Were the Crusades a shameful episode in the history of the west?

The best example of the level of piety of the Western world was perhaps the establishment of the Christian military orders of the Knights Templar, Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights.  An eyewitness account in Galilee, May 1187 describes Jakelin, a Knight Templar defending a Christian village against a Muslim raiding party, alone and hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded until, crushed rather than conquered by spears, stones and lances, he sank to the ground and joyfully passed to heaven with the martyr’s crown, triumphant.

Although quite a new faith to many, the percentage of those Christian in Western Europe was high and increasing at all times. For most people life was hard and unfair, a struggle to get through before entering the Kingdom of Heaven and rescuing Jerusalem, the most important place on God’s Earth, from the ‘Muslim savages,’ would guarantee them a place.

This faith and conviction was targeted by preachers and members of the Clergy to stir up enthusiasm for the crusades. The most obvious two examples are Peter the Hermit of Picardy and Pope Urban II.  There are several varying accounts of Unrban II’s speech at Clermont in 1095, but consistently, the main three incentives seem to be that the Turks were severely persecuting and even murdering the Christians in the Middle East and that they should be protected and avenged.  That the Turks had taken over territory previously belonging to Christians, including Jerusalem and other important Christian sites, which needed to be part of the Christian Empire and finally; simply that Christ commanded all believers to take part. 

Religious conviction however was not the only motivation for those who took up the cross.  Many people set off to obtain wealth and status and live the rest of their days away from the hardships of Europe in the land which flowed with milk and honey.  This view, that the crusades were an acquisitive facade to gain property and land seems to be held by many modern historians and there are many examples of this as a motive, such as Baldwin of Bouillon’s (one of the First Crusade’s most prominent leaders) actions when he left the main body of soldiers with his own army to take over Edessa, a rich and vibrant city in Armenia. 

It is widely believed that along with protection of the Christian people and Jerusalem that Urban II’s main motive for launching the First Crusade was to extend his influence in world affairs and unite Christendom with him as supreme ruler.  Historians Lerner, McNall and Meacham argue that the rise, fall and enthusiasm for the crusades were related closely to the fortunes of the medieval papal monarchy. 

The Christian Church had undergone many problems over the previous few centuries such as power struggles with state rulers as well as powerful, unruly members of the clergy.  The tension between the Eastern and Western Empires had been consistently growing (In 1054 the Pope excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church has remained in schism ever since) and after the disastrous reigns of his recent predecessors Urban needed to take action. A Crusade against the ’Muslim threat’ was a mechanism to end the Great Schism and unite all Christians under him. 

His speech at Clermont contradicts many important points in the bible such as:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you and perhaps more importantly, several passages which prohibit the forced taking of land and property, and fighting with non-Christians.  Surely if the Pope was acting purely as a spiritual leader he would follow the bible rather than a plea from Alexius I of Constantinople.

According to revisionist historian, Jonathan Riley-Smith, the first two reasons for crusading;  fear of Islamic power and religious conviction, on the most part carry far more significance than the desire to gain wealth and influence.  This argument seems valid as only a miniscule percentage of the crusaders returned wealthier than before.  A knight from England or France would have to spend four times his annual salary to finance an expedition to the Holy Land and usually the only way to raise the funds was to sell everything they owned.  This argument does seem to suggest that on the whole crusades were usually taken up by a desire to do what was believed to be right.

Another helpful step towards answering our question is to assess how successful the crusades actually were.  An almost unanimous opinion of them as a whole is that they were economically, militarily and culturally an absolute disaster.  

The most important aim of the crusades was to eliminate the Muslim threat to Jerusalem and its surrounding lands. With this in mind, the only ‘successful’ crusade was the first and this was short lived, with most of the cities and lands captured, falling back under Muslim control less than a hundred years later. 

After the initial glory of the First Crusade, military achievement began to dwindle. Jerusalem, the prize trophy, was never recaptured and most attempts by Christian soldiers to reclaim the areas of importance ended in decisive and often humiliating defeats.  The Fourth Crusade (1202-1261) stands out as a particular failure. Their ambitious plans of attacking Jerusalem through Egypt were thwarted by being unable to pay (through poor planning and lack of communication) the Venetians who had been contracted to transport them there.  In order to get the money, the crusading forces agreed to help the Venetians settle a debt by capturing the Christian town of Zara, this venture snowballed into more debts and problems until the Christian army agreed to help reinstall Prince Alexius Angelus as head of Constantinople. Not only had they failed to get anywhere near their goal, but the crusaders ended up sacking the Orthodox centre of Christianity in an infamously ruthless and brutal fashion.  An eyewitness account describes the scene:

The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable…Though the Venetians had an appreciation for the art which they discovered (they were themselves semi-Byzantines) and saved much of it, the French and others destroyed indiscriminately, halting to refresh themselves with wine, violation of nuns, and murder of Orthodox cleric.

Even at the time, the stupidity and gravity of their actions was easy to see as he goes on to say:

The estrangement of East and West, which had proceeded over the centuries, culminated in the horrible massacre that accompanied the conquest of Constantinople. The Greeks were convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin Christians. The defeat of Byzantium, already in a state of decline, accelerated political degeneration so that the Byzantines eventually became an easy prey to the Turks. The Crusading movement thus resulted, ultimately, in the victory of Islam, a result which was of course the exact opposite of its original intention.

Poor planning and logistical organisation wasn’t only a problem in the Fourth Crusade but seemed to be a constant issue.  The long slog across Asia Minor and the Taurus Mountains before reaching the city of Antioch was often a huge factor in the failure of the Westerners as by the time they’d reached their destination they were usually dangerously low on supplies and missing a large quantity of starting forces (dead or deserted).  William Tyre, perhaps the most famous chronicler of the crusades, describes men drinking their urine and animal blood and hundreds of soldiers dying of dysentery and starvation.     

Although for various reasons it is very difficult to estimate the total casualty figure for the whole crusading period, it is safe to say that a huge number of the people who took part lost their lives.  This along with the knowledge that none of the objectives were achieved, does support the view that the crusades were a disaster.

The repeated failures and military disasters of the Crusader period suggest that they were militarily shameful rather than morally, it seems questionable to describe an action or actions as morally shameful if they do not achieve what they set out to achieve.

Perhaps the most important step in assessing how shameful the crusades were is to look at the damage inflicted by the Christian armies on the Islamic World.  

Eye witness accounts of Siege of Jerusalem give an idea of the destruction caused by the ‘fanatical hordes of Christians.’

Monk Fulcher recalls:

A great fight took place in the court and porch of the temples, where they were unable to escape from our gladiators. Many fled to the roof of the temple of Solomon, and were shot with arrows, so that they fell to the ground dead. In this temple almost ten thousand were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared. 

The account of Raymond d'Aguiliers tells a similar story:

Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shoot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city…The city was filled with corpses and blood. Some of the enemy took refuge in the Tower of David, and, petitioning Count Raymond for protection, surrendered the Tower into his hands.

Even the treasured Richard the Lionheart committed ruthless atrocities.  After the capture of Acre in 1191, two thousand seven hundred Muslims were taken outside the city walls and  slaughtered. 

When the Crusaders took a city, they were often sacked and looted.  The sacking of Tripoli in 1109 after a five year siege is a perfect example.  The elegant affluent city of learning and craftsmanship was destroyed.  The great library, the Dar al-Ihm was pillaged and its hundred books burned - their contents lost to posterity forever.  The capture of Constantinople in Fourth Crusade (although not an Islamic city at the time) in which the ancient library of Constantinople along with many mosques were stripped of anything of value then burnt to the ground also demonstrates this. 

The fervour and feeling of purpose and adventure on the crusades did often lead to terrible injustices such as raids on passive villages to steal food and supplies or more disturbingly the mindless persecution  of anyone who was not Christian, particularly Jewish people.  There were many examples of ethnic cleansing in which many non-Christians were driven from towns of significance by deliberate campaigns of terror, and collapses in military discipline that led to appalling consequences for any wretches unlucky enough to be found in the crusaders' path.

It is easy to describe these acts as shameful and inhumane, but the mood of the time must be taken into account. All over the known world, battles, persecution and many other terrible events were constantly taking place.  When compared with the actions of the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century the crusaders seem almost moderate.  Jenghiz Khan’s horde advanced westward, savagely destroying the empire of Khorezm-Shah.  Bokhara was burned to the ground and Samarkand was destroyed. Huge cities simply disappeared. When the hordes reached Jerusalem there was a Christian population of six thousand.  Less than three hundred escaped.  The raiders dug up the bones of previous rulers, pillaged everything of value before burning the churches (including that of the Holy Sepulchre). 

All cultures of the dark and middle ages seem savage and violent in our eyes but to survive those times they often had to be.  The Muslims themselves were just as destructive and fierce as the crusaders of western Europe, if not more so.  There are many examples of Islamic violence. For example:

The Muslim general Zhengi, feared throughout the Middle East, after swearing on the Koran to spare the lives of any enemies who surrendered, crucified thirty seven soldiers and had the enemy commander burnt alive after capturing the town Baalbek (after it having surrendered). After he captured Edessa back in 1144, almost the whole population was massacred, all Frankish men were killed and their wives sold into slavery.  In 1149 Nureddin destroyed the whole army of Antioch, taking no prisoners.  Prince Raymond was killed in cold blood by Shirkuh, a Kurdish general and his skull was kept as a trophy and sent as a gift to the Caliph of Baghdad.

In 1150 Count Joscelin of Edessa was captured by Muslim warriors, blinded and left chained in a dungeon to starve, and the list goes on.

By looking at the reasons for going on the crusade, we have established that on the whole, people took up the cross for the defence of their saviour and in order to carry out what they passionately believed to be right.  They certainly seemed to have been doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.  The fact that they failed to achieve almost every objective and that everything now viewed as being part of the crusades was an poorly-planned blunder, eases the crusades as a whole, towards the realm of embarrassment rather than shame, and even so, there were many positive side-effects of the crusades; they helped to unite a tense and dangerous Europe from a mass of squabbling tribes and realms into a stable and religious continent.  Trade routes and communications between East and West were greatly increased after the hostilities ceased, speeding up the development of both and contributing greatly to the renaissance period.  The integration with the Arab and Muslim world improved many important fields of maths and science such as surgery and navigation. These positive points hardly seem to make up for the mindless slaughter and destruction but they don’t need to.

In the modern world,, the massacres and persecutions seem brutal and the ideas and conviction behind them invalid and silly.  But the crusaders should not be criticised through twenty first century eyes.  They weren’t after land or booty, they weren’t colonialists or imperialists. Their principles and values were just hugely different from today.  They were pursuing an ideal that, however alien it seemed to later generations of historians, was enthusiastically supported at the time by such heavyweights as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Thomas Aquinas.  A quote from Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A Short History, explains why the crusades should not be dismissed as a shameful episode in the history of the west.  History is a reconciliation of the past with the present; otherwise it would be incomprehensible to those for whom it is written. And since the present is always in a state of flux it follows that interpretations and judgments alter with time.

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