More on the Crusades
I started reading Riley-Smith's book on the crusades (see 6/21/03 post) because I am quite ignorant on the subject and thought more knowledge might provide some yardstick for measuring recent events in the mid-east. Crusading was a phenomenon that spanned several centuries and now I see why one book is a 'short history'. Some disagreement exists on what constitued a crusade. Clearly the Holy Land provided the overriding impetus and there were seven major crusades to the east. But as Riley-Smith points out there were crusades to Spain, the Baltic areas, Prussia, and even within Christian Europe. Taking all the crusades into account presents a more comprehensive picture of the importance and widespread support for crusading.
The crusading movement was set in motion by Pope Urban II at the council of Clermont in late 1095 and the first wave of crusaders left Europe for the Holy Land in the spring of 1096. The movement reached its peak in the first thirty years of the thirteenth century, declined by the end of the fourteenth century and died a "lingering death". Riley Smith says: " The last crusade may have been that of Sebastian of Portugal in 1578. The last crusading league was the Holy League from 1684 to 1699."
Urban called for liberation and "...proclaimed a war with two distinct liberating goals. The first was the freeing of the eastern churches, and especially the church of Jerusalem, from the savagery and tryanny of the Muslims. This was the liberation of people... and Urban apparently painted a lurid picture of life under Muslim rule and exaggerated the threat the Turks now posed to Constantinople..." The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem itself.
The first crusade was the most effective. The Christian armies captured Jerusalem and other cities and established Latin territories in Palestine. Make no mistake though, this was a holy war. An early account of the capture and pillaging of Jerusalem in 1099 paints an appalling picture of the "liberation".
The pillage of Jerusalem
Now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men (and this was merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared with what happened in the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are normally chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, you would not believe it. Suffice to say that, in the Temple and Porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood.
From Raymond d'Aguilers, Historia francorum qui ceprint Jerusalem
According to Riley-Smith, the Muslim version of holy war, Jihad, developed on the Muslim side from 1110 onwards and was evident in 1119 and especially in 1144 when the Muslim Army sacked Edessa, the capital of the first Latin state in the east. "In the tumult of praise and propaganda, the concept of Jihad....became prominent." Jihad emphasized two key themes. The first was the obligation to reconquer the coast of Palestine and especially Jerusalem. The second was the Muslim religious and political unity were necessary. Saladin, upon taking control of Muslim armies, took up the theme of Jihad and finally in 1187 won the battle of Hattin and retook Jerusalem along witn most of the Christian ports along the coast of Palestine.
Christians were in possession of Jerusalem for for only 88 years. The third crusade, directly in response to the loss of Jerusalem, ushered in "crusading at its height". In 1189-1190 one of the largest, if not the largest, crusading armies left Europe for Jerusalem. At this time the importance of crusading was elevated in the sense that "...the papacy was now associating success in war directly with the spiritual health of all Christianity." Riley-smith states that "by the middle of the thirteenth century crusading had become commonplace..." For a number of reasons, after 1272 there were no great crusades to the Holy Land. The end for the Latin territories came in 1291 when Acre and the other Christian settlements in Palestine and Syria were captured by the Mamluks. This re-ignited the crusading fervour, but European politics and threats of heresy prevented the organization of a crusade to the east of any magnitude.
I haven't quite finished the book. It is almost overwhelming in its detail. So far, I have yet to find in the text a definitive judgement about the crusading movement as a whole. Searching elsewhere, at least one historian, or group of historians I should say, has rendered a judgment.
Viewed in the light of their original purpose, the Crusades were failures. They made no permanent conquests of the Holy Land. They did not retard the advance of Islam. Far from aiding the Eastern Empire, they hastened its disintegration. They also revealed the continuing inability of Latin Christians to understand Greek Christians, and they hardened the schism between them. They fostered a harsh intolerance between Muslims and Christians, where before there had been a measure of mutual respect. They were marked, and marred, by a recrudescence of Anti-Semitism. A History of the Christian Church, 4th ed., edited by Williston Walker, Richard A. Norris, David W. Lotz, and Robert T. Handy (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985).
(This quote as well as the one above can be found at an introductory website about the crusades maintained by the United Methodist Women.)
11:16:04 AM 
|
|
