Myths about the Crusades
By Subby Szterszky
September 9, 2013
“History is written by the victors,” says the oft-quoted and rather jaded assessment. But truth be told, in our own time it might be more apt to say, “History is written by Hollywood and popular opinion.”
Not that Hollywood and popular opinion have found much resistance in this regard. Ours is a comparatively ahistorical culture. We live in the moment and plan for the future but typically don’t place too much value on the past. Consequently, when a movie comes along and claims to be based on “actual historical events,” many of us simply accept the picture it paints without questioning whether that picture is in fact true. When politicians or journalists make pronouncements about history, most of us aren’t familiar enough with that history to cry foul where appropriate.
Take the Crusades as an example. Together with the Inquisition, the Crusades make up that treasured pair of historical trump cards that opponents of Christianity love to toss on the table. “How can anyone believe in a religion responsible for such atrocities?” they ask.
Most of us are likely familiar with the standard Crusade narrative: During the Middle Ages, several waves of boorish, bloodthirsty Christians, egged on by their fanatical popes, trundled across Europe to the Holy Land in search of loot. Once there, they attacked and slaughtered thousands of peaceful, sophisticated Muslims in an unprovoked display of early-onset Western imperialism. In the process, they caused the decline of Medieval Muslim culture, thereby giving modern Muslims a justifiable grievance against the West.
This narrative is so widespread as to seem virtually beyond dispute. It’s found in many popular history texts on the subject. It was on full display in Ridley Scott’s 2005 feature film, “Kingdom of Heaven.” It was referenced by former U.S. President Bill Clinton in a speech after 9/11 to suggest that – just maybe – those attacks were understandable from a certain viewpoint. Many Muslims, both extremists and moderates, have embraced it and used it for political advantage. And some Christians, labouring under its weight, have even felt compelled to publicly apologize for the Crusades.
The problem? Like Ridley Scott’s film, the received Crusade narrative is essentially a work of historical fiction. It’s based on “actual historical events,” mingled with generous helpings of exaggeration, distortion and flat-out falsehood. Here are just a few common Crusade myths, briefly noted:
1. The Crusades were an unprovoked attack by militant Christians on peaceful Muslims
This is probably the most basic misconception about the Crusades. It requires a massive suspension of disbelief to ignore the politically incorrect elephant in the room: by the time Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095, Muslims had been attacking and conquering Christian lands for over 450 years.
In 632, the year Muhammad died, virtually the entire Mediterranean world was in Christian hands. Within a century, most of these lands had fallen to the Muslim onslaught. This included Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and most of Asia Minor. Southern France and Italy were under attack, and would soon lose their island possessions. In the east, the Byzantine Empire desperately clung to a small corner of Asia Minor around Constantinople. Far from being an unprovoked war of aggression, the Crusades were the first large-scale European counterattack against the dire and ongoing threat of Islamic expansion.
2. The Crusaders were barbarian bigots attacking a tolerant and advanced Muslim culture
Like most of the myths about the Crusades, this was fabricated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectuals with an axe to grind against Christianity. In reality, Europeans of the so-called “Dark Ages” were not the benighted primitives of popular imagination. They had already made technological advances in food production and war craft, among others things, that gave them a distinct edge over their adversaries. Moreover they showed little interest in forcibly converting others to their faith, at least during this period of history.
On the other hand, the Muslims weren’t the model of enlightened multiculturalism that’s commonly depicted. They had a complex and uneasy relationship with their conquered subjects, by turns persecuting and “tolerating” them as second-class citizens. Regarding the achievements of Medieval Muslim culture, sociologist and historian Rodney Stark is quite blunt:
The civilization we typically associate with Islam was in fact the civilization of the Christians and Jews they were ruling. When those Christians and Jews finally disappeared, so too did that advanced “Muslim” civilization. Suddenly the Muslims were all backward, and the question was, “How did they lose all that civilization?” They didn’t. They never had it.
3. The Crusaders used religion as an excuse for their greed, bloodlust and imperialistic ambitions
This is a gross distortion that reads modern secular assumptions back into the Medieval mind. The Crusaders were violent people living in violent times. They were also deeply religious, with a keen sense of their own sinfulness. Labouring under a theology that had lost track of salvation by free grace through the Gospel of Christ, they sought to do acts of penance for the forgiveness of their sins. Going on Crusade, enduring hardship to help their embattled Christian brothers and suffering a martyr’s death fit the bill nicely.
Far from dreaming of Eastern wealth and political glory, most Crusaders mortgaged themselves, their families and even their countries into insolvency to finance their venture. Most of them expected to die on Crusade, and many of them did. It was a price they were willing to pay for the salvation of their souls.
4. The Crusades gave Muslims a legitimate grievance against the West
This one is a genuine case of truth being stranger than fiction. Until the early twentieth century, the Muslim world thought little and cared less about the Crusades. If anything, they were a distant memory of a series of skirmishes with pesky Westerners that ended when the victorious Muslims finally booted the Europeans out of the Holy Land, as they did in 1291. After that, the Crusades faded from the Muslim consciousness for the next 600 years.
Then the dissolution of the Turkish Ottoman Empire after World War I gave rise to a new Arab nationalism, which needed a narrative to frame its struggles and aspirations. It needed someone to blame for the backward state of Islamic culture at the time.
In one of the most sublime examples of historical irony, the Arab nationalists and the Islamic fundamentalists after them took up the Enlightenment version of the Crusade story, distortions and all, and made it their own. Historian and political scientist Paul Crawford sums it up neatly:
So it was not the crusades that taught Islam to attack and hate Christians. Far from it. Those activities had preceded the crusades by a very long time, and stretch back to the inception of Islam. Rather, it was the West which taught Islam to hate the crusades. The irony is rich.
To the present day, many Muslims of every stripe take it as a point of faith that the Crusades were the first shot fired in the West’s ongoing war of oppression against Islam. All based on a historical fiction.
Conclusions
At this point, a couple of clarifications are in order.
First, these ideas are not the product of fringe revisionism, but are taken from leading contemporary scholarship on the Crusades. Indeed, top Crusade historians have been saying similar things for a long time, but their voice generally goes unheard. This is mostly because what they’re saying rubs against the liberal secular zeitgeist, which loves to blame all the world’s woes on Western civilization, Christianity in particular.
Second, the point of this exercise isn’t to whitewash Medieval Christians, or to give them a free pass for terrible things they may have done. Bottom line, it was a time of war in a larger era of warfare. Atrocities were committed on both sides that we simply cannot pass over, as modern people or as Biblically faithful Christians.
But as Christians we’re also committed to the truth, not just theological and moral, but scientific and historical as well. We’re not all historians, but we can equip ourselves so that when someone rejects the faith from a faulty understanding of history, we can at least begin to engage them with the truth.
Sources and further reading
Brendan Case, “God’s Battalions: The case for the Crusades (book review),” Relevant, December 9, 2009, http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/books/gods-battalions-case-crusades
Paul F. Crawford, “Four myths about the Crusades,” Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2011, http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1483
Timothy Dalrymple, “Crusade for Christ: An interview with Rodney Stark,” Patheos, May 13, 2010, http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Crusades-for-Christ
Thomas F. Madden, “Inventing the Crusades,” First Things, June/July 2009, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/05/inventing-the-crusades-1243195699
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: The case for the Crusades, New York: HarperOne, 2010.
Subby Szterszky is the managing editor of Focus Insights.
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