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HOLY SMOKE
by JOAN ACOCELLA
The New Yorker
Dec 6 2004
What were the Crusades really about?
In its original meaning, a crusade was a Christian holy war, and in
that sense it was a contradiction in terms. Christ's whole teaching
was to love thy neighbor, not kill him. But, like everyone else,
the early Christians had enemies, whom they needed to fight on
occasion. So the Church fathers went to work on the doctrine, and
by the eleventh century it was agreed that in certain circumstances
God might not only condone war but demand it. Of course, there had
to be an important cause. The Church claimed that it had such a
cause: Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of infidels. Actually,
that had happened more than four hundred years earlier, and in the
ensuing period Christians were generally treated far better in the
holy city than non-Christians were in Europe. But there was another
call to arms: Alexius I Comnenus, the emperor of Byzantium—that is,
of Catholic Europe's Eastern brother—had asked the Pope for help
against Muslim forces threatening his borders. Again, however, this
was something less than an emergency. Byzantium and Islam did fight,
but no more frequently than most neighboring powers of the time.
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. These two
expeditions are the subject of a pair of recent books, "The First
Crusade: A New History" (Oxford; $35), by Thomas Asbridge, and "The
Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople" (Viking; $25.95),
by Jonathan Phillips. Both authors are young lecturers in medieval
history at the University of London, both have written previous books
on the Crusades, and they think alike.
To the nineteenth century, the Crusades, like most things medieval,
were exotic, heroic, and spiritually fine. In Walter Scott's "The
Talisman," in Verdi's "I Lombardi," brave knights, their standards
whipping in the wind, ride off to save Christendom from godless people
with scimitars. The popularity of the subject was tied to the movements
for national unity that dominated the period. On the surface of "I
Lombardi," medieval Lombards are fighting the Saracens; beneath the
surface, nineteenth-century Lombards are fighting the Austrians,
and Verdi is rooting for them. The theme survived well into the
twentieth century. Lloyd George, when he published the speeches he
gave during the First World War, called the book "The Great Crusade";
Eisenhower's memoir of the Second World War was entitled "Crusade in
Europe." Whenever a war needed to be viewed as a sacred enterprise,
the word came up. Shortly after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush
used it to describe his war on terrorism.
Unlike his predecessors, however, President Bush was quickly warned
off that term, which had negative associations for Muslims and,
by this time, for others as well. Between Ike's war and Bush's, the
notion of ideological warfare fell into bad odor with intellectuals.
The most important influence here, aside from the Cold War, was
the great English medievalist Steven Runciman, whose three-volume
"History of the Crusades" was published between 1951 and 1954 and
achieved wide popularity. Far from regarding the crusading movement
as a noble endeavor, Runciman described it as "a vast fiasco,"
whose main result was simply to create an undying enmity between
Islamic and Christian peoples. Faith may have inspired the Crusaders,
but not for long, Runciman said: "High ideals were besmirched by
cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow
self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a
long act of intolerance in the name of God." That sentence is now fifty
years old, but the opinion is still widely held. John Julius Norwich,
in his 1995 "Byzantium: The Decline and Fall," calls the crusading
movement "one of the blackest chapters in the history of Christendom"
and says that the Fourth Crusade, at least, was basically about loot.
The trend is reversing again, however. Many of today's young
historians in Britain and America are tired of the economic—and
therefore iconoclastic—analyses that were so popular with their
professors and, perhaps not unaffected by the spectacle of people
in the Middle East blowing themselves up for Allah, are returning
to the study of ideology as the wheel of history. That, in any case,
is what one gathers from recent writings on the Crusades. As Jonathan
Riley-Smith, another expert on the movement, sees it, the disasters
of twentieth-century history so poisoned ideological warfare in the
minds of historians that they could not imagine its being waged even
by people who lived eight centuries earlier. They had to believe
that the Crusaders were after property, pillage. They could not
understand, though the evidence was there, "how intellectually
respectable the Christian theory of positive violence was" to the
medieval mind. Positive violence—what is that? Just what it says:
the idea that killing is virtuous. According to Riley-Smith, a number
of historians now accept this belief as key to the Crusades.
Asbridge and Phillips are of that party. Both are writing for the
general public, and in their view there are two facts about the
Middle Ages that nonspecialist readers must get into their heads. The
first is that violence was a normal fact of medieval life. Seizing
your brother-in-law's castle, cutting off his nose—these were
unremarkable activities. The second is the pervasive religiosity of
the period—above all, the fear of damnation, especially on the part
of the knights. They were usually the ones committing the violence.
Yet every sermon they heard told them that killing was an abomination
to God; every church portal they gazed up at showed grinning devils
hauling the violent down to Hell. So they were caught in a vise:
the thing they were trained to do was also a thing that was going to
cause them to burn for all eternity. They tried to stave this off.
They went on pilgrimages; they made donations to monasteries. (The
rise of the monastic orders in the Middle Ages owes much to knightly
guilt.) Still, they knew they were living in a state of sin.
Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered them 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.
Asbridge, in his account of the First Crusade, reminds us of this
point continually. But it is just his bass line, not his theme. His
theme—unavoidable, in the history of that expedition—is disunity. The
First Crusade had no single commander. Basically, the army was made
up of four contingents: the northern French, the southern French,
the Germans and Lotharingians, and the southern-Italian Normans—all
of them, despite their varying origins, called "Franks" by early and
late historians of the Crusades. Each group had a different leader
and spoke a different language; some hated others, by reason of past
conflict. Add to this another contingent, the so-called People's
Crusade, a rabble got up—independently of Urban, and probably to his
dismay—by a charismatic French monk, Peter the Hermit, and, in the
words of one chronicler, including as many "adulterers, murderers,
thieves, perjurers" as it did pious folk. All the divisions travelled
separately to the East. The People's Crusade departed first, crossing
Europe on foot and, figuring that the rout of infidels might as
well begin at home, slaughtering a large portion of the Rhineland
Jews as they passed through that territory. They were the first to
reach Constantinople, where Emperor Alexius I took one look at them
and shipped them across the Bosporus, into Asia Minor. Probably to
the relief of their allies as well as their enemies, they were soon
wiped out, almost to a man, by the Turks.
Then the official Crusade reached Constantinople, and began its
dealings with Alexius, who must be counted as another competing leader
of the expedition. He regarded the Crusaders as his tool—Urban had told
him that they were coming to defend his territories—so, after loading
them down with gifts, he extracted promises from the leading knights
that they would turn over to him any captured territory that had once
been part of the Roman Empire, of which, in his view, Byzantium was
the continuation. The knights departed and shortly began betraying
their vows to Alexius, as he began violating his promise to send them
supplies and reinforcements. They captured the important Turkish city
of Nicaea (which they did turn over to Alexius). Then they began
the gruelling march across Asia Minor. When it was over, half the
Crusade's men, and more than half of its horses, were dead. Whatever
their commitment to "positive violence," the survivors seem to have
decided that if they were going to suffer this they should get some
material reward. At every subsequent engagement, there were ferocious
disputes over booty. The Crusaders spilled each other's blood, shook
hands in the morning, and then took out their grievances on the towns
that lay in their path.
Chief among these was Antioch, a great trading city. In order to
conquer Jerusalem, the Franks had to take Antioch first, to cover their
backs, but the city was well supplied and had seemingly impregnable
walls. The siege of Antioch lasted more than seven months, during
which period many men deserted and many others died of hunger. By
the time it was over, the Crusaders were in no mood for mercy. They
killed almost everyone, including the resident Christians. And now
the quarrels over who would get what escalated. Jerusalem was three
days' march down the road, but it took the Crusaders half a year to
set out on that journey, because two rival knights were fighting over
control of Antioch, and neither would leave the city in the other's
hands. Finally, a large contingent left for Jerusalem. Outside the
city, they tarried for another month, building war machines and
arguing again over the division of the anticipated spoils. Then
they attacked. According to contemporary accounts, they left not
one Muslim alive. The city's Jews took refuge in their temple; the
Franks barricaded the exits and set the building on fire. At the end
of the sack, Asbridge writes, the Crusaders "came, still covered in
their enemies' blood, weighed down with booty, 'rejoicing and weeping
with excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Savior
Jesus.'" (He is quoting an eyewitness.) They had fulfilled their vow.
The story is not just brutal; it is thick with ironies. By the time
the Crusaders got to Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks, their primary enemy,
had lost the city to the Egyptian Fatimids, who were in diplomatic
negotiations with the Crusaders. So the people from whom the Crusaders
took the city were not their foes but their hoped-for friends. Pope
Urban II never heard of the victory; he died two weeks after it
occurred. Most of the wealth that the soldiers had acquired was spent
on their return passage; many arrived home penniless. The Eastern
Christian sects—the Armenians and Copts and others whose freedom to
worship in the city was one of the Crusade's foremost stated goals—were
expelled from Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the Franks had established the
Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which, despite various losses (notably
the city of Jerusalem), did not fall for two hundred years.
Asbridge, in keeping with his aim to produce a popular history,
writes with maximum vividness. Some of this gets a little
hokey—there are cliff-hangers galore—but I am grateful that he
stooped to entertain us. Mad Hugh and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer were
fun to read about. Raymond of Toulouse, one of the leading knights,
was reputed to have had an eye plucked out in an earlier conflict,
and to have carried this shrivelled organ in his pocket afterward,
"as testament to his suffering." Asbridge says that there's no good
evidence for this story, but he includes it anyway. As long as we're
on the gallows, he'll give us some gallows humor. There is also
a note of comedy in the competition among the knights, with their
nasty little treacheries, and with the lesser soldiers running back
and forth between tents to figure out who's on top—and therefore whom
they should ally themselves with—today.
Asbridge tries to put everything in concrete, practical terms. In
particular, he takes pains to explain the actual warfare, which
in those days had everything to do with walls. Walls—huge, thick
walls—were how a city protected itself, and they were what the
besiegers had to breach. The Franks had ingenious machines—the
petraria, the mangonella—for catapulting rocks over the battlements.
And, when the townspeople retaliated by pouring burning grease and
pitch down on the attackers, there were other machines—the vulpus,
the testudo—to protect them. Walls were also the stage of medieval
warfare's psychological theatre. The Muslims hung the Christian dead
from the top of the walls and left them there, so that their friends
could watch them rot. In turn, the Christians, when they beheaded their
prisoners, did so in front of the walls, so that the enemy could get
a good look. Then they lobbed the heads over the battlements. In the
face of such tactics, Asbridge has to work hard to remind us of the
holy principles underlying the Crusade.
Asbridge's problem is small, however, compared with that of Jonathan
Phillips, in his book on the Fourth Crusade. As appalling as the
First Crusade was, the fourth was far worse. The goal, again,
was to recapture Jerusalem, which had been seized by the Turks in
1187. This time, the leaders of the expedition decided that everyone
must go together, by sea. In 1201, a delegation was sent to Europe's
mightiest seafaring power, Venice, which was ruled at that time by a
bold, crafty man, Doge Enrico Dandolo, who, though he was blind and
probably over ninety years old, was to become the chief policy-maker
of the Fourth Crusade. The delegates told Dandolo what they needed:
enough ships to transport thirty-three thousand five hundred soldiers
and their horses, enough men (it turned out to be thirty thousand,
the equivalent of half the adult population of Venice) to rig and
sail the ships, and enough food to get everyone through the journey.
This was a tall order, and the Doge asked a great price—eighty-five
thousand marks. (According to Phillips, that was twice the annual
income of the kings of France and England.) The Franks swallowed
hard and signed the contract, and the Venetians spent more than a
year preparing the fleet. Then, as agreed, the Crusaders mustered
at Venice, but instead of the thirty-three thousand five hundred
men who were expected—and absolutely needed, for the Doge's price
was to be met by each of the men paying his own portion—only a third
of that number showed up. True to form, the European knights didn't
like taking orders. Some preferred to sail, with their forces, from
Marseilles or Genoa. Of those who had come to Venice, the rich dug
into their pockets, but still they could come up with only a little
more than half of what they owed.
What could they do now? To turn back would be a betrayal of their vow,
and of their knightly honor. But what could the Doge do? He thought
about it, and he came up with an idea. On the Dalmatian coast there
was a city, Zara—a rich city, with excellent oak for shipbuilding—that
had recently thrown off Venetian control and gone over to the King
of Hungary. If the Crusade would agree to besiege Zara and restore
it to Venetian rule, the Doge would postpone (not forgive—he drove a
hard bargain) payment of the Franks' debt. For the Franks, this was
a shocking proposal. Their mission was to make war on infidels. Zara
was a Christian city, and under the spiritual rule not of the Greek
Orthodox Church but of the Pope in Rome. Furthermore, the King
of Hungary had taken the Cross, which meant that his property was
under the protection of the Vatican and could not be legitimately
attacked by anyone. That was part of the deal offered by the Church
to any Crusader.
Nevertheless, the Franks accepted the Doge's proposal. The Pope
soon got wind of their plans, and as they were camped outside Zara
they received a letter from him forbidding them to lay a hand on the
city and promising excommunication to anyone who did. At this point,
a bitter quarrel broke out among the knights, and a few defected,
with their men. (Indeed, as the fleet left Venice for Zara, the
putative leader of the Crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, found that he
had urgent business to attend to back home in Piedmont. He rejoined
the forces at Zara, but only after the city had been taken.) A core
group of influential knights decided to go ahead, and make it up
to the Pope later. They did not share the contents of the Pontiff's
letter with the common soldiers; they just led them to the walls of
Zara and conquered the city in short order. The Pope then fired off
a new letter, excommunicating them all.
News of their difficulty spread quickly to the courts of Europe,
and reached Alexius Angelos, the crown prince of Constantinople, who
at that time was living in exile in the West. Seven years earlier,
Alexius's father, Isaac II, the rightful emperor of Byzantium, had
been deposed by his (Isaac's) brother, now Alexius III, who threw him
into a dungeon and had his eyes gouged out. Prince Alexius had been
trying for years to induce some European power to help him reclaim
his inheritance. Now, like Dandolo, he saw in the Fourth Crusade's
troubles an opportunity for himself, and he sent a delegation to
the Crusaders at Zara. Since the Crusade was pledged to the service
of God and justice, the delegates said, its duty, clearly, was to
make a detour to Constantinople and expel the usurper. If they did
so, furthermore, Prince Alexius would pay them two hundred thousand
silver marks, provision the entire army, provide ten thousand men to
go with them to Egypt (this was another of their planned side trips),
and, for as long as he lived, protect Frankish possessions in the
East. Finally, he would place the Greek Orthodox Church under the
rule of Rome. The last item was crucial, the very thing the Crusaders
needed. If they could return proud, schismatic Byzantium to Roman
control, this would quickly solve their problems with the Pope. Also,
the promised two hundred thousand marks would more than pay their
debt to Dandolo. The Doge, who was with them, favored the plan for
other reasons as well. Byzantium had threatened Venetian trade routes;
if it had a ruler who owed his throne to Venice, this would be good
for business. So the offer was accepted. Alexius, who now arrived in
person, was taken on board, and the Crusaders, with stops at various
Byzantine ports to demand the people's allegiance and make off with
their food supplies, proceeded to Constantinople.
Byzantium at that time was the greatest civilization in Christendom.
In 395, the Roman Empire had been divided in two. The Western
half—that is, Europe—soon fell to the barbarians, while the Eastern
half survived, as the inheritor of the empire and the repository of
its culture. Constantinople, its capital, was ten times larger than any
city in Western Europe. Situated on the Bosporus, smack in the middle
of the trade route between the West and the Orient, it was also far
richer than any European city. It had palaces of gold and marble; its
basilica, Hagia Sophia, dwarfed any European cathedral and, together
with the city's other churches, housed priceless relics—the Virgin
Mary's robe, the Crown of Thorns, two heads of John the Baptist. The
city was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, with luxurious habits. Its
ladies, watched over by twenty thousand eunuchs, wore silks and
jewels and white wigs. The Constantinopolitans—or Greeks, as they
were known—regarded the Europeans as grunting tribesmen. The Franks,
in turn, viewed the Greeks as pantywaists, and probably enjoyed
the thought of having to rescue them. Arriving in June of 1203,
they attacked quickly and in one day put Alexius III to flight.
Isaac was brought up from his dungeon and restored to power.
Then a delegation from the Crusade went to Isaac, enthroned among
his nobles, and informed him of the bargain that his son had made
to achieve this result. (Apparently, the agreement included Prince
Alexius's being made co-emperor, Alexius IV, for that happened soon
afterward.) The court was not happy, nor, after twenty years of
political unrest, was it in a position to meet the terms. But it had
no choice. Oppressive taxes were levied on the people; the silver lamps
of Hagia Sophia were taken down and melted into coin. As this went on,
the Constantinopolitans came to hate the Franks, and, as the payments
started to come late, and then stopped coming at all, the Franks hated
them back. Finally, the Franks threatened war. In response, a flotilla
of "fire ships"—flaming vessels—was sent out one night from the port
of Constantinople to destroy the Venetian ships. (It failed.) Soon
afterward, Isaac and Alexius IV were deposed by a Constantinopolitan
nobleman determined to get rid of the Franks. Isaac died of grief,
probably with some assistance; Alexius was murdered. With the latter
gone, the Franks knew that they would never be paid, and they decided
to take the city instead. They did so in two days.
Even amid the other horrid events of the Crusades, the sack of
Constantinople is notorious. Not only did the Crusaders rape and
massacre; they made a party of it. They hatted out their horses in the
white wigs of the Constantinopolitan ladies. A prostitute straddled the
Patriarch's throne in Hagia Sophia and sang songs. The Franks gathered
up booty wholesale; what they couldn't carry, they destroyed. The
Venetians, who had better taste—and who, in keeping with their
still unpaid debt, were allowed two-thirds of the spoils—quietly
crated up the city's finest treasures. As a result, St. Mark's
basilica, in Venice, houses one of the world's foremost collections
of Byzantine art, including the four golden horses that once stood
in Constantinople's hippodrome and were now installed over St. Mark's
main portal. As for the territories, Dandolo shrewdly took what he knew
Venice could defend: Crete, Corfu, the ports in the Peloponnese. The
huge power of the Venetian republic during the Renaissance owed
much to those acquisitions. The Franks took the interior, which they
then spent years fighting over with outraged locals and, as usual,
with each other. Baldwin of Flanders, one of the Crusade's leaders,
was made emperor of Byzantium. He was captured and killed by the King
of Bulgaria within a year. Nor did the Frankish rule of Byzantium
last long. The Greeks retook Constantinople a half-century later, in
1261; in 1453, the city, or what was left of it, fell to the Turks,
who occupy it still. So a great, ancient civilization was destroyed,
in the name of God.
Phillips, even more than Asbridge, is determined to put this story over
to the general public. He is not just vivid; he basically storyboards
the Crusade, beginning with an elaborate flash-forward to the rugged
Baldwin being crowned in Hagia Sophia. (Baldwin changes his woollen
hose for stockings of red samite. He receives in his calloused hands
a ruby the size of an apple. He thinks of his wife, a denizen of
"cold, marshy" Flanders, whom he must now summon to be the empress of
Byzantium.) And that's just the prologue. These scenes are exciting,
but Phillips's most substantial achievement is his analysis of the
Realpolitik of the Fourth Crusade, his effort to show these knights
not as greedy cynics, which is what Steven Runciman called them, but as
men impelled by many conflicting motives, among which, like Asbridge,
he places religion very high. At some points, he has trouble with this
argument. For example, in the matter of the knights' worries about
Zara, he writes that damnation was "the greatest possible concern to
all medieval people." Clearly not, however, for the knights ignored
the Pope's threat of excommunication—that is, damnation—and attacked
Zara anyway. It gets a little confusing. Nevertheless, that is often
what people's decisions are like when their backs are to the wall,
and one has to admire Phillips for trying to juggle so many causes.
We are left with one question about these two books. The insistence
on the Crusaders' sense of religious duty, as opposed to bloodlust
and greed, comes across as a justification. However much the authors
may historicize it, it starts to sound virtuous. Does this mean that
Asbridge and Phillips think the Crusades were O.K.? Not according to
many of their statements, particularly about the sack of Jerusalem
and of Constantinople. But before those events, as the Franks are
lobbing the stones and mounting the battlements, our chroniclers
are full of admiration for them. Asbridge praises the "inspired
and audacious" tactics of the leaders of the First Crusade, their
"military genius"; Phillips roots for the men of the Fourth Crusade
as, with their boats swaying beneath them and with scores of Greek
bowmen firing at them, they climb their ladders and jump out onto the
walls of Constantinople. Later, the authors bemoan the slaughter,
but what did they think the audacious tactics were for? There is a
curious amorality here. It may be endemic to military history. (What
an exciting battle! Oops, what a lot of dead people!) Still, it
is strange.
And it is even stranger in relation to current events. Asbridge never
mentions the war in Iraq. Phillips gives Al Qaeda a few sentences in
his introduction. But these two books are aimed at the common reader,
and the authors know very well that their customers will be thinking
about what is now happening in the Middle East. (Or Asbridge knows
it. In the American edition of his book, a new subtitle has been
added: "The Roots of Conflict Between Christianity and Islam.") 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.
--Boundary_(ID_1aRc2iiafMd9RioEMx/Qkw)--
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
by JOAN ACOCELLA
The New Yorker
Dec 6 2004
What were the Crusades really about?
In its original meaning, a crusade was a Christian holy war, and in
that sense it was a contradiction in terms. Christ's whole teaching
was to love thy neighbor, not kill him. But, like everyone else,
the early Christians had enemies, whom they needed to fight on
occasion. So the Church fathers went to work on the doctrine, and
by the eleventh century it was agreed that in certain circumstances
God might not only condone war but demand it. Of course, there had
to be an important cause. The Church claimed that it had such a
cause: Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of infidels. Actually,
that had happened more than four hundred years earlier, and in the
ensuing period Christians were generally treated far better in the
holy city than non-Christians were in Europe. But there was another
call to arms: Alexius I Comnenus, the emperor of Byzantium—that is,
of Catholic Europe's Eastern brother—had asked the Pope for help
against Muslim forces threatening his borders. Again, however, this
was something less than an emergency. Byzantium and Islam did fight,
but no more frequently than most neighboring powers of the time.
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. These two
expeditions are the subject of a pair of recent books, "The First
Crusade: A New History" (Oxford; $35), by Thomas Asbridge, and "The
Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople" (Viking; $25.95),
by Jonathan Phillips. Both authors are young lecturers in medieval
history at the University of London, both have written previous books
on the Crusades, and they think alike.
To the nineteenth century, the Crusades, like most things medieval,
were exotic, heroic, and spiritually fine. In Walter Scott's "The
Talisman," in Verdi's "I Lombardi," brave knights, their standards
whipping in the wind, ride off to save Christendom from godless people
with scimitars. The popularity of the subject was tied to the movements
for national unity that dominated the period. On the surface of "I
Lombardi," medieval Lombards are fighting the Saracens; beneath the
surface, nineteenth-century Lombards are fighting the Austrians,
and Verdi is rooting for them. The theme survived well into the
twentieth century. Lloyd George, when he published the speeches he
gave during the First World War, called the book "The Great Crusade";
Eisenhower's memoir of the Second World War was entitled "Crusade in
Europe." Whenever a war needed to be viewed as a sacred enterprise,
the word came up. Shortly after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush
used it to describe his war on terrorism.
Unlike his predecessors, however, President Bush was quickly warned
off that term, which had negative associations for Muslims and,
by this time, for others as well. Between Ike's war and Bush's, the
notion of ideological warfare fell into bad odor with intellectuals.
The most important influence here, aside from the Cold War, was
the great English medievalist Steven Runciman, whose three-volume
"History of the Crusades" was published between 1951 and 1954 and
achieved wide popularity. Far from regarding the crusading movement
as a noble endeavor, Runciman described it as "a vast fiasco,"
whose main result was simply to create an undying enmity between
Islamic and Christian peoples. Faith may have inspired the Crusaders,
but not for long, Runciman said: "High ideals were besmirched by
cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow
self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a
long act of intolerance in the name of God." That sentence is now fifty
years old, but the opinion is still widely held. John Julius Norwich,
in his 1995 "Byzantium: The Decline and Fall," calls the crusading
movement "one of the blackest chapters in the history of Christendom"
and says that the Fourth Crusade, at least, was basically about loot.
The trend is reversing again, however. Many of today's young
historians in Britain and America are tired of the economic—and
therefore iconoclastic—analyses that were so popular with their
professors and, perhaps not unaffected by the spectacle of people
in the Middle East blowing themselves up for Allah, are returning
to the study of ideology as the wheel of history. That, in any case,
is what one gathers from recent writings on the Crusades. As Jonathan
Riley-Smith, another expert on the movement, sees it, the disasters
of twentieth-century history so poisoned ideological warfare in the
minds of historians that they could not imagine its being waged even
by people who lived eight centuries earlier. They had to believe
that the Crusaders were after property, pillage. They could not
understand, though the evidence was there, "how intellectually
respectable the Christian theory of positive violence was" to the
medieval mind. Positive violence—what is that? Just what it says:
the idea that killing is virtuous. According to Riley-Smith, a number
of historians now accept this belief as key to the Crusades.
Asbridge and Phillips are of that party. Both are writing for the
general public, and in their view there are two facts about the
Middle Ages that nonspecialist readers must get into their heads. The
first is that violence was a normal fact of medieval life. Seizing
your brother-in-law's castle, cutting off his nose—these were
unremarkable activities. The second is the pervasive religiosity of
the period—above all, the fear of damnation, especially on the part
of the knights. They were usually the ones committing the violence.
Yet every sermon they heard told them that killing was an abomination
to God; every church portal they gazed up at showed grinning devils
hauling the violent down to Hell. So they were caught in a vise:
the thing they were trained to do was also a thing that was going to
cause them to burn for all eternity. They tried to stave this off.
They went on pilgrimages; they made donations to monasteries. (The
rise of the monastic orders in the Middle Ages owes much to knightly
guilt.) Still, they knew they were living in a state of sin.
Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered them 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.
Asbridge, in his account of the First Crusade, reminds us of this
point continually. But it is just his bass line, not his theme. His
theme—unavoidable, in the history of that expedition—is disunity. The
First Crusade had no single commander. Basically, the army was made
up of four contingents: the northern French, the southern French,
the Germans and Lotharingians, and the southern-Italian Normans—all
of them, despite their varying origins, called "Franks" by early and
late historians of the Crusades. Each group had a different leader
and spoke a different language; some hated others, by reason of past
conflict. Add to this another contingent, the so-called People's
Crusade, a rabble got up—independently of Urban, and probably to his
dismay—by a charismatic French monk, Peter the Hermit, and, in the
words of one chronicler, including as many "adulterers, murderers,
thieves, perjurers" as it did pious folk. All the divisions travelled
separately to the East. The People's Crusade departed first, crossing
Europe on foot and, figuring that the rout of infidels might as
well begin at home, slaughtering a large portion of the Rhineland
Jews as they passed through that territory. They were the first to
reach Constantinople, where Emperor Alexius I took one look at them
and shipped them across the Bosporus, into Asia Minor. Probably to
the relief of their allies as well as their enemies, they were soon
wiped out, almost to a man, by the Turks.
Then the official Crusade reached Constantinople, and began its
dealings with Alexius, who must be counted as another competing leader
of the expedition. He regarded the Crusaders as his tool—Urban had told
him that they were coming to defend his territories—so, after loading
them down with gifts, he extracted promises from the leading knights
that they would turn over to him any captured territory that had once
been part of the Roman Empire, of which, in his view, Byzantium was
the continuation. The knights departed and shortly began betraying
their vows to Alexius, as he began violating his promise to send them
supplies and reinforcements. They captured the important Turkish city
of Nicaea (which they did turn over to Alexius). Then they began
the gruelling march across Asia Minor. When it was over, half the
Crusade's men, and more than half of its horses, were dead. Whatever
their commitment to "positive violence," the survivors seem to have
decided that if they were going to suffer this they should get some
material reward. At every subsequent engagement, there were ferocious
disputes over booty. The Crusaders spilled each other's blood, shook
hands in the morning, and then took out their grievances on the towns
that lay in their path.
Chief among these was Antioch, a great trading city. In order to
conquer Jerusalem, the Franks had to take Antioch first, to cover their
backs, but the city was well supplied and had seemingly impregnable
walls. The siege of Antioch lasted more than seven months, during
which period many men deserted and many others died of hunger. By
the time it was over, the Crusaders were in no mood for mercy. They
killed almost everyone, including the resident Christians. And now
the quarrels over who would get what escalated. Jerusalem was three
days' march down the road, but it took the Crusaders half a year to
set out on that journey, because two rival knights were fighting over
control of Antioch, and neither would leave the city in the other's
hands. Finally, a large contingent left for Jerusalem. Outside the
city, they tarried for another month, building war machines and
arguing again over the division of the anticipated spoils. Then
they attacked. According to contemporary accounts, they left not
one Muslim alive. The city's Jews took refuge in their temple; the
Franks barricaded the exits and set the building on fire. At the end
of the sack, Asbridge writes, the Crusaders "came, still covered in
their enemies' blood, weighed down with booty, 'rejoicing and weeping
with excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Savior
Jesus.'" (He is quoting an eyewitness.) They had fulfilled their vow.
The story is not just brutal; it is thick with ironies. By the time
the Crusaders got to Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks, their primary enemy,
had lost the city to the Egyptian Fatimids, who were in diplomatic
negotiations with the Crusaders. So the people from whom the Crusaders
took the city were not their foes but their hoped-for friends. Pope
Urban II never heard of the victory; he died two weeks after it
occurred. Most of the wealth that the soldiers had acquired was spent
on their return passage; many arrived home penniless. The Eastern
Christian sects—the Armenians and Copts and others whose freedom to
worship in the city was one of the Crusade's foremost stated goals—were
expelled from Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the Franks had established the
Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which, despite various losses (notably
the city of Jerusalem), did not fall for two hundred years.
Asbridge, in keeping with his aim to produce a popular history,
writes with maximum vividness. Some of this gets a little
hokey—there are cliff-hangers galore—but I am grateful that he
stooped to entertain us. Mad Hugh and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer were
fun to read about. Raymond of Toulouse, one of the leading knights,
was reputed to have had an eye plucked out in an earlier conflict,
and to have carried this shrivelled organ in his pocket afterward,
"as testament to his suffering." Asbridge says that there's no good
evidence for this story, but he includes it anyway. As long as we're
on the gallows, he'll give us some gallows humor. There is also
a note of comedy in the competition among the knights, with their
nasty little treacheries, and with the lesser soldiers running back
and forth between tents to figure out who's on top—and therefore whom
they should ally themselves with—today.
Asbridge tries to put everything in concrete, practical terms. In
particular, he takes pains to explain the actual warfare, which
in those days had everything to do with walls. Walls—huge, thick
walls—were how a city protected itself, and they were what the
besiegers had to breach. The Franks had ingenious machines—the
petraria, the mangonella—for catapulting rocks over the battlements.
And, when the townspeople retaliated by pouring burning grease and
pitch down on the attackers, there were other machines—the vulpus,
the testudo—to protect them. Walls were also the stage of medieval
warfare's psychological theatre. The Muslims hung the Christian dead
from the top of the walls and left them there, so that their friends
could watch them rot. In turn, the Christians, when they beheaded their
prisoners, did so in front of the walls, so that the enemy could get
a good look. Then they lobbed the heads over the battlements. In the
face of such tactics, Asbridge has to work hard to remind us of the
holy principles underlying the Crusade.
Asbridge's problem is small, however, compared with that of Jonathan
Phillips, in his book on the Fourth Crusade. As appalling as the
First Crusade was, the fourth was far worse. The goal, again,
was to recapture Jerusalem, which had been seized by the Turks in
1187. This time, the leaders of the expedition decided that everyone
must go together, by sea. In 1201, a delegation was sent to Europe's
mightiest seafaring power, Venice, which was ruled at that time by a
bold, crafty man, Doge Enrico Dandolo, who, though he was blind and
probably over ninety years old, was to become the chief policy-maker
of the Fourth Crusade. The delegates told Dandolo what they needed:
enough ships to transport thirty-three thousand five hundred soldiers
and their horses, enough men (it turned out to be thirty thousand,
the equivalent of half the adult population of Venice) to rig and
sail the ships, and enough food to get everyone through the journey.
This was a tall order, and the Doge asked a great price—eighty-five
thousand marks. (According to Phillips, that was twice the annual
income of the kings of France and England.) The Franks swallowed
hard and signed the contract, and the Venetians spent more than a
year preparing the fleet. Then, as agreed, the Crusaders mustered
at Venice, but instead of the thirty-three thousand five hundred
men who were expected—and absolutely needed, for the Doge's price
was to be met by each of the men paying his own portion—only a third
of that number showed up. True to form, the European knights didn't
like taking orders. Some preferred to sail, with their forces, from
Marseilles or Genoa. Of those who had come to Venice, the rich dug
into their pockets, but still they could come up with only a little
more than half of what they owed.
What could they do now? To turn back would be a betrayal of their vow,
and of their knightly honor. But what could the Doge do? He thought
about it, and he came up with an idea. On the Dalmatian coast there
was a city, Zara—a rich city, with excellent oak for shipbuilding—that
had recently thrown off Venetian control and gone over to the King
of Hungary. If the Crusade would agree to besiege Zara and restore
it to Venetian rule, the Doge would postpone (not forgive—he drove a
hard bargain) payment of the Franks' debt. For the Franks, this was
a shocking proposal. Their mission was to make war on infidels. Zara
was a Christian city, and under the spiritual rule not of the Greek
Orthodox Church but of the Pope in Rome. Furthermore, the King
of Hungary had taken the Cross, which meant that his property was
under the protection of the Vatican and could not be legitimately
attacked by anyone. That was part of the deal offered by the Church
to any Crusader.
Nevertheless, the Franks accepted the Doge's proposal. The Pope
soon got wind of their plans, and as they were camped outside Zara
they received a letter from him forbidding them to lay a hand on the
city and promising excommunication to anyone who did. At this point,
a bitter quarrel broke out among the knights, and a few defected,
with their men. (Indeed, as the fleet left Venice for Zara, the
putative leader of the Crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, found that he
had urgent business to attend to back home in Piedmont. He rejoined
the forces at Zara, but only after the city had been taken.) A core
group of influential knights decided to go ahead, and make it up
to the Pope later. They did not share the contents of the Pontiff's
letter with the common soldiers; they just led them to the walls of
Zara and conquered the city in short order. The Pope then fired off
a new letter, excommunicating them all.
News of their difficulty spread quickly to the courts of Europe,
and reached Alexius Angelos, the crown prince of Constantinople, who
at that time was living in exile in the West. Seven years earlier,
Alexius's father, Isaac II, the rightful emperor of Byzantium, had
been deposed by his (Isaac's) brother, now Alexius III, who threw him
into a dungeon and had his eyes gouged out. Prince Alexius had been
trying for years to induce some European power to help him reclaim
his inheritance. Now, like Dandolo, he saw in the Fourth Crusade's
troubles an opportunity for himself, and he sent a delegation to
the Crusaders at Zara. Since the Crusade was pledged to the service
of God and justice, the delegates said, its duty, clearly, was to
make a detour to Constantinople and expel the usurper. If they did
so, furthermore, Prince Alexius would pay them two hundred thousand
silver marks, provision the entire army, provide ten thousand men to
go with them to Egypt (this was another of their planned side trips),
and, for as long as he lived, protect Frankish possessions in the
East. Finally, he would place the Greek Orthodox Church under the
rule of Rome. The last item was crucial, the very thing the Crusaders
needed. If they could return proud, schismatic Byzantium to Roman
control, this would quickly solve their problems with the Pope. Also,
the promised two hundred thousand marks would more than pay their
debt to Dandolo. The Doge, who was with them, favored the plan for
other reasons as well. Byzantium had threatened Venetian trade routes;
if it had a ruler who owed his throne to Venice, this would be good
for business. So the offer was accepted. Alexius, who now arrived in
person, was taken on board, and the Crusaders, with stops at various
Byzantine ports to demand the people's allegiance and make off with
their food supplies, proceeded to Constantinople.
Byzantium at that time was the greatest civilization in Christendom.
In 395, the Roman Empire had been divided in two. The Western
half—that is, Europe—soon fell to the barbarians, while the Eastern
half survived, as the inheritor of the empire and the repository of
its culture. Constantinople, its capital, was ten times larger than any
city in Western Europe. Situated on the Bosporus, smack in the middle
of the trade route between the West and the Orient, it was also far
richer than any European city. It had palaces of gold and marble; its
basilica, Hagia Sophia, dwarfed any European cathedral and, together
with the city's other churches, housed priceless relics—the Virgin
Mary's robe, the Crown of Thorns, two heads of John the Baptist. The
city was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, with luxurious habits. Its
ladies, watched over by twenty thousand eunuchs, wore silks and
jewels and white wigs. The Constantinopolitans—or Greeks, as they
were known—regarded the Europeans as grunting tribesmen. The Franks,
in turn, viewed the Greeks as pantywaists, and probably enjoyed
the thought of having to rescue them. Arriving in June of 1203,
they attacked quickly and in one day put Alexius III to flight.
Isaac was brought up from his dungeon and restored to power.
Then a delegation from the Crusade went to Isaac, enthroned among
his nobles, and informed him of the bargain that his son had made
to achieve this result. (Apparently, the agreement included Prince
Alexius's being made co-emperor, Alexius IV, for that happened soon
afterward.) The court was not happy, nor, after twenty years of
political unrest, was it in a position to meet the terms. But it had
no choice. Oppressive taxes were levied on the people; the silver lamps
of Hagia Sophia were taken down and melted into coin. As this went on,
the Constantinopolitans came to hate the Franks, and, as the payments
started to come late, and then stopped coming at all, the Franks hated
them back. Finally, the Franks threatened war. In response, a flotilla
of "fire ships"—flaming vessels—was sent out one night from the port
of Constantinople to destroy the Venetian ships. (It failed.) Soon
afterward, Isaac and Alexius IV were deposed by a Constantinopolitan
nobleman determined to get rid of the Franks. Isaac died of grief,
probably with some assistance; Alexius was murdered. With the latter
gone, the Franks knew that they would never be paid, and they decided
to take the city instead. They did so in two days.
Even amid the other horrid events of the Crusades, the sack of
Constantinople is notorious. Not only did the Crusaders rape and
massacre; they made a party of it. They hatted out their horses in the
white wigs of the Constantinopolitan ladies. A prostitute straddled the
Patriarch's throne in Hagia Sophia and sang songs. The Franks gathered
up booty wholesale; what they couldn't carry, they destroyed. The
Venetians, who had better taste—and who, in keeping with their
still unpaid debt, were allowed two-thirds of the spoils—quietly
crated up the city's finest treasures. As a result, St. Mark's
basilica, in Venice, houses one of the world's foremost collections
of Byzantine art, including the four golden horses that once stood
in Constantinople's hippodrome and were now installed over St. Mark's
main portal. As for the territories, Dandolo shrewdly took what he knew
Venice could defend: Crete, Corfu, the ports in the Peloponnese. The
huge power of the Venetian republic during the Renaissance owed
much to those acquisitions. The Franks took the interior, which they
then spent years fighting over with outraged locals and, as usual,
with each other. Baldwin of Flanders, one of the Crusade's leaders,
was made emperor of Byzantium. He was captured and killed by the King
of Bulgaria within a year. Nor did the Frankish rule of Byzantium
last long. The Greeks retook Constantinople a half-century later, in
1261; in 1453, the city, or what was left of it, fell to the Turks,
who occupy it still. So a great, ancient civilization was destroyed,
in the name of God.
Phillips, even more than Asbridge, is determined to put this story over
to the general public. He is not just vivid; he basically storyboards
the Crusade, beginning with an elaborate flash-forward to the rugged
Baldwin being crowned in Hagia Sophia. (Baldwin changes his woollen
hose for stockings of red samite. He receives in his calloused hands
a ruby the size of an apple. He thinks of his wife, a denizen of
"cold, marshy" Flanders, whom he must now summon to be the empress of
Byzantium.) And that's just the prologue. These scenes are exciting,
but Phillips's most substantial achievement is his analysis of the
Realpolitik of the Fourth Crusade, his effort to show these knights
not as greedy cynics, which is what Steven Runciman called them, but as
men impelled by many conflicting motives, among which, like Asbridge,
he places religion very high. At some points, he has trouble with this
argument. For example, in the matter of the knights' worries about
Zara, he writes that damnation was "the greatest possible concern to
all medieval people." Clearly not, however, for the knights ignored
the Pope's threat of excommunication—that is, damnation—and attacked
Zara anyway. It gets a little confusing. Nevertheless, that is often
what people's decisions are like when their backs are to the wall,
and one has to admire Phillips for trying to juggle so many causes.
We are left with one question about these two books. The insistence
on the Crusaders' sense of religious duty, as opposed to bloodlust
and greed, comes across as a justification. However much the authors
may historicize it, it starts to sound virtuous. Does this mean that
Asbridge and Phillips think the Crusades were O.K.? Not according to
many of their statements, particularly about the sack of Jerusalem
and of Constantinople. But before those events, as the Franks are
lobbing the stones and mounting the battlements, our chroniclers
are full of admiration for them. Asbridge praises the "inspired
and audacious" tactics of the leaders of the First Crusade, their
"military genius"; Phillips roots for the men of the Fourth Crusade
as, with their boats swaying beneath them and with scores of Greek
bowmen firing at them, they climb their ladders and jump out onto the
walls of Constantinople. Later, the authors bemoan the slaughter,
but what did they think the audacious tactics were for? There is a
curious amorality here. It may be endemic to military history. (What
an exciting battle! Oops, what a lot of dead people!) Still, it
is strange.
And it is even stranger in relation to current events. Asbridge never
mentions the war in Iraq. Phillips gives Al Qaeda a few sentences in
his introduction. But these two books are aimed at the common reader,
and the authors know very well that their customers will be thinking
about what is now happening in the Middle East. (Or Asbridge knows
it. In the American edition of his book, a new subtitle has been
added: "The Roots of Conflict Between Christianity and Islam.") 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.
--Boundary_(ID_1aRc2iiafMd9RioEMx/Qkw)--
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress