The crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonisation; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military.
(A History of Christianity page 241)
Paul Johnson’s magisterial History of Christianity is divided into eight parts.
- Part One describes the life of Jesus and, following his execution, the development of a ‘Christian’ theology and the spread of Christianity during the years of repression by the Roman Empire.
- Part Two ‘From Martyrs to Inquisitors’ (250 to 450) describes the changing fortunes of the faith, as it morphs from a banned underground movement into the officially sanctioned state religion of the Roman Empire. By 400 it is firmly enough established to begin to ban and persecute pagans and non-believers in its own right.
- Part Three ‘Mitred Lords and Crowned Ikons (450 to 1054)’ covers the Dark Ages, focusing on the achievement of Charlemagne in establishing order across a wide expanse of northern Europe, wholeheartedly accepting Christianity and becoming an active evangelist for it.
Part Four: ‘The Total Society and its Enemies (1054 to 1500)’
This section covers a myriad historical developments but grouped under one Big Idea: From the later 11th century through to around 1500 the papacy set out to systematically aggregate religious and secular power to itself.
Charlemagne (king of the Franks from 768 to 814) had expected his bishops, and even the pope himself, to obey his commands. He found a subordinate Church an invaluable aid in establishing law and order in 9th century Europe.
But around the time of the Norman Conquest the papacy began to flex its muscles, and successive popes tried to seize the upper hand against secular rulers, not least by asserting the Church’s control over every aspect of secular life. The body of church law expanded exponentially. The types of monastic order and mendicant friars burgeoned: Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans and so on. Clerics asserted a dizzying array of taxes, especially the hated ‘mortuary’ tax i.e. they wouldn’t bury you unless your family handed over a percentage of your valuables to the church.
Something similar happened with the concept of ‘indulgences’, which were first issued for pilgrims who attended a one-off jubilee in Rome in 1300. You bought them and – if you attended certain ceremonies, pilgrimages, feasts etc, they got you out of purgatory early. The 1300 Jubilee brought in so much money for the Church that the next pope declared there’d be another jubilee in 1350. Soon they were being declared every ten years. Eventually you could pay someone to do the pilgrimage for you, just like you could pay people to do your penances and pay clerics to sing masses for you after you were dead. Johnson calls it the growth of ‘mechanical’ Christianity.
Johnson gives countless examples of the invasive growth of church administration: For example, in the 10th century the Pope had had only a hazy idea where Britain even was; but by the 13th century we find the Pope intervening between two bishops in East Anglia squabbling about who benefits from the tithes of a local parish church.
But as the Total Church pushed its tentacles into every aspect of society, it planted the seeds of opposition. Johnson records various early appearances of anti-clerical complaints and these grew into a crescendo when the papacy as an institution left Rome altogether to relocate to Avignon in 1309.
To all intelligent observers it became clear the church was ceasing to be a spiritual body and becoming a well-run multinational corporation. The second half of the chapter details the ways the Church’s aspiration to ‘Total Control of Western Society’ generated increasing criticism and opposition. He examines the various movements for reform, including the intellectual ‘Humanist’ movement. This was just beginning to suggest the possibility of sophisticated reform within the established Church, when its subtle suggestions and ecumenical spirit were swept away in the tsunami of Martin Luther’s rhodomontades and the immense upheaval of the Reformation (started 1517).
The Crusades
It is in this overarching context that Johnson devotes a dozen or so pages to the Crusades. His main points are:
Early Christians viewed all violence as abhorrent, preferring death and martyrdom to armed resistance. Here, as in so many other issues, it was St Augustine who gave Christianity its baleful turn. He reasoned that men fight anyway, so a complete and realistic theology must take account of this fact, give in to human nature, and define under what circumstances violence, fighting and war are justified. Augustine’s writings gave birth to the long tradition of theologising about the ‘Just War’. These arguments became elaborated, along with the rest of ‘mechanical’ medieval theology, as successive popes developed more and more casuistical arguments: for example claiming that anyone dying in battle in defence of the faith would go to heaven; then would be defined as a ‘martyr’; and then would have all their sins forgiven. And obviously, the most just of just wars would be not against other Christian kings, but against either heretics and blasphemers (as defined, of course, by the pope), or against the joint enemy, the infidel hordes who had swept across the Mediterranean in the 7th and 8th centuries.
As to this Muslim world, Johnson shows in convincing detail how Islam had succeeded in sweeping through the Middle East and the North African coast largely because of the hopeless divisions among innumerable forms of North African Christianity – there were Nestorians and Pelagians and Arians who all accused each other of being ‘heretics’ with such bitterness that some openly greeted the new Muslim rulers, preferring to be ruled by infidels than by ‘heretics’.
Islam’s success was because, as a theology, it is simple and easy to grasp: there is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet. That’s it. Compare and contrast with the scores of fiendishly subtle and complex heresies which early Christianity threw up in droves, particularly around the two sore points of the exact nature of Christ’s manhood and godhood – and the precise relationship of the three elements of the ‘Trinity’. Christian heresy lost Africa to Islam.
Origins of the Crusades
Those in the region who didn’t convert were treated well. Islam proved tolerant and permissive of other beliefs. But by the 1000s a storm was brewing in the West. Johnson identifies three factors:
1. Small-scale wars against Muslims were being pioneered in Spain, half of which was, of course, in the control of Muslim kings during this period. In 1063 King Ramiro I of Aragon was murdered by a Muslim and Pope Alexander II offered an indulgence (i.e. forgiveness of all sins; go direct to heaven) to anyone taking arms to revenge this crime. (N.B. It was the same Pope Alexander II who gave his blessing to William the Bastard’s conquest of England a few years later.) In 1073 his successor Pope Gregory VII helped to organise an army to fight against the Muslims in Spain, promising any Christian soldier that he could keep any ‘infidel’ land that he could seize.
2. A Frankish tradition dating back to Charlemagne’s times had it that the Carolingian monarchs had a special duty to protect the Holy Places in Palestine and keep pilgrimage routes across Europe to them safe and secure. There were three well-marked land routes as well as the more expensive sea routes to the Holy Land. Many Holy orders maintained hospices along the route. Sometimes huge numbers of pilgrims did the journey and, by and large, the Muslim authorities treated them peaceably. (For example, in 1064 to 1046 some 7,000 Germans, some heavily armed, travelled to Jerusalem and back unhindered.)
3. What prompted the synthesis of the above two notions – the idea of taking military action against the infidel along with the idea of seizing control of the Holy Land – was the population explosion of the 11th century. By the 1000s, after centuries of chaos, most of Europe was settled and under the legalised control of strong rulers, themselves backed by the authority of a resurgent Catholic Church. Agricultural land across the continent began to be exploited to the maximum of the available technology. The Crusades can thus be interpreted as a bid for Lebensraum for a booming population. This explains why, along with the knightly enterprises we mostly read about, went various less romantic movements by the poor: like the 20,000 peasants led by Peter the Hermit, or the Peasants Crusade, or the Children’s Crusade and so on. Many of the nobles who flourished on Crusade – like Godfrey de Bouillon, who emerged as leader of the First Crusade (1096 to 1099) – were junior members of the aristocracy, often left landless by elder brothers. To these ambitious younger sons the crusades offered huge opportunities to create and run their own fiefdoms, kingdoms, empires.
In a sweeping statement typical of his confident handling of large perspectives, Johnson says the Crusades, seen as a mass movement of people, stand mid-way between the Germanic migrations of the 4th and 5th centuries which brought the Angles and Saxons to this country, and the great transatlantic migrations of the European poor to America in the 19th century.
Seen from this lofty height, all of human history can be summarised in terms of mass migrations.
The appalling violence of the Crusades
Like Terry Jones in his book Crusades, Johnson emphasises that the crusades were very bad news for Europe’s Jews, sparking waves of anti-Semitic violence, pogroms, murders and massacres.
But then they were bad news for lots of others, not just Muslims, as the crusaders repeatedly massacred everyone they found in foreign towns and cities. Peter the Hermit’s crusade slaughtered everyone they found in the villages around Nicea within the Byzantine Empire. When Jerusalem fell in 1187, the conquering Christians went on a horrifying rampage, murdering everyone they saw, raping women, even nuns, looting everything they could carry, burning everything they couldn’t. In 1101 when the crusaders took Caesarea they rounded up all the Muslims into the Grand Mosque and massacred them all. Same in Beirut. In 1109 Tripoli fell to Genoese sailors who burned down the Banu Ammar library, the largest in the Muslim world. The Frankish crusade to Egypt in 1168 was characterised by massacres wherever these rampaging barbarians went.
As Jones points out, the crusaders hated the Greek Christians of the Byzantine Empire almost as much as the Muslims. When, frustrated and unpaid, the angry crusaders rampaged through Constantinople in 1204 they massacred so many citizens and destroyed so much infrastructure that the city never recovered. What Johnson calls the last of the international crusades in 1365, led by Peter I of Cyprus, resulted in the sacking of the Christian city of Alexandria, when these ‘holy warriors’ killed as many Christians as Muslims or Jews. Once they’d finished slaughtering the inhabitants, the crusaders expelled all Greek clerics from their positions, replacing them with Latin-born bishops, priests etc. Orthodox priests were routinely tortured to reveal the location of hidden treasure, plate or relics. Cultural imperialism has rarely come more naked. The Orthodox empire, from the emperor to the lowest peasant, learned to hate and fear the Latins, the Franks, the Catholics, as devils.
The failure of the Crusades
Johnson brings out a point mostly implicit in Jones’s narrative: that a key reason for the failure of the crusaders was that there just weren’t enough of them. In their cultural imperialism the Pope and clerics forbade the crusaders to intermarry even with the Greeks, let alone the local Muslims or Jews. Therefore the population was dependent on rates of childbirth among the small colonies of pure Wester Christians – which appear to have been pitifully low – or on replenishment from Europe which, despite occasional spurts of enthusiasm, was never continuous enough to supply a stable population.
If it had wanted the Crusader kingdoms to succeed, the Church should have funded mass emigration. It should have set up missionising orders to convert Muslims to the faith and create a native population sympathetic to the colonists. But, as Johnson summarises, in the kind of magisterial judgement which makes his History so stimulating and entertaining to read:
The whole crusading movement was dogged by intellectual bankruptcy. (p.248)
Not enough people, not enough money, not enough knights, not enough soldiers – it’s surprising the crusader kingdom staggered on for as long as it did. By the 13th century there was no longer the same population surplus in Europe which had driven the first crusades -excess peasants tended to drift to the growing and commercially successful towns. Meanwhile, the north German knights were applying crusading techniques more effectively and with much more promise of land and titles against the pagan slavs in Poland, Lithuania etc. And then along came the Black Death in the 1340s, after which there was definitely not a problem of over-population.
The events surrounding the last century of the crusader kingdoms are complex, and involve the complicated interventions of different groups of enemies – the Seljuks, the Mongols, the Mamelukes – but the enterprise was by then bankrupt in every sense.
Conclusions
The Crusades left a sense of loss and nostalgia in the West given to sentimental self-deceit; but led directly to the creation of an embittered and less tolerant Islam, some of whose adherents are still smarting from its humiliations, 800 years later.
The Crusades set a pattern for the blood-thirsty anti-Semitism which was to disfigure parts of ‘Christian’ Europe for centuries to come.
And they established many of the mental, cultural and economic patterns, mindsets, paradigms which were to be invoked when the great European colonisations began in the 16th century and which we are still recovering from today.
Books & Boots 