Crusading Rhetoric

By Nate Jones on 26 February 2007

No one was surprised when Iranian Grand Ayatollah Khamenei denounced the Pope's infamous Regensburg speech as “the latest link” in a conspiracy to unleash a new crusade.¹ Since September 11th, 2001, rhetorical references to the Crusades have proliferated, keeping pace with increased international attention to the religious dimensions of foreign policy. References to the U.S. war in Iraq as an American crusade rally the Muslim street from Indonesia to Palestine, while British and American politicians simultaneously insist that the War on Terror does not constitute a crusade.

Unfortunately, both Muslim and non-Muslim public figures have contributed to a public narrative of the Crusades that is grossly inaccurate. Politically-charged references to the Crusades tend to frame this complex period as a simplistic series of brutal Christian invasions of Muslim territory on expressly religious grounds.² The religious nature of the Crusades forms the touchstone of this public historical narrative, implicitly challenging the comfortable dichotomy between church and state that prevails in Western civilization.

Western public references to the Crusades, whether printed or spoken, typically use the wars as a convenient straw man, contrasting militantly intolerant Christianity with the religious tolerance that characterizes the contemporary West. Simultaneously, Muslim militants and clerics use the same exaggerated version of the Crusades in their own political maneuvering, over-emphasizing convenient aspects of a complex conflict in order to create a hot-button issue that will mobilize their support base.

The generally agreed narrative of the Crusades deliberately and consistently disregards aspects of the series of conflicts that do not support a self-image of Western tolerance or a mentality of outrage in the Islamic world. In particular, popular rhetoric conveniently ignores the complex religious and geopolitical back story to the Crusades as a whole.

European religious motivation for the Crusades is usually characterized externally, with reference to enmity toward Islam. The Crusades seem to be popularly considered as a gross and irrational outpouring of Christian religious hatred directly outward toward Islam. In fact, the religious buildup to the Crusades is more accurately viewed as primarily internal in character.

In the decades prior to the announcement of the first Crusade in 1095, European intellectuals began to formulate a new theology of war that unconsciously laid the foundations for the peculiar religious characteristics of the Crusades. It should be noted that the context for these early theological reflections was not a potential inter-faith war, but rather the constant skirmishes between feudal lords across Western Europe. The new discussion of sin and warfare centered around an Augustinian emphasis on motives, rather than the early medieval emphasis on the inherent sinfulness of actions.³

Gradually, the early medieval conviction that all killing was sinful gave way to a new conception of warfare that not only permitted killing in certain situations, but eventually even sanctified the practice of warfare. Warfare ultimately became characterized as a means of salvation, as long as the warrior fought for the church against her enemies.⁴

Thus, the Crusades were not framed as attacks against a particular external enemy so much as they were conceived as a form of service to God and the church. It is a popular misconception that the Crusades were fought exclusively against Muslims, or even exclusively against non-Christians. The Crusaders were essentially warriors for the church, not warriors against Islam or any other faith. They served the church's interests equally against heretics, Muslims, and even rebellious Christians.⁵

Along with intellectual developments in the theology of war, popular apocalyptic fears associated with the momentous year 1000 provoked an atmosphere of reform and revival. Pope Urban II's famous speech at Clermont that launched the First Crusade characterized the looming war for Jerusalem as an act of penance and a pilgrimage for personal piety. In other words, the Crusades were to serve as a kind of public penance, a Christian revival that would return God's blessing to disobedient Christendom, delaying the awful judgment of the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, as the Crusades got under way academics continued to expand the moral boundaries of Christian warfare. Eventually, theologians extended the penance-focused theology of war into salvific territory. Warring service to the church became, like the monastic orders, an accessible means of salvation for ordinary people.⁶

Another element of the religious back story for the Crusades came from the Peace of God and Truce of God movements in the century prior to Pope Urban II's speech. These movements attempted to regulate the warring chaos of feudal states through religious coercion, initially pressuring nobles to protect the safety of non-combatants and eventually attempting to prohibit warfare on certain holy days. Although the attempt was not particularly successful in and of itself, it did generate discussion about the legitimacy of protective violence against disturbers of the peace, a concept that would be revitalized in justifications for the Crusades.⁷

Furthermore, the ongoing chaos that sparked the Peace of God movement was likely a factor in Pope Urban II's decision to encourage bellicose knights to go abroad. In this context, it is worth noting that Clermont, where the Pope delivered his initial speech, was located at the heart of the region of southern France that was especially associated with the Peace of God movement.⁸

Just as the religious back story to the Crusades reveals a complex internal process instead of a simplified external hatred, so the geopolitical back story to the wars reveals a blurred collision of land disputes and colonialist ambitions rather than a clear-cut example of Christian aggression.

Geopolitically, the impetus for conflict came about as the rapidly expanding Islamic empire began shifting the regional balance of power in the Levant during the 7th and 8th centuries. Prior to the onslaught of the Ummayad Caliphate, Byzantium had administered the Levant, fighting a series of border wars with the Sasanian Empire, which held land in today's Iraq and Iran.⁹

The ascent of the Islamic empire permanently broke Byzantium's hold on the Levant during the early 7th century, forcing Constantinople's borders far back into Asia Minor.¹⁰ Like most pre-modern empires, the Ummayad Caliphate was primarily interested in the revenues to be obtained through conquest and administration of trade routes. By geopolitical necessity, the Caliphate remained generally tolerant of the vast numbers of non-Muslims who had been rapidly incorporated into the new empire.

Between the 7th and 11th centuries, Byzantium fought a series of minor border wars against various Islamic authorities, but the strategic equation governing the Levant did not shift until the First Crusade. At that time, Muslim claims to Jerusalem and its environs were already more than 350 years old.

The stated geopolitical goal of the First Crusade was the liberation of Jerusalem and the land of Christ in support of Byzantium. Although the stated reasons for this First Crusade were more spiritual than practical, the geopolitical implications of the Latin church's involvement in the Levant were quite complex.

At the launching of the Crusade, Pope Urban II may have had a number of options in mind for the eventual administration of the Levant. Theoretically, the First Crusade was the Latin church's response to the Greek church's request for help in recovering lost Christian lands from Muslim hands.¹¹ However, given the emerging theological split between the eastern and western branches of the church, the Pope may have hoped that the appearance of a large Western European army at Constantinople might secure a Latin advantage in the east.

Eventually, the Latin church was able to establish several crusader states in the Levant, but the whole process was overshadowed by the prior claims and geopolitical influence of Byzantium. Furthermore, the crusader states, while theoretically subservient to the church at Rome, became increasingly entangled in the immediate cultural and political milieu of the Levant, effectively removing any hoped-for leverage against Byzantium.

By the dawn of the 12th century, the First Crusade had extended Byzantine influence across much of Asia Minor again. Although Emperor Alexius could not claim to rule Palestine, the presence of the crusader states in the region provided a convenient shield from the Fatamid dynasty. Of course, the presence of the crusader states also provoked Muslims to call for war, inevitably entangling Western Europe in the politics and war of the Levant.

Conclusion

The only realistic way of viewing the crusades is as the bloody nexus between Latin ecclesial interests and theology and competing geopolitical interests in the Levant. In this context, the crusades were not unusual for their brutality or their religious justification, as today’s rhetoric would have us believe. Rather, they were unique in their formation as a military extension of an internal religious revival movement in Western Europe. The unusual theological climate of Europe at the time justified and celebrated the practice of piety through war, simultaneously easing chaotic social pressures at home and extending the Latin church's interests against the Greek church abroad.

Of course, the lofty ideals of the crusaders immediately conflicted with the competing claims of Byzantium and the various Islamic authorities to the Levant, embroiling the new crusader states as trophies in the subsequent bloody struggles to shift the balance of power in the region. In these wars, the simple dichotomy of Christian aggressor and Muslim defender must break down in favor of a complex and unpleasant picture of bloody and competitive greed.

Ultimately, as the crusader states struggled through the geopolitical crosswinds, the fundamentally pietistic nature of the early crusading movement rapidly evaporated. In the coming centuries, the Latin church's Palestinian outposts became liabilities, constantly embroiling Rome in the far-off politics of the Levant while providing little useful leverage against either Byzantium or the Caliphate. In the end, the crusades are probably best referenced and described as a tragic series of wars originally justified by aberrant European theology but quickly succumbing to a bloody chaos of imperial avarice, in which no faith or empire could be innocent.

Last updated 12 January 2009