The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam

Jonathan Riley-Smith

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231517942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

The Crusades were penitential war-pilgrimages fought in the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as in North Africa, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Baltic region, Hungary, the Balkans, and Western Europe. Beginning in the eleventh century and ending as late as the eighteenth, these holy wars were waged against Muslims and other enemies of the Church, enlisting generations of laymen and laywomen to fight for the sake of Christendom.

Crusading features prominently in today's religio-political hostilities, yet the perceptions of these wars held by Arab nationalists, pan-Islamists, and many in the West have been deeply distorted by the language and imagery of nineteenth-century European imperialism. With this book, Jonathan Riley-Smith returns to the actual story of the Crusades, explaining why and where they were fought and how deeply their narratives and symbolism became embedded in popular Catholic thought and devotional life.

From this history, Riley-Smith traces the legacy of the Crusades into modern times, specifically within the attitudes of European imperialists and colonialists and within the beliefs of twentieth-century Muslims. Europeans fashioned an interpretation of the Crusades from the writings of Walter Scott and a French contemporary, Joseph-François Michaud. Scott portrayed Islamic societies as forward-thinking, while casting Christian crusaders as culturally backward and often morally corrupt. Michaud, in contrast, glorified crusading, and his followers used its imagery to illuminate imperial adventures.

These depictions have had a profound influence on contemporary Western opinion, as well as on Muslim attitudes toward their past and present. Whether regarded as a valid expression of Christianity's divine enterprise or condemned as a weapon of empire, crusading has been a powerful rhetorical tool for centuries. In order to understand the preoccupations of Islamist jihadis and the character of Western discourse on the Middle East, Riley-Smith argues, we must understand how images of crusading were formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

CHAPTER ONE

Crusades as Christian Holy Wars

Crusades were penitential war pilgrimages, fought not only in the Levant and throughout the eastern Mediterranean region, but also along the Baltic shoreline, in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Poland, Hungary and the Balkans, and even within Western Europe. They were proclaimed not only against Muslims, but also against pagan Wends, Balts and Lithuanians, shamanist Mongols, Orthodox Russians and Greeks, Cathar and Hussite heretics, and those Catholics whom the church deemed to be its enemies. The crusading movement generated holy leagues, which were alliances of front-line powers, bolstered by crusade privileges, and military orders, the members of which sometimes operated out of their own order-states.

It is the length of time crusading lasted and its expression in many different theaters of war that make it so hard to define.¹ It was adaptable and aspects of it changed in response to circumstances and even fashion, but certain elements were constant. To crusade meant to engage in a war that was both holy, because it was believed to be waged on God’s behalf, and penitential, because those taking part considered themselves to be performing an act of penance. The war was authorized by the pope as vicar of Christ. Most crusaders were lay men and women who made vows, committing themselves to join an expedition. When their vows were fulfilled, or when a campaign was considered to have ended, the individuals concerned resumed their normal lives. There were also crusaders of another type, the brothers (and in some cases sisters) of the military orders—such as the Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller, and Teutonic Knights—who made vows of profession and were therefore permanently engaged in the defense of Christians and Christendom. The vows, whether specific and temporary, varying a little from place to place and over time, or permanent ones of profession into a military order, were symbolized by the wearing of crosses, either on everyday clothes or on religious habits. The lay men and women who made them were rewarded with indulgences, guarantees that the penitential act in which they were engaged would rank in God’s eyes as a fully satisfactory remission of the sins that they had committed up to that date.² It is against these basic features that every manifestation, or pseudomanifestation, of the movement must be measured.

The body of inspired writings that Christians consider to be divine revelation is ambivalent when it comes to the use of violence, by which I mean physical actions that threaten, whether intentionally or as side effects, homicide or injury to the human body. On Mount Sinai, Moses received from God the commandment “You shall not kill,” but what struck fourth-century Christian theologians was how, in the narrative of events on and around Sinai, that commandment was immediately modified. In the book of the Covenant that follows and is a gloss upon the Ten Commandments, God was reported demanding the death penalty for an inventory of crimes and promising to exterminate those peoples who barred the entry of the Israelites into the Promised Land. When Moses came down from Sinai with the Tablets of the Law and found his followers worshipping a golden calf, he was described authorizing their slaughter.³

It is a mistake to assume that the New Testament unequivocally condemns the use of force. Christ did indeed demand of his followers love of enemies as well as friends, meekness, gentleness, and nonresistance. On the other hand, he, like John the Baptist, seemed to accept the need for soldiers, as when he praised the faith of the centurion but did not question his profession.⁴ And at the end of the Last Supper, according to St. Luke, he told the apostles: “‘Let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one. For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, And he was reckoned with transgressors …’ And they said, ‘Look, Lord, here are two swords.’ And he said to them, ‘It is enough.’”⁵ Later in the evening his followers were carrying swords, presumably those from the room, and it must have been with one of these that St. Peter cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant.⁶ Peter was rebuked by Christ, but, the war theorists asked, if Christ had been opposed to the use of force on principle, what was his leading disciple doing walking at his side bearing a sword, even if the purpose was to fulfill scripture?⁷ Other New Testament texts, particularly those relating to the career of St. Paul, recognized the use of force by the state. The ruler in authority “does not bear the sword in vain [wrote Paul]; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.”⁸

It was in an attempt to resolve the contradictions in scripture that the moral theology of violence evolved. Pacifism had played some, perhaps a significant, part in the early church, although its extent has now been questioned.⁹ It survived as a minority opinion throughout the centuries that followed—we shall see that crusade preachers felt the need to answer its root-and-branch objections—but once their coreligionists became more numerous and occupied ranks in the army, posts in the judiciary involving the imposition of penal sanctions, and the imperial throne itself, Christian thinkers had to face up to the issues involved. They found no comfort in distinguishing the old dispensation from the new, not only because the new dispensation was itself ambivalent, but also because if the state of mankind and of man’s perception of God had led him to authorize violence in one era, the fact that he frowned on much of it in another could not in any way prevent him from changing his policy again if conditions here on earth merited it.

For more than 2,000 years of Western history, violence, whether expressed in warfare, armed rebellion, or the employment of force as a state sanction, and whether holy or merely licit, has required three criteria to be considered legitimate. First, it must not be entered into lightly or for aggrandizement, but only for a legally sound reason, which has to be a reactive one. Second, it must be formally declared by an authority recognized as having the power to make such a declaration. Third, it must be waged justly. These principles, rooted in the law of the Roman Republic, were developed in a Christian context by St. Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the early theoreticians, who wrote at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries.¹⁰ Augustine defined the offense that provided violence with a just cause as intolerable injury, usually taking the form of aggression or oppression. Since injuries disturbed earthly order, which reflected the divine order, resistance to them was a stern necessity for good men. “It is [Augustine wrote] the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty to wage wars.”¹¹

He recognized two expressions of legitimate authority. He followed St. Paul in treating all rulers, even pagan ones, as divine ministers, although he saw the Christian Roman emperors especially as representatives of God, who had put them and the temporal power of the empire at the Church’s disposal for its defense. But he also believed that God could personally order violence, which would be “without doubt just.”¹² On divine authority Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and Moses had waged war. God, in mandating the use of force, acted not out of cruelty but in righteous retribution.¹³ Augustine’s fullest treatment of the subject of divinely ordained violence is to be found in his Contra Faustum Manichaeum, a defense of the Old Testament in reply to the Manichees, but he was prepared for direct commands from God to be transmitted to men under the new dispensation, and he referred to the possibility of them coming in his own time in two of his later works.¹⁴

He was at his most positive when writing about the right intention required of those who authorized and took part in violence. They had to be motivated by love and should only use as much force as necessary. It followed that those responsible for the management of violence should circumscribe it in such a way that the innocent suffered as little as possible.¹⁵ Augustine’s treatment of right intention provided the foundations for the later doctrine of proportionality.

I have given his ideas more clarity than would have been apparent to his contemporaries or even perhaps to himself, since they were scattered throughout a vast corpus, written over several decades, and were sometimes contradictory. It was not until the eleventh century, when the popes turned to learned supporters to justify the use of force on the church’s behalf, that citations from Augustine’s works were anthologized in a convenient form with the contradictions ironed out.¹⁶ This process brought into focus two premises that underpinned his treatment of violence. The first was an insistence on the ultimate authority of a God or Christ who was intimately involved in the affairs of this dimension. It was in his name and in accordance with his wishes that his ministers authorized the use of force, in order to prevent his will being frustrated. The second was the conviction that violence was ethically neutral. What was evil in war of itself? Augustine had asked. The real evils were not the deaths of those who would have died anyway, but the love of violence, cruelty, and enmity; it was generally to punish such that good men undertook wars in obedience to God or to some lawful authority.¹⁷ It was the intention of the perpetrators, therefore, that provided force with a moral dimension—bad in many cases, but good in some—and this led Augustine to develop a theory of just persecution that was to haunt Christian history up until the nineteenth century.¹⁸

The Augustinian tradition seems so alien today because it has been displaced by another set of ideas, which reached maturity much more recently than we like to think. Modern just war theory presumes, unlike Augustine, that violence is indeed an evil, but also that disorder can be a greater one. The use of force may therefore become a necessity as the lesser of evils when a state or community is faced with a situation in which order can only be restored by means of it. In these special circumstances it will be condoned by God and participation in it will not incur guilt. The origins of this body of thought are to be found in the Middle Ages, when theologians and canon lawyers struggled with demands for advice coming from those engaged in conflicts that were not covered by any traditional model,¹⁹ but the theory could not make headway until a consensus was prepared to abandon the Augustinian premises. Catalysts for the jettisoning of the belief that force could be employed on Christ’s behalf were reports in the 1530s of atrocities committed by the Spaniards against the indigenous peoples in the New World and the critical reaction to them of Francisco de Vitoria, who rejected the notion that violence could be part of any divine plan. He and his followers could only justify it by reference to the Aristotelian and Thomist idea of “the common good,” the defense of which was the prerogative of every community. Christ began to withdraw from the fray as just war arguments moved from the field of moral theology to that of international law.²⁰

If you had asked most Enlightenment thinkers, for many of whom the Crusades were “ces guerres horribles,”²¹ how they could justify war, they would probably have replied that in some cases the requirements of a foreseeable good—the common good—could outweigh predictably evil results. The evil they referred to, however, was not the violence itself but the suffering that accompanied it. Although there was general agreement that the use of force nearly always had unpleasant consequences and great interest was expressed in the measures that might be taken to ameliorate them, there seems to have been no serious intellectual challenge to the consensus that violence was morally neutral.²² No one seems to have taken the second step necessary for the full emergence of modern just war theory, the borrowing from pacifism of the conviction that violence is intrinsically evil. The topic still needs research, but I suspect that this very important shift in thought was an achievement of a popular and widespread peace movement that swept Europe and America after the Napoleonic Wars.

Holy war, of which there are many examples in Christian history, may be defined as being considered to be authorized directly or indirectly by God (or Christ) and as being fought to further what are believed to be his intentions.²³ Crusades were particularly theatrical manifestations of it, but, although the reasons for them could not in the eyes of contemporaries have been more weighty, since they involved the removal of impediments to God’s wishes for humankind, they were still expected to be subject to the same criteria of just cause, legitimate authority, and right intention as should be all expressions of Christian violence. In a sermon preached to the brothers of a military order early in the thirteenth century, the preacher James of Vitry sum...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Crusades as Christian Holy Wars
• Chapter 2. Crusades as Christian Penitential Wars
• Chapter 3. Crusading and Imperialism
• Chapter 4. Crusading and Islam
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index