not be aware that, starting in 1915, Turks killed more than a million and a half Armenian Christians.  There have been unsuccessful encounters between Muslims and Christians for nearly the last 1,500 years, but [this history is] not all the fault of the West and Christians.  Muslims have also done wrong. (“Waging Peace on Islam,” Christianity Today, June 2005, Vol. 49, No. 6, in which Stan Guthrie interviews Warren Larson.)

Larson goes on to caution Christians who might apologize to Muslims for the Crusades: the Muslim belief in jihad, that notion of holy war which justifies violence against the enemies of Islam, and the Muslim resistance to asking for forgiveness make receiving an apology for Muslim violence unlikely.

Of course whatever wrongdoing might be ascribed to the Muslims is a matter for their religious leaders to acknowledge and reckon with; it is the misbehavior of Christians that the apologist must address.

The Crusades and Apologetics

Men and women who dozed through their world history classes often believe they know enough to offer the Crusades as evidence sufficient to deny the claims of Christianity.  Though the only Urban they may know coaches OSU’s Buckeyes, they have made the Crusades an apologetics issue.

Some attempt to diffuse the issue by saying the Crusaders were not Christians, so—by implication—you can’t blame us real Christians.  Beyond the fact such judgment is beyond the our remit and the charge smells of the old Protestant claim that anything done by the church from the early second century to the sixteenth is suspect, the defense is hazardous.  Chiefly, we often are faced with those who were clearly Christians yet held views or engaged in behavior inconsistent with that claim.

A look back at slavery in America illustrates this problem.

Consider Robert E. Lee, whose statues have attracted so much attention in recent days.  Though he fought for the south, defending a civilization built on the institution, his attitude toward slavery is unclear. His lands were worked by slaves but, it is claimed, these slaves belonged to his wife. Clearer, however, is the almost universal remembrance of the general as a devout Christian. 

More problematic for evangelicals, a century before Lee, Jonathan Edwards owned slaves and George Whitefield celebrated when his orphanage in Georgia was prosperous enough to buy slaves.

Several of the Princeton theologians who helped shape the evangelical view of Scripture defended slavery as an institution sanctioned by the Bible.  This included Charles Hodge (1797 – 1878) who was described by W. A. Hoffecker as “the most prominent American Presbyterian theologian of the nineteenth century.” (Dictionary of Christianity in America, IVP 1990, p. 538.) In fairness, Hodge seems to have changed his mind about slavery somewhere around 1850, though some biographers claim he condemned the American system of slavery not the institution itself.  But the damage was already done; despite any new opinion he may have embraced, Hodge had to witness his writings being used by both abolitionists and defenders of slavery.

By appealing to a technicality we might claim the Southern Baptist Convention (the American denomination with which I am most familiar) was not born to defend slavery; still, slave-holding deacons found the SBC a comfortable niche.  Baptist leaders in antebellum Texas, like other Southern Baptists across the south, urged keeping slaves illiterate and teaching slaves “that slavery is biblical, that masters are the slaves’ natural protectors, and that they are better off in slavery than in freedom.” (H. L. McBeth, Texas Baptists: A Sesquicentennial History, p. 54.) In post-war years, those same leaders were puzzled when former slaves failed to respond to evangelistic appeals.

Is this not an appalling stain on the testimony of these American Christians?  Certainly.  Yet, isn’t it possible some of these flawed Christians led ancestors of ours to faith in Christ, all the while influencing their social attitudes?  If so, they passed on a tainted blessing.  But wouldn’t most of us hesitate to thumb through the Book of Life, eraser in hand, looking for our sexist, racist, slave-holding ancestors’ names?

Dinesh D’Souza, Alvin J. Schmidt, and others have attempted to demonstrate the benefits Christianity has brought to civilization.  I believe we can argue Christians have accomplished so much good in the world that events like the Crusades must be seen as anomalies.   More important, while historical apologetics is a useful tool, it cannot be the foundation of the Christian truth claim.  The truth of Christianity rests on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, the person who invokes the Crusades as a reason to reject Christianity may be trying to evade the challenge of what to do with Jesus Christ.  Any prolonged apologetic dialogue, especially one with an evangelistic aim, must either begin with Jesus or end with Jesus. 

Nevertheless, you probably won’t be able to ignore or long evade questions about Christians behaving badly.

How, then, do we meet the challenges?

Certainly honesty is the starting point.  Christians often fail to live Christlike lives; even those who do a better job of it than most other Christians will fail at some point.  A corollary truth to the one saying, “Christians sin” is one saying, “No one should be surprised.”  John was writing to Christians when he said, “If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins.” (I John 1:9) After decades of following Jesus, sharing the good news of his love, and building churches in tough places, the apostle knew the church was not the place to look for “perfect” people.  In fact, he offered his promise with this caveat: “If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense.” (I John 1:8 The Message) 

In the centuries after John wrote those words some Christians forgot them.  They began to teach that a single sin following baptism invalidated your salvation; this prompted some to postpone baptism because they knew how weak they were, how susceptible to temptation they were.  That error generated a false picture of God and denigrated the salvation he offers.

Years before John wrote, James had instructed Christians, “ confess your sins to one another and pray for one another….” (James 5:16)  The words imply an open and honest admission of failure; we may also infer from them that the ideal Christian community should be one of support and encouragement, a place where people get better.

And, of course, Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses.”  Did you get that?  Just as surely as we need “daily” bread to sustain us, we need regular forgiveness to maintain our spiritual health. Fortunately the holy God of heaven invites sinners to ask for forgiveness. 

We all have failed—and continue to fail—to give God his due; we are debtors before heaven. We owe a debt we cannot ever hope to pay. Who would ever claim to have lived up to God's demands? None of us; we all fall short. Traditionally, we have put it this way: We have done those things we ought not to have done and left undone those things we ought to have done. 

Into this situation the gospel brings a message of grace and restoration.

Just as acknowledging our propensity to sin does not permit us to ignore the Biblical calls to holiness and sanctification, neither does it demand we retreat before the critics charge that Christians sin.  Those who resist Christ’s call to repent and believe because Christians aren’t perfect fail to understand they are expecting more than Jesus expected.

Sometimes we Christians fall prey to the inertia pull of our culture.  Sometimes we’re not even aware it’s happening.  Sometimes we imagine this struggle to be new. But it has been happening since the beginning.  In Romans 12, Paul delineates the counter-cultural lifestyle of the Christian, a lifestyle of grateful response to the salvation God has graciously given us, a lifestyle demanding thoughtful diligence whatever shape our culture may take.  I have always liked J. B. Phillips’s rendering of 12:2, “Don’t let the world [culture] around you squeeze you into its own mould (sic), but let God re-mould your minds from within….” It is a goal so difficult to attain.  The best of us sometimes fail to resist the culture’s molding process.  The pastor who served the church where I spent my childhood and youth was widely known as a denominational leader and a Bible scholar; he took time for the youth of the church when many other pastors would have relegated them to volunteers; he offered compassionate counsel to the troubled; yet, a son of the South, he held clearly racist notions.  He supported the status quo of segregation in schools and opposed interracial marriage, basing those positions, as many others did, on erroneous interpretations of obscure scriptures.  Doubtless, he had learned those interpretations from his mentors and believed the long-standing social structures he had grown-up with were the way things should be, the way God wanted them to be.  The culture had squeezed him into its mold.  But before my pastor was born (1896) some Christians realized those Scriptures were being misinterpreted and misapplied; they began the slow move toward rejecting racism. 

To resist the culture means we thoughtfully ask if our interpretation of scripture and moral positions are informed by accepted canons of interpretation or by cherished cultural norms.  John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church and leader of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Awakening, was a lifelong Tory: So it is legitimate to ask if his passionate condemnation the American Revolution was based on his understanding of scripture or on his political philosophy.

I recently had dinner with an old friend who has been a pastor and denominational leader for nearly four decades. Raised as a Baptist, he had been taught from childhood the evils of “drink,” enjoined by pastors, Sunday school teachers, and parents to eschew alcohol.  All three of his adult children are involved in ministry at their Baptist churches; all three enjoy drinking alcohol.  My friend believes the majority of Baptist young adults have abandoned the teetotalism born out of the alcohol-related social and health crises endemic to the nineteenth-century American frontier.

Acknowledging the propensity of Christians to be influenced negatively by their cultures gives us the opportunity to remind the critic that the proper foundation for our behavior is the Bible.

Further, the Crusades illustrate the axiom:  Where the church and the state are wed, the marriage is always dysfunctional.  In the most revered writings of Islam, the distinction between a spiritual and a secular leader is often obscured; a “caliph” is viewed as a spiritual and political successor to Mohammed.  Most Muslim nations brook no vigorous rivals to Islam.  The Christian Bible, however, advocates a division between that which is “Caesar’s” and that which is “God’s.”  Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, have sometimes yielded to the temptation to make the church an agent of the state or, more often, to use the state as an agent of the church.  This never works well, neither for the church nor for the state. 

Schmidt insists the earliest Crusades were just, defensive wars but believes they “ . . . should have been launched by the appropriate head of state, not the head of the Christian church in the West.” (The Great Divide: The Failure of Islam and the Triumph of the West, p. 154.)  Because the pope called for the Crusades, these wars have forever been stamped as a Christian action. Though that cannot be undone, we also need to consider other important aspects in the papacy’s involvement in the Crusades.  In calling for a crusade, Urban said nothing about attempting to convert the Muslims, a charge some modern critics make. Even in the middle ages the church understood an army of thousands was not an effective evangelistic tool.  Furthermore, the massacre of Jews associated with the Crusades, especially the so-called “People’s Crusade,” were not sanctioned by the church; such atrocities took place either in cities were there were no resident bishops or where the perpetrators defied bishops’ efforts to protect the Jewish population (in some instances, marauders broke into the local bishop’s palace to seize Jews sheltered there).  During the Fourth Crusade (1201), when Crusaders attacked Orthodox Christian centers, the Pope immediately excommunicated the perpetrators.  The papacy tried hard, but not always successfully, to rein in the Crusaders.  

The “Children’s Crusade,” which was probably made up of teenagers (or simple peasants) rather than children, set off in 1212.  Meager references prevent us knowing how many the fanatical Stephen of Cloyes enticed to follow him on his unauthorized crusade; in any case most were drowned or were captured and sold into slavery.  Sometimes rulers didn’t fare much better:  Emperor Frederick Barbarossa I drowned in a swollen stream while crusading in Cilicia; though England’s Richard the First defeated Saladin in 1191, he was captured in Austria on his way home and held for ransom. Back home in England, Richard’s absence allowed his infamous brother Prince John to lead the nation into chaos. The English, the French, the Germans, and others whose leaders went to the Crusades often suffered from “the Saladin tithe,” taxes levied to pay the costs of the armies.  Troubadours sang bitter songs about these taxes. Wives and mothers wrote poetry to express their grief at what they conceived as the useless deaths of their loved ones.  Even when not engaged in battle, the ordinary crusader faced danger from scurvy, dysentery, malaria, and other diseases; in his history of medical care during the Crusades, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon,

Piers D. Mitchell suggests: “thousands appear to have died from such diseases in the Latin East.” (http://blog.targethealth.com/sickness-disease-during-the-crusades/) Though Urban had used the plight of their fellow Christians to justify his appeal, when the crusaders finally withdrew, life for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries was often harder than it had been before; for example, Egypt’s Coptic Christians were accused of collaborating with the Europeans—a false charge—and suffered for it.  Although the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire remained until 1453, the Crusades hastened its ultimate fall, since weary Europeans would not come to the aid of Eastern Christians who would not submit to the Pope. (Ironically, the empire’s fall hastened the coming of the Renaissance as scholars from Constantinople fled westward.)

Chroniclers report how the crowd responded to Pope Urban II’s call for a crusade by spontaneously shouting, “Deus vult, Deus vult” (“God wills it, God wills it”).  After more than two centuries of bloodshed and death we can understand how some Europeans began to question that; eight centuries later we understand why people still do.

In the end, I can neither totally endorse the Crusades nor can I totally condemn the Crusades.  No doubt they hurt Christianity’s reputation and its relationship with Muslim nations, but historians insist Muslims largely ignored the Crusades until the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries when agitators used their specter to fan anti-colonial flames.  The Crusades weren’t given much thought because Muslims knew they had ultimately won.  “From the perspective of Muslim history,” Thomas Madden writes, “[the Crusades] were simple tiny and failed attempts to halt the inevitable expansion of Islam.” (Madden , The New Concise History of the Crusades, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, p. xii)  As the old song goes, “It’s Istanbul not Constantinople.”

Maybe the Crusades were unnecessary. Maybe the Crusades were the best response to the perceived crisis of the times. Charitably, the Crusades were a blend of faith, failure, and folly.  Though they stifled the Islamic dream conquering Europe, they failed to make Jerusalem a completely “Christian” city.  Treaties would make Jerusalem an open city: mosques, churches, and synagogues would exist within its confines; Muslims, Jews, and Christians (Catholic and Orthodox) would worship within earshot of one another, an abomination to the strictest of each group.  Significantly, pilgrimages were allowed to resume.

 It’s tempting to wonder what might have happened if there had been no Crusades.  Had there been no Crusades would 9/11 have happened? Hard to say; though Madden believes the attack had nothing to do with events beginning ten centuries before.  But I digress.  Had there been no Crusades, would the majestic St. Paul’s Cathedral in London be a mosque?  Would the so-called “Great Century” have seen missionaries sailing off under the banner of the Crescent rather than the Cross—missionaries accompanied by squadrons of soldiers rather than the simple faith that God would be with them?  Would you rarely see a woman behind the wheel of a car? Would Christians live as second-class citizens? Would you know presenting the claims of Christ to a Muslim friend might put your very life in jeopardy?  Of course, speculation is so speculative and this particular line of speculation (inspired by Edward Gibbon who wondered what might have happened had the Franks not defeated the Muslims at Tours in 732) may be too imaginative. 

That aside, let me end with what I hope are two, more substantive, observations.

Though the Crusades represented Christianity at its worst, the same era saw Christianity at its best.  Three years after Urban II called for a crusade, Anselm published his Cur Deus Homo? (Why the God-Man?), a seminal work on the atonement; two and a half centuries later, as the age of the crusades drew to a close, Thomas Aquinas was producing his Summas,  theological masterpieces that continue to influence Christian thought; in fact, several of the “doctors of the church” produced their classic works during the era.  Born in 1098, Hildegard of Bingen would become a busy abbess and prolific writer, producing hymns, devotional materials, and theological treatises; though known for her visions and prophetic writings, she also made practical contributions through the medical texts she wrote.  About a century after the First Crusade an Italian playboy from Assisi named Francis renounced his former lifestyle and began urging the church to show Christlike compassion to the poor and outcasts. The Franciscans, as his followers became known, would build hospitals, do important academic research, and carry the message of Christianity into new places, such as the American Southwest.  Even while the Crusades raged it wasn’t all bad.

Here is a final observation concerning those who resist Christ’s claims because of the behavior of Christians: Those who denounce the bad behavior of famous Christians may have been wounded by lesser-known Christians who behaved badly.  On one level, dealing with the problems posed by the Crusades demands a basic knowledge of history and the acumen to place the events into their cultural context; we may, should we choose, approach the problem with cool detachment.  But dealing with the pain and sense of betrayal felt by one hurt by someone claiming to be a Christian (or hurt by a genuine but flawed believer) demands compassion, patience, and commitment.  That will take more time than a simple history lesson.