Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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CHRISTIAN JIHAD: THE CRUSADES

Written by Vladimir Moss

CHRISTIAN JIHAD: THE CRUSADES

 

     Gregory VII fled from Rome with his Norman allies and died in Salerno in 1085. When he was lying on his death-bed, he said: “I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.” But a monk who waited on him replied: “In exile thou canst not be, for God hath given thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession (Psalm 2.8).”

 

     The papist claim to lordship over the whole world, including the heathen, was demonstrated especially during the Crusades, which were the manifestation to the Orthodox Christian and Muslim worlds of the mystery of iniquity that was taking place within the Western world. The West – especially England, Germany and Italy – had already felt the mailed fist of the Pope. Now it was the turn of the North (the Baltic lands), the South (Spain) and the East (Byzantium, the Levant and the Holy Land).

     First, the Pope’s vassals, the Normans, having conquered Bari in 1071 and Palermo in 1072, invaded Greece from the West. Emperor Alexis I’s Varangian Guard, probably containing many Anglo-Saxon veterans of Hastings, were again defeated, and Alexis only just succeeded in containing the invaders. Finally, the formidable Norman leader Robert Guiscard, died as Duke of Apulia in 1085, with the inscription on his tomb: “Here lies Guiscard, terror of the world.”

     Then, in 1085, King Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon captured the Muslim city of Toledo for the Pope; within a few years, his champion, the famous El Cid, had entered Valencia.

     Most importantly, in 1095, at a synod in Clermont, Pope Urban II, a Cluny monk, appealed to all Christians to free Jerusalem from the Saracens, and placed his own legate, a bishop, at the head of the Christian forces. He was responding to a plea for help against the Muslims by the Emperor Alexis. But he may also have been trying to shore up his own position in his struggle with the Holy Roman Empire in the Investiture Contest.

     As Christopher Tyerman writes, “The background to the First Crusade lay in this conflict, as Urban II sought to use the mobilization of the expedition as a cover the reclaim the pope’s position in Italy and demonstrate his practical leadership of Christendom, independent of secular monarchs. The slogan of the papal reformers was ‘libertas ecclesiae’, ‘church freedom/liberty/rights’. This provided the central appeal of Urban II’s summons of 1095, when called on the faithful to go to ‘liberate’ the churches of the east and Jerusalem. The crusade is impossible to understand outside the context of more general church and papal reform.”[1]

     Urban offered remission of sins to all those who died on crusade: “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ!”

     At the same time, the pope saw the crusades as a “Christian” solution to problems thrown up by the new feudal, militaristic pattern of life in the West. He made it clear, writes Barbara Ehrenreich, “that a major purpose of the crusade was to deflect the knights’ predatory impulses away from Europe itself:

     “’Oh race of the Franks, we learn that in some of your provinces no one can venture on the road by day or by night without injury or attack by highwaymen, and no one is secure even at home.’ 

     “We know he is not talking about common, or lowborn, criminals because it emerges in the next sentence that the solution to this problem is a re-enactment of the ‘Truce of God’, meaning voluntary restraint on the part of the knights, whose energies are now to be directed outward towards the infidels:

     “’Let all hatred depart from among you, all quarrels end, all wars cease. Start upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre to wrest that land from the wicked race and subject it to yourselves.’

     “Militarily, the Crusades were largely a disaster for the Christians, but they did serve to cement the fusion of the cross and the sword. The church’s concept of the ‘just war’ had always been something of a grudging concession to reality. Here, though, was a war that was not only ‘just’ but necessary and holy in the eyes of God, Christendom’s first jihad. Those who participated in Europe’s internal wars were often required to do penance for the sin of killing; but participation in a crusade had the opposite effect, cleansing a man from prior sin and guaranteeing his admission to heaven. It was the Crusades, too, that led to the emergence of a new kind of warrior: the warrior-monk, pledged to lifelong chastity as well as to war. In the military monastic orders of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitalers, any lingering Christian hesitations about violence were dissolved. The way of the knight – or at least of the chaste and chivalrous knight – became every bit as holy as that of the cloistered monk.”[2]

     In 1090, writes Simon Jenkins, “four crusader armies set off across Europe. First to leave was a chaotic ‘People’s Crusade’ under a charismatic French evangelist, Peter the Hermit. He led an estimated 15,000 variously adventurous and starving peasants, with little idea of where they were going or what to do. On the way Peter’s crusaders and other hangers-on killed thousands of Jews in the Rhineland, possibly a quarter of those in the region. They went on to inflict similar pogroms in Hungary, largely in a quest for food. Disoriented survivors eventually arrived in Constantinople, where they again raided the countryside for supplie. A dismayed Alexis pushed them south, where in October the remnants were massacred in an ambush by the Turks. They were heard of no more.

     “The other armies, from France, Flanders, Germany and Italy travelled more comfortably by sea, some 35,000 assembling outside Constantinople in 1097. Their motives have been much discussed, a mix of adventurism, hope of gain and genuine piety. As the crusaders marched south they were debilitated by heat, disease and disagreement. They captured Nicaea and Antioch, and entered Jerusalem in 1099. Here they perpetrated another mass killing, this time of the city’s Muslim population, and held the Jews for ransom. By then, barely 12,000 crusaders remained. Jerusalem was garrisoned and four Christian settlements were formed, including a ‘kingdom’ of Jerusalem.”[3]

* 

     The First Crusade had many important effects. First, it demonstrated to the Byzantines, who previously had not paid much attention to the Schism of 1054, but rather had hoped to use the western schismatics to defend their own territories, that the westerners were now truly of a different spirit from theirs, and that, far from defending them from the Muslims, they were an enemy scarcely less dangerous than the Muslims, for they did not return former Byzantine possessions such as Antioch and Jerusalem to the empire, as had been agreed, but rather made them centres of heresy.

     Secondly, the crusade revealed that in the West there had arisen a new “theology of war”, as it were.

     Bettany Hughes points out that “Unlike both the Muslims and the Latins, Byzantium did not indulge a particular penchant for holy war; in fact Byzantine authors use the phrase only when referring to battles for the possession of Delphi in classical times. ‘We must always preserve peace,’ their chronicles say. The West on the other hand did not indulge such squeamishness.”[4] For the Byzantines the just war had to be a defensive war, a war to defend or regain territory lost to the infidel, not for territory’s sake, but for the sake of the souls of the Orthodox who lived on that territory.

      St. Philaret of New York (+1985) writes: “War is a negative phenomenon. Yet, it will exist, sometimes as the sole defense of truth and human rights, or against seizure, brutal invasion and violence. Only such wars of defense are recognized in Christian teaching. In fact, we hear of the following event in the life of St. Athanasios of the Holy Mountain.

      “Prince Tornikian of Georgia, an eminent commander of the Byzantine armies, was received into monasticism at St Athanasios' monastery. During the time of the Persian invasion, Empress Zoe recalled Tornikian to command the armies. Tornikian flatly refused on the grounds that he was a monk. But St. Athanasios said to him, "We are all children of our homeland and we are obligated to defend it. Our obligation is to guard the homeland from enemies by prayers. Nevertheless, if God deems it expedient to use both our hands and our heart for the common weal, we must submit completely ... If you do not obey the ruler, you will have to answer for the blood of your compatriots whom you did not wish to save." Tornikian submitted, defeated the enemy and rescued the homeland from danger…

      “One can, of course, sin and sin greatly while participating in war. This happens when one participates in war with a feeling of personal hatred, vengeance, or vainglory and with proud personal aims. On the contrary, the less the soldier thinks about himself, and the more he is ready to lay down his life for others, the closer he approaches to the martyr's crown.”[5]

     St. Cyril Equal-to-the-Apostles made a similar point to some Muslims, who asked him: «Your God is Christ. He commanded you to pray for enemies, to do good to those who hate and persecute you and to offer the other cheek to those who hit you, but what do you actually do? If anyone offends you, you sharpen your sword and go into battle and kill. Why do you not obey your Christ?» Having heard this, St. Cyril asked his fellow-polemists: «If there are two commandments written in one law, who will be its best respected — the one who obeys only one commandment or the one who obeys both?» When the Hagarenes said that the best respecter of law is the one who obeys both commandments, the holy preacher continued: «Christ is our God Who ordered us to pray for our offenders and to do good to them. He also said that no one of us can show greater love in life than he who gives his life for his friends (John 15:3). That is why we generously endure offences caused us as private people. But in company we defend one another and give our lives in battle for our neighbours, so that you, having taken our fellows prisoners, could not imprison their souls together with their bodies by forcing them into renouncing their faith and into godless deeds. Our Christ-loving soldiers protect our Holy Church with arms in their hands. They safeguard the sovereign in whose sacred person they respect the image of the rule of the Heavenly King. They safeguard their land because with its fall the home authority will inevitably fall too and the evangelical faith will be shaken. These are precious pledges for which soldiers should fight to the last. And if they give their lives in battlefield, the Church will include them in the community of the holy martyrs and call them intercessors before God.»[6] 

     But among the Roman Catholics a different concept of the just war was emerging. The Catholics claimed that this concept went back to St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great. Thus Gregory, following Augustine, had argued that war could be waged “for the sake of enlarging the res publica within which we see God worshipped… so that the name of Christ will travel among the subject people through the preaching of the faith.”[7]

     As for Augustine, from his “diffuse comments on war,” writes Tyerman, “could be identified four essential characteristics of a just war that were to underpin most subsequent discussions of the subject. A just war requires a just cause; its aim must be defensive or for the recovery of rightful possession; legitimate authority must sanction it; those who fight must be motivated by right intent. Thus war, by nature sinful, could be a vehicle for the promotion of righteousness; war that is violent could, as some later medieval apologists maintained, act as a form of charitable love, to help victims of injustice. From Augustine’s categories developed the basis of Christian just war theory, for example, by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.”[8] 

     However, between Augustine and Aquinas came the crusades; and the crusades added other elements that are completely lacking in Augustine – the secular authority of the pope, and the positive holiness of a war proclaimed by the pope. For Augustine, the only authority that could justly proclaim a war was the Roman emperor – and he was more than a little sceptical that all wars proclaimed by the emperor were holy or just. But for the crusader, as Jonathan Riley-Smith writes, “A crusade was a holy war fought against those perceived to be the external or internal foes of Christendom for the recovery of Christian property or in defence of the Church or Christian people. As far as the crusaders were concerned, the Muslims in the East and in Spain had occupied Christian territory, including land sanctified and made his very own by the presence of Christ himself, and they had imposed infidel tyranny on the Christians who lived there. The pagans in the Baltic region threatened new Christian settlements. The [Albigensian] heretics in Languedoc or Bohemia were rebels against their mother the Church and were denying the responsibility for teaching entrusted to her by Christ; they and the Church’s political opponents in Italy disturbed rightful order. These people all menaced Christians and the Church, and their actions provided crusaders with the opportunity of expressing love for their oppressed or threatened brothers in a just cause, which was always related to that of Christendom as a whole. A crusading army was therefore considered to be international even when it was actually composed of men from only one region… The war it fought was believed to be directly authorized by Christ himself, the incarnate God, through his mouthpiece, the pope. Being Christ’s own enterprise it was regarded as positively holy…”[9]

     The crusades were a new kind of “just” war with a more exalted, religious pathos. Those who incited them were popes rather than kings; plenary remission of sins and penances, even eternal salvation, was touted as the reward – “by a transitory labour you can win an eternal reward”, said Gregory VII. They were holy wars blessed by the Pope and directed against Muslims (in Spain and Palestine), pagans (the Slavic Wends and the Balts), and even other Christians (the “schismatics” of Anglo-Saxon England, the Albigensians of Southern France, the Orthodox of Novgorodian Russia). Thus they were not defensive wars, but wars of reconquest of formerly Christian lands - the word reconquista was first used to describe the wars against the Moors in Spain blessed by Pope Alexander II in 1064. To this was added a passionate and sinful element, the desire for revenge, albeit on God’s behalf. Thus the Norman leader Robert Guiscard declared his wish to free Christians from Muslim rule and to “avenge the injury done to God”[10]… His brother Robert was blessed to conquer Muslim-held Sicily, completing his “holy war” in his conquest of Palermo in 1072. His grandson Tancred was a leader of the crusaders who conquered Jerusalem in 1099, himself becoming “Prince of Galilee”.

     The Lord said: “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay”. But for the brave new world of Roman Catholic Christendom born in the second half of the eleventh century, vengeance became once again a human obligation or right… 

     With more justice it may be argued that the crusaders’ concept of holy war was borrowed from their main opponents, the Muslims. And indeed, the crusades could be compared with the Muslim jihads, with the Pope taking the place of the Caliph. Now Jihad is “the sixth pillar of Islam, the perpetual collective and sometimes individual obligation on all the faithful to struggle (jihad) spiritually against unbelief in themselves (al-jihad al-akbar, the greater jihad) and physically against unbelievers (al-jihad al-asghar, the lesser jihad).”[11] In the era of the Crusades, we see the lesser jihad, the physical struggle against unbelievers, becoming increasingly important in the thought and practice of the Catholic West, which in turn stimulated its revival among the Muslims. Traditional peaceful missionary work had no place in this Christian jihad; the aim was not the conversion of the infidel enemy, but his extermination… 

     The evil consequences were not slow to reveal themselves. First, the Crusades were sadistically cruel. It has been observed that when a Christian people falls away from the true faith, during the first two or three generations after their apostasy they display a cruelty that would not have seemed possible before. We can say this of the Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and of the Russians who accepted Sovietism after 1917. It now became true of the Western European peoples after the fall of the Roman Church in 1054, being displayed most clearly in the First Crusade of 1098-99. For in the course of recapturing Jerusalem, the crusaders exterminated most of the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of the Holy City in a terrible and wholly unjustified bloodbath. “In the Temple,” wrote an eye-witness, “[the Crusaders] rode in blood up to their bridles. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.”[12]  And another wrote: “On the top of Solomon’s Temple, to which they had climbed in fleeing, many were shot to death with arrows and cast down headlong from the roof. Within this Temple about 10,000 were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain. What more shall I tell? They did not spare the women and children.”[13]

     Montefiore writes: “The massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem was a terrible crime but it was certainly vastly exaggerated: Muslim historians claimed that 70,000 or even 100,000 died in the slaughter but it is likely that there were not more than 30,000 inside the city and the latest research from contemporary Arab source el-Arabi suggests the number may be closer to between 3,000 and 10,000. Crusader brutality demonstrates the evil of intolerance but the Christians were scarcely alone in this: when the crusader cities of Edessa and Acre later fell, the slaughter by Muslim conquerors was much greater.”[14]

*

     Quarrelling among the crusaders led to a strengthening of the Muslim position, which led to the disastrous Second Crusade, led by King Louis VII of France, the builder of Notre Dame de Paris and founder of the Sorbonne, the University of Paris. Some years later, a Muslim jihad under the Kurdish Sultan Saladin destroyed a large Crusader army at Hattin and reconquered Jerusalem in 1187, but was relatively merciful to the Christian inhabitants. In response, King Richard “the Lionheart” of England together with the French king Philip Augustus undertook the Third Crusade, in which, after sacking the Greek city of Messina in Sicily and seizing the Orthodox land of Cyprus and imposing a Latin hierarchy on the inhabitants, he “massacred thousands of Muslim prisoners in cold blood outside Acre and arranged the heads of executed Muslims around his tent…”[15] But he was forced to turn back before the walls of Jerusalem…

* 

     The Crusaders’ cruelty was not confined to the Eastern Mediterranean. Those against the pagan Slavs and Balts of the Baltic Sea coast were similarly savage. Thus Albert, Margrave of Brandenburg colonized the lands of the Slavic Wends in the mid-twelfth century as follows: “Because God gave plentiful aid and victory to our leader and the other princes, the Slavs have been everywhere crushed and driven out. A people strong and without number have come from the bounds of the ocean and taken possession of the territories of the Slavs. They have built cities and churches and have grown in riches beyond all estimation.”[16]

     Again, Bernard of Clairvaux said about the Wendish crusade of 1147: “We expressly forbid that for any reason whatsoever they should make a truce with those peoples, whether for money or for tribute, until such time as, with God’s help, either their religion or their nation be destroyed.”[17] For “the knight of Christ need fear no sin in killing the foe, he is a minister of God for the punishment of the wicked. In the death of a pagan a Christian is glorified, because Christ is glorified… [He] who kills for religion commits no evil but rather does good, for his people and himself. If he dies in battle, he gains heaven; if he kills his opponents, he avenges Christ. Either way, God is pleased.”[18]

     Even the Orthodox Russians were considered to be in need of forcible conversion. Thus Bishop Matthew of Crakow wrote to Bernard in 1150, asking him to “exterminate the godless rites and customs of the Ruthenians”.[19]

     A vivid witness to the destructiveness and anti-Orthodoxy of these Crusaders in the Baltic is provided by the city of Vineta on the Oder, whose under-sea remains are now being excavated by German archaeologists. Tony Paterson writes: “Medieval chroniclers such as Adam of Bremen, a German monk, referred to Vineta as ‘the biggest city in all of Europe’. He wrote: ‘It is filled with the wares of all the peoples of the north. Nothing desirable or rare is missing.’ He remarked that the city’s inhabitants, including Saxons, Slavs and ‘Greeks and Barbarians’ were so wealthy that its church bells were made of silver and mothers wiped their babies’ bottoms with bread rolls.…

     “A century later, another German chronicler, Helmold von Bosau, referred to Vineta, but this time in the past tense. He said it had been destroyed: ‘A Danish king with a very big fleet of ships is said to have attacked and completely destroyed this most wealthy place. The remains are still there,’ he wrote in 1170… Vineta was most likely inhabited by resident Slavs and Saxons as well as ‘Greeks and Barbarian’ merchants from Byzantium who plied a trade between the Baltic and the Black Sea via the rivers of western Russia. Dr. Goldmann said that the majority of Vineta’s estimated 20,000 to 30,000 population were probably Greek Orthodox Christians…’After the great schism of 1054, the Orthodox believers were regarded as a threat by the Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire. Vineta was almost certainly a victim of a campaign to crush the Orthodox faith,’ he said. Its demise is therefore likely to have occurred when the chronicler von Bosau said it did: towards the end of the 12^th century when the Crusaders launched a never fully explained campaign in northern Europe…”[20]

*

     In the long run, in spite of the enormous effort put into them over the course of centuries, the crusades failed in their ostensible aim, the reconquest of the Holy Land from the Muslims. Most of the crusader kingdoms carved out of Syria and Palestine had been reconquered by the Muslims by the late thirteenth century. So if that, too, was the “just and splendid judgement of God”, it did not speak well for the justice or holiness of the crusader wars.

     While at first claiming to help “liberate” the Eastern Churches, the crusades ended up by destroying Orthodoxy in large parts of the Greek-speaking East. Already before the Second Crusade Bernard of Clairvaux had expressed “bloodthirsty anti-Greek fulminations”, in Sir Steven Runciman’s phrase.[21] But the climax of the anti-Greek campaign was undoubtedly the fourth crusade of 1204, than which, as Runciman, with pardonable exaggeration, “there never was  a greater crime against humanity”. The crusade was diverted to Constantinople by the crafty doge of Venice, Dandolo, as a result of which the city was sacked in a frenzy of barbarism, and a Latin emperor and patriarch were placed on the thrones of Hagia Sophia. And so the project that had begun as a mission to liberate the Eastern Churches at the request of the Byzantine emperor ended up by destroying the empire (temporarily) and attempting to subject all the Orthodox Churches to Rome. Even Pope Innocent III disapproved. The Greek Church, he said, “now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs”.[22] 

     However, this did not prevent the Pope from profiting from the crusaders’ evil. Latin kingdoms with Latin patriarchs were established over Orthodox populations in Jerusalem, Antioch, Cyprus and, in the fourth crusade of 1204, Constantinople.[23] In general, therefore, the thirteenth century represented a nadir for Orthodoxy and the zenith of Papism. Nevertheless, the Orthodox held out in these conquered lands. In Cyprus, for example, which had been conquered by King Richard of England and then handed over to the Knights Templar, the local population refused to adopt the faith of their Latin metropolitan. They were instructed and inspired by the great hermit St. Neophytus the Enclosed of Cyprus (+1219), who once said of a Latin attempt to reconquer Jerusalem: “It is similar to the wolves coming to chase away the dogs...”[24]

     The crusades were with reason called “the Roman wars ” because they were waged by the Pope of Rome. Although the actual fighting was undertaken by emperors and kings, who sometimes displayed megalomaniac tendencies on a par with the Pope’s[25], it was the Popes who propelled the crusaders eastward; and they frequently excommunicated rulers who were tardy in fulfilling their vows to take up the cross. Thus the crusades completed the transformation of the papacy from a spiritual power into a worldly, political and military one, placing an ineluctably expansionist and violent seal on western civilization. 

     The most successful of the crusades was the fifth, led by the German Emperor Frederick II in 1228-1229. Paradoxically, he “‘alone of all the Crusaders was not blessed, but cursed by the Pope’. But he alone succeeded in securing freedom for Jerusalem and the Holy Land for a full fifteen years by a treaty with the Arabian Sultan, without shedding a drop of human blood. And this was the only bloodless Crusade…”[26] 

     The Crusades demonstrate how ostensibly good intentions can pave the way to hell. For violence, even violence that is blessed by lawful authorities, can so easily unleash hatred and cruelty. And this in turn leads to false, heretical justifications of that hatred and cruelty; for “the sinner praiseth himself in the lusts of his soul” (Psalm 19.24). In the West, consciousness of the evil that lurks in even the justest of wars remained strong in the Orthodox period, as we see in the Truce of God movement. And even after the schism this consciousness lingered for a time, as when the Norman knights who had participated in their barbaric Conquest of England in 1066-70 were put on penance when they returned home. But by the end of the century this Orthodox consciousness was waning in the West, while by the thirteenth it had disappeared completely… In the East, by contrast, war was not glorified, but seen as a necessary evil. The Eastern Orthodox have never preached pacifism; and even those Eastern writers with pacifist tendencies, such as Origen, admitted the concept of the just war.[27] 

     Nevertheless, there has always been an awareness in the East of the strong temptation to sin inherent in all warfare, an awareness expressed thus in St. Basil’s Canon 13: “Our fathers did not consider killing on the field of battle as murder, pardoning, as it seems to me, defenders of chastity and piety. But it might be good that they refrain from Communion only in the Holy Mysteries for three years as people who have unclean hands…”

 

July 27 / August 9, 2020.

St. Panteleimon the Healer.

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