Catholic Replies
Q. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, learning history in a parochial elementary school and a public high school, and watching those Hollywood movies about the Crusades and Richard the Lionheart, I thought the Crusades were an admirable, heroic endeavor of epic proportions that reflected favorably on Christianity and the Church.
Now it seems that, in the public square at least, the Crusades were a dastardly, shameful effort that gives the Church and Christianity at best a black eye and at worst reason for condemnation. My question: Can you sort out the real truth of the Crusades to include the good, the bad, and the ugly? — D.M., via e-mail.
A. We can try and would recommend the following books for more information: God’s Battalions by Rodney Stark, The Glory of the Crusades by Steve Weidenkopf, Christianity, Islam, and Atheism by William Kilpatrick, What Were the Crusades? by Jonathan Riley-Smith, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) by Robert Spencer.
At a National Prayer Breakfast in February, President Obama distorted history by telling the Christians in his audience that they shouldn’t get on their “high horse” about ongoing ISIS killings of Christians because “during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ….So it is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith.”
It was indeed shameful for the president to link the Crusades with the current slaughter of tens of thousands of Christians by Islamic killers because the Crusades were a defensive war against Muslim jihadists who, for 450 years, had been slaughtering Christians while waging an offensive war against Jerusalem and other holy places where Jesus had walked. One historian calculates that the Muslims fought more than 500 battles in the centuries leading up to the Crusades, while the Crusades fought only a few dozen battles in two centuries.
For the record, the Crusaders may have been responsible for thousands of deaths between 1095 and 1291, but the Islamic jihadists have been responsible for the deaths of some 270 million persons since Mohammed launched his war in the seventh century on all those who don’t believe in Allah.
From the time of St. Paul in the first century to the birth of Mohammed in AD 570, Christians had spread the teachings of Christ peacefully throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Europe.
Christian missionaries were men of peace and prayer and not military warriors. They did not spread violence, but were often the victims of violence, and many are recognized today as martyrs for laying down their lives for Christ. If you thought there were a lot of martyrs in the first few centuries of the Church’s existence, know that more Christians have been killed for their faith in the past century than in the previous 19 centuries combined.
Within 200 years of Mohammed’s death in 632, however, Muslims had overrun all those Christian lands around the Mediterranean with the sword. They were following the command of their founder “to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah’.” And, strikingly, Mohammed’s marauders committed the same atrocities back then as their successors are committing today — beheading captives, burning them to death, and crucifying them.
So it was in 1095 that Pope Urban II, responding to a plea for help from the Emperor of Byzantium, whose capital city of Constantinople was under siege, rallied Christians in Europe to travel to the Holy Land to take back the holy places from the Muslims and to protect Christian pilgrims from being persecuted and killed. “On whom is the duty of avenging these wrongs and recovering the territory, if not upon yourselves?” the Holy Father asked. “If you do not make a stand against the enemy now, the tide of their advance will overwhelm many more faithful servants of God.”
There were seven Crusades altogether, but only the First Crusade achieved any success. It started out with 130,000 volunteers, about half of them knights and soldiers and the other half peasant men, women, and children. Most of them had to walk 2,500 miles (!) to get to Jerusalem, and most of them died from fighting, disease, and starvation long before they got there. So only about 12,000 of the original force made it to Jerusalem, a heavily fortified city with huge walls. It took a while to build towers and ladders to scale the walls, but the Crusaders captured the city in 1099.
Once the city was secure, however, most of the warriors left for home, leaving only a few hundred men to hold a city surrounded by Muslim armies. They held on for some years, but then the Muslims took the city back in 1187. Other attempts to regain the city and to defeat Muslim armies in the Middle East and Africa were unsuccessful, and the Crusades came to an end in 1291.
Though some modern-day historians claim that the Crusaders marched for plunder and wealth, the fact is that they marched for two reasons: to liberate the Holy Land and to do penance for their sins. Crusading was very expensive and the financing came from wealthy families, who sometimes sold everything they had — and lost everything in the process. They didn’t go seeking wealth because they were already wealthy, and the flow of money went from West to East and not from East to West.
Did some Crusaders behave badly and commit crimes? Yes. Can you imagine a large army made up only of saints? Did some American soldiers behave badly in the wars that this country has fought? Of course, and that’s a consequence of original sin. But these bad actors were the exception, not the rule. When some Crusaders massacred Jews in Germany on the way to the Holy Land, the Pope at the time harshly condemned those attacks. And St. John Paul II apologized in 1991 for the Fourth Crusade attack on Constantinople in 1204 that led to the deaths of about 2,000 Orthodox Christians (out of a total population of 150,000).
So while there were some Crusaders who committed crimes, the great majority marched with the highest of motives, fighting and dying against overwhelming odds out of love for Christ and the holy places where He had lived.
Those who denounce the Crusaders never seem to have a bad word for the Muslims, who were guilty of the single greatest massacre of the whole crusading era, the destruction of Antioch in 1268. In a letter to the ruler of Antioch, who was away at the time, the Muslim general boasted of destroying churches, selling women “four at a time,” and “cutting the throats of monks, priests, and deacons upon the altars.”
We are also not aware of any denunciation of the Muslims for their attack on Constantinople in 1453, when, according to historian Steven Runciman, the jihadists “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination.”
Were the Crusades a failure? In one sense, yes, because they did not achieve their primary objectives of regaining lasting control over the Holy Land and protecting pilgrims traveling there. They were a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war. But on the other hand, they did tie down Muslim armies and buy time to stave off the threatened Muslim conquest of Europe. Decisive defeats of Islam came later at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 (through the intervention of the Blessed Mother and her rosary) and when King Jan Sobieski stopped them from conquering Europe on September 11, 1683.
The Crusades were 800 years ago, but the jihadists are still destroying Christian churches and brutally murdering priests and monks and deacons today, so why is President Obama not denouncing the current genocide against Christians in the Middle East and Africa? The “terrible deeds” mentioned by the president are not typical of Christianity and are a violation of the principles set forth by Jesus. The terrible deeds of Muslims, however, are ingrained in Islam and are part of the marching orders given them by their founder in the seventh century.
Islam, you see, does not mean “peace,” as some would have you believe. It means “submission” — to Allah. The Koran (sura 9:5) says to “slay the idolaters wherever ye find them” and “make war on the infidels who dwell around you” (9:123). The next time someone tells you that Islam is a religion of peace, point out to them that the Koran has 164 verses devoted to jihad, the waging of “holy war” against all those who do not bow down to Allah.
There do exist “moderate” Muslims, but the Islamic ideology is not moderate. One of Islam’s chief spokesmen in the United States, Omar Ahmad, said in 1998 that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
Not much moderation there!
