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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” |
