Some similarities to the politics of today
newyorker.com/printable/?critics/041213crbo_books
HOLY SMOKE
by JOAN ACOCELLA
What were the Crusades really about?
Issue of 2004-12-13
According to many modern historians, what triggered the Crusades was not an external cause but an internal one: a campaign, beginning with Pope Gregory VII, in the late eleventh century, to reform the Church. This was a two-pronged effort. One goal was to stamp out immorality: get the priests to stop marrying, stop selling ecclesiastical offices, live by their vows. A second, and probably more important, objective was to strengthen the Papacy. In religion as in politics, Europeans of that period had little respect for centralized authority. The Pope’s sovereignty was disputed not just by secular rulers but within the Church. When Urban II, Gregory’s successor, was elected, in 1088, it took him six years to get a rival, German candidate out of the Lateran Palace. (He finally had to bribe him.) This is not to speak of the fact that the Pope had no control over the Eastern churches, the dioceses of the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. Most of these territories were under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine Empire and hence of the Greek Orthodox Church, which, to Rome’s abiding fury, had broken with the Western Church in 1054. The Vatican wanted to get mightier and holier, and Urban II took on the job.
In 1095, he went on a tour of France, and one afternoon in Clermont he gave a sermon calling on Christians to journey to the East and reclaim the Holy Land. “A race absolutely alien to God,” he said, was defiling Christian altars, raping Christian women, tying Christian men to posts and using them for archery practice. None of this was true, but it had the desired effect. First, as the postcolonial theorists would say, it “otherized” the Muslims. Second, it gave the European nobles a cause that could distract them from warring with their neighbors—a more or less daily occupation of knights in that period—and unite them, for a holy purpose. In the months that followed, at convocations across Europe, between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand people came forward and knelt to “take the Cross.”
Thus was launched the crusading movement, whose high tide lasted for two centuries. As time went on, a “crusade” no longer meant just a march against the Muslim infidel. Any perceived enemy of the Church—the Wends, in Germany (pagans); the Cathars, in southern France (heretics)—could be the target of a crusade. But the Crusades against Islam were the model, and the two most interesting were the first (1095-99) and the fourth (1202-04). The First Crusade is important because, apart from being first, it was successful, at least in the Church’s terms: the men recruited by Urban did capture Jerusalem, together with other rich territories in the East, and in consequence—because those lands had to be defended—they made the later Crusades to the East necessary. The Fourth Crusade is famous for the opposite reason. In Christian terms, it was the least successful—indeed, a scandal. The Crusaders never got to Jerusalem; instead, they attacked Christian cities, notably Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which they effectively destroyed. They thus shifted the center of Christian civilization from East to West, and permanently altered the history of the world.
And
Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered [the knights] a solution. He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it was not a sin—indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins. By the Fourth Crusade, participants were guaranteed absolution of all confessed transgressions—in other words, a ticket straight to paradise. The arrangement that Urban offered to the men of the First Crusade is less clear, but they were promised “eternal rewards.” So it was two in one: the knights could go on slaughtering people and get to Heaven thereby. That was “positive violence,” and, according to Asbridge and Phillips, it was the motor of the Crusades.
Concluding
And if I have noticed certain resemblances between the Crusades and the war in Iraq—the exaggeration of the threat, to get the war going; the enormous financial cost to the attacking country; the mixture of idealistic and commercial motives; the surprise of finding that the liberated may not thank you, indeed, may attack you—Asbridge and Phillips have surely also noted the parallels. They are silent on the subject, but in the resulting void, and with the constant emphasis on the religious motive, there is a strong suggestion, intentional or not, that we should consider whether today, too, there might be such a thing as positive violence.
My long term goal is to make it clear that the humanities have much to offer in the understanding o current policies. The following quotes are from Disraeli's novel Conningsby. Written (I think 1844) when young as a novel about the reform of parlaimanet, it became the guide when D became prime minister many years later. The novel is available on line at
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7412
and for the Oxforn Hist of Ebglish lit on Disraeli see
http://www.bartleby.com/223/1103.html
The chief members of this official confederacy were men distinguished by none of the conspicuous qualities of statesmen. They had none of the divine gifts that govern senates and guide councils. They were not orators; they were not men of deep thought or happy resource, or of penetrative and sagacious minds. Their political ken was essentially
dull and contracted. They expended some energy in obtaining a defective, blundering acquaintance with foreign affairs; they knew as little of the real state of their own country as savages of an approaching eclipse. This factious league had shuffled themselves into power by clinging to the skirts of a great minister, the last of Tory statesmen, but who, in the unparalleled and confounding emergencies of his latter years, had been forced, unfortunately for England, to relinquish Toryism. His successors inherited all his errors without the latent genius, which in him might have still rallied and extricated him from the consequences of his disasters. His successors did not merely inherit his errors; they exaggerated, they caricatured them. They rode into power on a springtide of all the rampant prejudices and rancorous passions of their time. From the King to the boor their policy was a mere pandering to public ignorance. Impudently usurping the name of that party of which nationality, and therefore universality, is the essence, these pseudo- Tories made Exclusion the principle of their political constitution, and Restriction the genius of their commercial code.
In the language of this defunct school of statesmen, a practical man is a man who practises the blunders of his predecessors.
an internal trade supported by swarming millions whom manufacturers and inclosure-bills summoned into existence; above all, the
supreme control obtained by man over mechanic power, these are some of the causes of that rapid advance of material civilisation in England, to which the annals of the world can afford no parallel. But there was no proportionate advance in our moral civilisation. In the hurry-skurry of money-making, men-making, and machine-making, we had altogether outgrown, not the spirit, but the organisation, of our institutions.
because they were called upon, for the first time, to perform the functions of government. Like all weak men, they had recourse to what they called strong measures. They determined to put down the multitude. They thought they were
imitating Mr. Pitt, because they mistook disorganisation for sedition.
we can boast no remarkable superiority either in political justice or in political economy. One must attribute this degeneracy, therefore, to the long war and our insular position, acting upon men naturally of inferior abilities, and unfortunately, in addition, of illiterate habits.
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