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Crusades and mirages
He is, without a doubt, the most powerful man in the Western world. His friends regard him as courteous and moderate. His enemies see him as ‘a combination of Christian piety, xenophobia and imperialistic arrogance’, in the words of one commentator. He is possessed by a passionate and single-minded determination: to end the ceaseless conflict in the Middle East once and for all. By doing so, he believes, he can not only bring peace to that region, but also extirpate the danger that Islamic fanaticism represents to innocent Westerners. To that end, he brings together an unprecedented multinational force, drawn from most of the Western nations, although not all. Some observers at least are sceptical, believing that he has ulterior motives for his campaign, or is launching it on a pretext, in order to consolidate his own authority and distract people from other conflicts nearer to home. Almost from the first, the vast military project is bedevilled by unforeseen scandals and setbacks, including appalling atrocities committed by some of the Western combatants. And although the invasion itself succeeds swiftly and conclusively, it is not long before some people are questioning the price that has been paid, as occupation of the Middle East leads to a cycle of attrition that makes the previous state of affairs seem pale by comparison.The subject of the first paragraph is, of course, none other than Odo of Lagery, Pope Urban II, who on 27 November 1095 addressed a great crowd of believers in Clermont, calling upon them to take up arms and liberate Jerusalem. It was in many ways an improbable proposition. Europe was only just emerging from a long era of internal wars and realignments. Up to that moment, no-one in the West had seemed particularly exercised by the state of affairs in the Middle East. The enemies that Urban identified as his target were probably the wrong ones anyway; the real threat came from more fundamentalist and aggressive factions elsewhere in the Muslim world.1 Yet Urban's proclamation of the First Crusade galvanized the West.
Within four years—an astonishingly brief period if you take into consideration the logistic capabilities of the early mediaeval age—the Western armies had occupied Jerusalem. As Raymond of Aguliers, chaplain to the count of Toulouse, noted with satisfaction: ‘In all the streets and squares of the city, mounds of heads, hands and feet were to be seen ... what an apt punishment!’ This prefigured much that was to follow. In the subsequent two and a half centuries, Jerusalem fell and was retaken many times, in a desperate and bewildering succession of intrigues, alliances, partitions, truces, betrayals and reverses of fortune. Most of this was accompanied by utter confusion and unspeakable carnage. Finally, after four further crusades, in an ultimate irony, the combined armies of the French barons and the Sultan of Damascus fell to an alliance of Turkish mercenaries and Egyptian slave warriors, the Mameluks, in 1243.
It is interesting to try and understand the mindset of a man like Urban II, and of the millions whom he inspired to engage in increasingly pointless acts of brutality against a distant enemy. The most obvious feature of this mindset is what psychologists call splitting: an inability to see anything except virtuous motives on one's own side and malignity on the part of the other. The most atrocious deeds were perpetrated in the fixed belief that the enemy's misdeeds were sufficient to merit such punishment. War was seen as a necessity for bringing about peace. Indeed, it was accepted more or less without question that the best way of promoting a universal doctrine of peace was by imposing it through extreme violence.2 This allowed the crusaders to see themselves as virtuous, even when it was clear that they were driven by economic motives and the raw pursuit of power. For example, from time to time they abandoned their own allies and turned to slaughtering them instead, including innumerable Greek Orthodox Christians as well as Jews. During all of this, they were able to sustain an image of themselves as noble and chivalrous knights, rather than as fanatical, avaricious, treacherous and bloodthirsty thugs, which is how they were generally seen outside the West.
Throughout the period, the crusaders therefore managed to maintain a fantasy that the very next campaign would end the conflict for all time. They were incapable of looking back at the errors of their predecessors or foreseeing the catastrophes that would follow a repetition. Hardly anyone understood that messy stand-offs are often the best that can be achieved in human affairs, or that a compromise may allow a population to live in a more tolerable state than interminable war. Two honourable exceptions in this respect were Frederick of Hofenstaten and Al-Kamil. These basically irreligious leaders managed to achieve a historic partition of Jerusalem in 1229, allowing free access to pilgrims of all religions. This was a similar state of affairs to the one that had existed anyway before the crusades began. They were both reviled by their contemporaries. Their treaty lasted only ten years.
The spirit of the crusading enterprise infused the whole of Western society. Many British place names still carry echoes of the barracks, banks, hospitals, estates and other institutions that supported and housed the crusading knights. Temple station on the London Underground and Ysbyty Ifan—St John's Hospital—in north Wales are two among many examples. The crusading armies were financed by the taxes, rents and donations of many of the Western nations. Essentially, whole European populations were implicated in the crusades, not least through their acquiescence in the idea that their civilization was superior to that of others. They tolerated the news of collateral suffering inflicted in their name on innocent bystanders elsewhere. They remained incapable of understanding that they might be seen exactly as they saw others, and were actually provoking complementary acts of barbarism. The only question the crusaders ever asked was ‘what retribution should follow the enemy's crimes?’. No-one ever considered the alternative question: ‘what retribution might follow our response?’
Our children or grandchildren may live to see the day in 2095 that marks a millennium since Pope Urban initiated this long era of mass ideological psychosis. Let us hope that they will inherit a world that has risen above such simplistic thinking, and such militaristic folly.
References
1. Read PP. The Templars. London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999.
2. Housely N. The Crusaders. Stroud, Tempus, 2002.
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