See also my related post on the Inquisition
[originally edited and uploaded on 17 March 2000, from public list posts, with the permission of Mark Shea]
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How does one defend Catholicism in view of the Crusades and its slaughter?
How do you defend the Allied assault on continental Europe during World War II? Oh sure, you will say that Europe was occupied territory dominated by a foreign power, but does that really justify the sorts of atrocities, civilian deaths, and often racism that characterized so much Allied activity? I mean, just look at the fire bombing of Dresden. Just look at our neglect to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz. Just look at our neglect of the Warsaw Uprising Reprisals. Just look at the mass slaughter of innocent people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not only that, we hypocritically entered into an alliance with Stalin, one of the greatest butchers in history, to press our "just war" effort against Hitler. So obviously, there is no way at all to justify the so-called "Allied Cause." The whole thing must have been an entirely self-serving hypocritical effort with a thin veneer of "God and country" painted over it to give it a semblance of piety.
Please read this description of WWII carefully several times and then replace "WWII" with "the Crusades" and Hitler with "Saladin" to get some sense of the way a medieval European would regard the assumptions at the back of your question. The Crusades involved nasty slaughter because war usually does this. There were terrible crimes committed during the Crusades just as there there were terrible crimes committed by the Allies. But the Crusades were fundamentally seen by Europeans as a defensive war to liberate Christian lands from Muslim oppression, just as WWII was seen as a defensive war to liberate Europe from Nazi oppression. (Not for nothing did Eisenhower entitle his memoirs Crusade in Europe). It is also worth noting that Muslim conquest proceeded to gobble up all of Christian North Africa and Spain, as well as make it as far as Vienna. The last major assault on Christendom was in 1689. For some reason, Europe regarded Islam as a hostile power and sent troops to try to stop the conquest and roll it back.
We, who just watched our planes blow up Serbs to "liberate" Kosovo have little room to wring our hands.
Come on, Mark -- you can't compare the Byzantine Emperor -- or even Saladin -- with Hitler.
Sure I can. Both were occupying powers seen as a threat to Europe. I don't mean that Saladin was a genocidal maniac. But I do mean that Islam posed the gravest military threat to a Europe already surrounded by military threats (from Norsemen and Magyars too).
My point is that modernity has somehow gotten the idea that the Crusades were wars of conquest against happy Arab nomads who were minding their own business. In fact, they were seen as wars of liberation against an invader who not only conquered but imposed an alien religion (and, it should be noted, a heretical religion in the eyes of medievals. Mohammed was perceived, even by Dante, as a Christian heretic, not as a heathen).
Would you care to demonstrate that the Crusades met all the requirements for a "just war"?
I don't claim they did. What I am trying to show is that the Crusades were seen by those prosecuting them as a legitimate defense against a mortal threat.
I think the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland was every bit as reprehensible as the bombing of Dresden. I simply do not say that this was "all there really was" to the Crusades or to the Allied effort. Most people that post questions such as the one that started this thread are people who have almost no actual knowledge of the enormous complexities behind the Crusades. There is a cartoon history at work in most American minds which goes something like: The Pope was corrupt and decided he wanted land. He whipped people into a fervor with tent meetings and attacked the peaceful Arab nomads. Greedy kings and dumb peasants signed up for this in the hope of spoils. The attack failed, but not before a lot of innocent people were tortured for fun by evil Catholics. Then some other stuff happened like the Inquisition and the Black Death (caused by unsanitary dumb medievals who were 700 years stupider than us smart people). Then the Reformation happened and everybody learned to read and its been leading up to us ever since. Sorry. But this sort of cartoonish Whig history is omnipresent in a huge number of American heads. It is this I am trying to challenge a bit. I do not mean to equate Hitler and Saladin. But I do mean to show that something ("the Crusades involved unjust slaughter") needs to be considered in making a historical judgement.
The Turks occupied eastern Christendom. I pointed to WWII in order to show that people who see themselves as fighting wars of liberation can still do evil things like Dresden (or the slaughter of the Rhineland Jews), yet believe their cause basically just. The nearest historical experience of a big menacing occupying power with which an American can identify is Festung Europa, so I pointed to it as an analog.
The sack of Christian Byzantium was a shameful act and I did not defend it, just as I do not defend the slaughter in the Rhineland. However, if I were to ask "how did the bombing of Dresden protect against a German threat?" one would be justified in saying I was not really portraying the full scope of what the Allies believed themselves to be trying to accomplish in the European theatre. The betrayal of Constantinople, like the betrayal of Poland and the eastern countries by the Allies, was indefensible. But is was not all there was to the Crusades.
The Muslim-occupied eastern lands were historically Christian and were conquered by a power that gave a good college try at taking the rest of Europe with them. I don't think it simply "foolish and evil" that Europe resisted that college try.
On the whole, I think WWII a necessary, if not a "just" war. And I do not think the necessity (and in many cases, nobility) of that war is obliterated by the fact that in a number of cases, we acted with tremendous immorality.
Once again, I bring up the Rhenish Jews, and Byzantium - which scarcely posed a "moral threat" to Europe.
As I say, I don't defend these crimes. I merely point out that they do not constitute the whole story any more than the betrayal of Poland and the slaughter at Dresden are the summation of the Allied story.
The fact is that the Church of its day was deeply involved in the politics of the Crusaders.
Of course it was. And much of it was corrupt. I don't deny that for a moment. I merely point out that much of the Allied politics was deeply corrupt too, and yet still I think the war necessary. The Crusaders felt the same way.
I don't think the Crusades (or the Inquisition or any of the other blots on the Church's record) are simply and purely excusable. I think real inexcusable sins were committed for which it is our task to do penance. The death of a single innocent person is, quite literally, sin enough for the whole Church. But though I do not think it all excusable, I do think that any sensible assessment of such a huge historical phenomenon as the Church requires a bit of historical perspective.
A huge number of Americans are indeed profoundly historically illiterate and really do have just such a cartoonish view of the complexities of history. A huge number of people really do believe we are just 800 years smarter than those dumb people who lived in the Dark Ages. My point is not to justify crimes. It is to show that crimes have always been committed in the midst of a human race that thinks (and sometimes occassionally even attempts) to do what is best and make the best of a bad job. However, even that attempt is often rare and much evil is done, not by people "doing their best" but by people who are frankly selfish and evil, including Catholics. Life is complex.
The jerks that sacked Constantinople destroyed, right up to the present, the chance of reunion in Christ's Eastern and Western Church. It is not the least of their crimes. But it is also not the only thing that happened in the Crusades.
If the United States were occupied by a foreign power, I doubt most Americans would be soothed by your saying, "Hey, the United States has only been here for two centuries. It's not like this turf is historically American."
In the real world war has seldom conformed itself to either just war theory or any other sort of theory. Both the Crusades and WWII are examples of this.
I don't equate Saladin with Hitler just as I don't equate General Sherman with Hitler. But if I am trying to show how a Southerner perceived the threat of an invader to an historically illiterate audience, I have to begin with the experience of which that audience is mostly likely to be able to grasp at least something.
My point (and I will say it again) is not "Islam=Nazism" but "Here's how cultures respond to a perceived invading threat if they can muster the arms to do so."
Indeed, Saladin was often more honorable than the Crusaders. If it comes to that, Rommel was, on the whole, a far better man than Bomber Harris, who orchestrated Dresden. That does not, however, negate the fact that in both "Crusades" Europe saw itself as threatened by an invading power. That has been my only point.
War is complex. A medieval Europe pressed by Norsemen, Magyars and Islam felt itself threatened and reacted. It was neither purely evil nor purely noble in doing so. The Crusades were fought by sinners. But they were also fought by saints. Complex phenomena are like that. And the first Crusade was a different thing than the wars following it, just as the cynicism of Vietnam was, in a certain sense, a corrosion of the very things that made WWII defensible.
The Crusades are often oversimplified into a jaunt for Western Imperialism. My secondary point was that Christendom, for some reason, felt itself menaced as it watched the east, then North Africa, then Spain fall to Islamic armies. So it launched what it clearly regarded as a defensive war, not a war of imperialism.
The nearest historical experience of a defensive war to the minds of most average Americans is WWII, so I used it as an analogy to show that the Crusades were seen by many of the the people prosecuting them as something more than merely cynical military exercises.
My final point was that those who prosecuted them were capable of seeing them in this way despite the sack of Constantinople and the Rhineland massacres, just as the Allies were capable of thinking their cause to be, on the whole, right despite the atrocities of Dresden, and Nagasaki and the betrayal of Poland.
These elementary points are not written to justify the evils committed by the Crusades. Nor are they written to equate Saladin's character with Hitler's. They are merely written to help people to see that when people feel themselves to be threated by an invading military power that appears to be bent on conquest, they react remarkably like people whether in the 13th century or the 20th.
Twere crimes committed by the Crusaders that did not necessarily render the entire enterprise a complete exercise in sin and nothing but sin. Dresden was as morally revolting as the sack of Constantinople. The Allies entered the war to "save" Poland and ended by betraying it (just as the Crusaders entered the Crusades to "save" Constantinople and betrayed it). Yet that's not the sum total of the story of either conflict. And I think you can see that point too.
I was not setting out to argue either that the Crusades or, for that matter, WWII were blueprints for a Just War. In fact, I think I made it pretty clear that I think there are real problems with both conflicts from a Just War perspective. My only purpose was to show to a modern reader something of the complexity and ambiguity that faces us when we try to apply a cartoon "Crusades as western imperialism" template to the Crusades. I have tried to give a bit of a picture of how it looked to medieval Europeans. This does not constitute a brief for the Crusades as a just war.
I think the Crusades are understandable. I also think much of the Crusades (and much of WWII) were immoral. I do not think that someone who is scandalized by the Crusades is just being malicious toward the Church.
I was simply pointing out the small and obvious fact that the Crusades were perceived by the Crusaders as a defensive war and that the evils committed therein were not understood by medieval Europeans as fundamentally discrediting to their cause. It was a very simple point really.
I was not attempting to write a full dress history of the Crusades replete with a ten volume discussion of Catholic moral theology. My purpose was to provoke a small amount of cerebral activity in the original questioner by suggesting a startling analogy that he may not have thought about.
The Allies could have refused to engineer the bloodbath at Dresden, protested Stalin's facilitation of the massacre in Warsaw, not bombed Nagasaki, not interned all the Japanese, not betrayed Poland and the eastern countries, not had racially segregated armies, and not engaged in ethnic cleansing of western Poland after the war. There are a number of serious black marks on the Allied record that we seldom hear about because we were the Good Guys.
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Other related links:
Crusade Myths (Thomas F. Madden)
The Crusades 0101 (James Akin)
The Jews and the Crusaders: Medieval Shoah? (Vince Ryan)
The Crusades and Their Critics (James Hitchcock)
Rethinking the Crusades (Jonathan Riley-Smith)
The Real History of the Crusades (Thomas F. Madden)
Catholic Encyclopedia: CRUSADES
The Battle Over the Crusades (Robert P. Lockwood)
Crusades: Truth and the Black Legend (Vittorio Messori)
The Crusades (Anne W. Carroll)
The Meaning of the Crusade (G.K. Chesterton)
The Crusades: A Defensive Gesture
Crusades and Counter-Crusades (Paul Crawford)
Crusades: Additional Background (Paul Crawford)
Crusades: Legacy (Paul Crawford)
Crusades: Political and Military Background (Paul Crawford)
Crusading Vows and Privileges (Paul Crawford)
The First Crusade (Paul Crawford)
The Later Crusades (Paul Crawford)
Reflections on the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 and Lesser-Known Byzantine Atrocities (Dave Armstrong)
Last edited on Thu Dec 20th, 2007 09:50 pm by Dave Armstrong
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