The Misunderstood Essence of the Crusades

Part 1

Though modern secular society is conspicuous for how much it does not know about the history of the Middle Ages, popular culture has managed to keep the memory of the Crusades alive. Even among those with little interest in the events, beliefs, and ideals of the medieval world, the Crusades are still well known and widely understood—or rather, grossly misunderstood—as a

deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history.

The theme was taken up even by a prominent American politician, himself not exactly famous for moral integrity, in a 2001 speech delivered at Georgetown University. “When the Christian soldiers [of the First Crusade] took Jerusalem,” Mr. Clinton explained, they indiscriminately slaughtered local inhabitants until the knights were obliged, according to “contemporaneous descriptions,” to walk around “with blood running up to their knees.” The former president is actually being somewhat moderate here, as other versions of the massacre indicate that the blood reached the knees of their horses—or even the bridles of their horses! The more restrained commentators affirm that the river of blood was merely ankle-deep. We perhaps can discern here an educational lapse in not only the historical domain but also the mathematical: as one scholar reluctantly demonstrated by means of grotesque calculations, the sensationalized versions of this event are spectacularly impossible, and the accounts on which these versions are based “were never meant to be taken seriously. Medieval people knew such a thing to be an impossibility. Modern people, unfortunately, often do not.”

We will never know what exactly happened on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in the year 1099, and modernity would do well to redress current atrocities instead of declaiming sanctimoniously against an event that is, sadly, but one example of the countless wartime excesses that fill the pages of world history. There is, however, something crucial to be learned here, and it is found not in modern-day polemics but in the actual medieval words written by Raymond d’Aguilers, a cleric who accompanied the Count of Toulouse on the First Crusade. His account of the Temple Mount massacre includes the following sentence:

Sed tantum sufficiat, quod in templo et porticu Salomonis equitabatur in sanguine ad genua, et usque ad frenos equorum.

(But let it suffice [to relate] that in the temple and the portico of Solomon they rode in blood to the knees, and even to the bridles, of the horses.)

As the editors of a 1969 edition of this text pointed out in a footnote, Raymond’s phrase is identical to a phrase found in the Vulgate rendering of Revelation chapter 14. This chapter begins with a vision of the divine Lamb on Mount Sion, and it concludes with a vision of the harvest and vintage of the earth:

And another angel came out from the temple, crying with a great voice to him that sat on the cloud, Send forth thy sickle, and reap: for the hour to reap is come; for the harvest of the earth is over-ripe. And he that sat on the cloud cast his sickle upon the earth; and the earth was reaped.

An angel also gathered the “clusters of the vine of the earth” and cast them into “the great winepress of God’s wrath,… and there came out blood from the winepress, even unto the bridles of the horses [usque ad frenos equorum].” Raymond was not attempting to describe the scene with scientific objectivity; he was, in characteristically medieval fashion, interweaving the literal and the mystical, the historical and the biblical, the visible and the invisible. He was, in other words, blending the truths of heaven into the ongoing story of earth.

To read Raymond’s words as precise facts, or even as exaggerated facts, is to err as we moderns so easily do when pondering the events and customs and writings of the Middle Ages. Historical scholarship in the modern sense hardly existed in the Age of Faith; medieval historiography was above all an exercise in allowing human actions to reveal the providential designs of Almighty God. Furthermore, as the historian Deborah Deliyannis has observed, “there was no such thing as a professional historian at any time during the Middle Ages”; chronicles and the like were composed by scholars or clerics who wrote “exegesis, poems, panegyrics, scientific or computational texts, and legal documents in addition to works that memorialized the past.” When Raymond invokes the biblical image of blood usque ad frenos equorum, he is doing what medieval Christians continually and instinctively did: spiritualize that which they observed and experienced, by drawing from the Church’s vast treasury of theology, sacramentality, and sacred literature. How exactly Raymond sought to spiritualize the massacre on Temple Mount is hard to say; perhaps he interpreted the violence as a ghastly purification, or perhaps he saw it in an apocalyptic light. In any case, such details are not our concern at the moment; what’s important for the present discussion is that his allusion to the mystical violence of the Book of Revelation gives us insight into the entirety of the grand project that we now call the Crusades—which were not fundamentally about the bare “facts” of war, conquest, adventure, or wealth. At the heart of the Crusades, emerging as they did from the deep logic of medieval life, was an earthly journey whose benefit was spiritual, and whose destination was God.

It is somewhat ironic that the term “crusade” is so widely recognized in modern society, because if someone asked Raymond d’Aguilers to share his thoughts on the nature and significance of a Crusade, the response might be a blank stare. The word “crusade”—cruciata in Latin, crociata in Italian, crozada in Old Occitan—was rarely used and didn’t even exist until the thirteenth century. And though “crusade” is derived from the word for “cross,” it refers primarily to the symbol that the travelers sewed into their clothing. I say this because it would perhaps be easy for us to exaggerate associations between the term “crusade” and triumphalistic notions of marching forth with the Cross of Christ into heathen and hostile lands. The original phrases for these expeditions described them simply as a journey to Jerusalem or to the Holy Sepulchre, and a participant in the journey was called a peregrinus, a word that in the classical era denoted a foreigner or stranger (then by extension, a traveler). All this leads us to the essential principle of the Crusades as they were first envisioned: a Crusade is most properly understood not as a military campaign but as an “armed pilgrimage.” The historian Thomas Madden conveys this with memorable emphasis:

No one at the time considered the First Crusade to be a “first” anything… Crusaders took vows akin to pilgrims’ vows, marked themselves as pilgrims, and enjoyed the ecclesiastical protection often afforded to pilgrims. They referred to themselves as pilgrims and their expedition as a pilgrimage.

And pilgrimage to Jerusalem was by no means a new idea.

The Christian tradition of pilgrimage, meaning a journey to a sacred place undertaken for spiritual purposes, began very early. Already in the second century, the faithful celebrated local martyrs by going to their tombs, and these journeys increased in distance as people began traveling to the tombs of illustrious martyrs such as St. Peter. As martyr shrines increased in number, so did pilgrimage destinations. The Holy Land, being that favored portion of material Creation that felt the very footsteps of the Incarnate God, must ever be the pilgrimage destination par excellence, though its appeal for ordinary Christians increased after Constantine built a basilica over the sites of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. One of Latin Christianity’s most remarkable pilgrimage-related documents was written by a devout woman named Egeria, perhaps as a way to share her journey with a community of religious sisters back in Europe. She visited the Holy Land in the late fourth or early fifth century, about a hundred years before the beginning of the medieval period, and she recorded her experiences in a diary. Egeria’s detailed account of liturgical life in Jerusalem is inspiring, but it’s also a bitter reminder of the apathy and liturgical desolation that afflict postmodern Christianity. In the introduction to a 1970 edition of the diary, the translator included the following highlights:

A multitude, including many children, attended daily vespers. On Sundays, the crowds were as large as at Easter. On the great feasts, particularly Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday evening, and Pentecost, vast throngs moved from the Mount of Olives in procession to the city. Egeria states that on Pentecost not a single Christian remained at home.

Egeria’s description of Epiphany shows how solemn and cherished that feast was in former times, and how early in Christian history the Church employed the finest and most expensive materials for divine worship:

You see nothing there but gold and gems and silk. If you look at the hangings, they are made of silk with gold stripes; if you look at the curtains, they are also made of silk with gold stripes. Every kind of sacred vessel brought out on that day is of gold inlaid with precious stones… What can I say about the decoration of this building which Constantine, with his mother on hand, had embellished with as much gold, mosaics, and marble as the resources of his empire permitted?

Is it not something like a dream, this vision of vibrant, fervent, magnificently communal and public Christianity in the land where Christ Himself walked the earth and healed the sick and preached the Gospel? Is there not a unique sorrow, an incurable wound of loss and yearning, in the knowledge that it came so soon to an end and remains to this day a place of strife and unbelief?

O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last,

And careful hours with time’s deformèd hand

Have written strange defeatures in my face.

But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?

Part 2

In the year 628, Islamic armies began conquering cities and territories in Syria and Palestine, and by 638, the Muslim Caliph Umar ibn al-Κhattab had entered the Holy City:

He was riding upon a white camel, his clothes were dirty and dusty, and worn out, and his thin figure reflected the hardships of years of war in the desert. Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, watched him at the site of the Temple of Solomon, and turning to one of his clergymen, he murmured in Greek: “Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet.”

One could doubt whether Sophronios actually said this. The comment may more accurately reflect the assessment of the chronicler, a man named Theophanes, for Sophronios was careful to treat the Caliph with great respect. Hostility would have accomplished little, in any case, since Jerusalem had surrendered without a fight.

The conquest could have been much worse. The city was not sacked, and its inhabitants were not slaughtered or enslaved. Sophronios negotiated with Umar, and the resulting pact gave official recognition to the Church and legal protection to Christians, including pilgrims. Thus, the tradition of Holy Land pilgrimage continued through Christianity’s first millennium, but the surrounding environment was changing in ominous and convulsive ways. Not only was Jerusalem now an Islamic city, but invading armies were on the move all over the Christian world. Egypt, Spain, North Africa, Syria, southern France, Italy, Mediterranean islands—all were threatened, and some definitively conquered, by the warriors of Islam.

By the eleventh century, the geopolitical situation was swiftly deteriorating. A Caliph named Abu Ali al-Mansur came to power in 996; he was not favorably disposed to Christianity and in 1009 went on an unprecedented rampage: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was destroyed, its treasure was confiscated, Christians were massacred, and survivors were “heavily penalized: they were not only under legal disabilities, but had to wear a copper cross ten pounds in weight.” These were traumatic moments for Christendom; many a Frankish knight back in Europe must have listened to this news with a wrathful hand gripped tight around the hilt of his sword, and with the sort of facial expression that Shakespeare’s King Henry V recommended to his English warriors:

Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage,

Then lend the eye a terrible aspèct,

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon, let the brow o’erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock

O’erhang and jutty his confounded base

Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Al-Mansur was a deranged and unpredictable ruler who also persecuted Jews and Sunni Muslims (and dogs, which annoyed him with their barking and which he therefore sought to exterminate). However, the fact that his actions were due in part to mental illness did nothing to bring back one of the most cherished and sacred sites on earth—medieval maps placed Jerusalem in the center of the world, and the Holy Sepulchre was the spiritual center of Jerusalem. To make matters even worse, Seljuk Turks were replacing Arab rulers in the Middle East, and the Turks were not part of the agreements that gave Christian pilgrims some degree of toleration and protection. Thus, pilgrimage to the Holy Land was becoming more dangerous, and in response, pilgrims began traveling in groups and carrying weapons. This is what is meant by the term “armed pilgrimage”; as we saw above, “no one at the time considered the First Crusade to be a ‘first’ anything,” and the word “crusade” was not in use during the eleventh century. For those taking part in it, the First Crusade was primarily an armed pilgrimage—or as the British historian Joan Evans expresses this idea, “pilgrim and crusader were one and the same; the one defended himself, the other attacked his enemies in order to reach his goal.”

One of our primary sources for the First Crusade is a text by Ekkehard of Aurach, a German historian writing in the twelfth century. According to Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook, “his work is regarded by historical scholars as remarkably painstaking and temperate.” (That’s high praise considering the tension between medieval and modern historiography.) Though Ekkehard admits that the Germans (in contrast to the Franks) initially regarded the crusaders as madmen, he speaks highly of the endeavor:

Here I am very anxious to add certain details concerning these military undertakings, which are due to divine rather than human inspiration. This I do for the especial purpose of refuting those imprudent—or, better, impudent—critics, who, bound by prejudice, take it upon themselves with insolent lips to blame this novel enterprise, so necessary to a world that is growing old and nearing its end. They, like the Epicureans, prefer the broad way of pleasure to the narrow way of God’s service.

He is convinced that the expeditions were preceded, and aided, by supernatural occurrences:

The signs in the sun and the wonders which appeared, both in the air and on the earth, aroused many who had previously been indifferent. It seems to us useful to interweave an account of a few of these signs…. For example we beheld a comet on the 7th of October to the south, its brilliancy slanting down seemed like a sword…

This next passage shows us how the spirit of penance and pilgrimage was woven into the First Crusade:

Many displayed, either on their clothing or upon their forehead, or elsewhere on their body, the sign of the cross, which had been divinely imprinted, and they believed themselves on this account to have been destined to the service of God. Others likewise were induced, through some sudden change of spirit or some nocturnal vision, to sell all their property and possessions and to sew the sign of mortification on their mantles. Among all these people who pressed into the churches in incredible numbers, swords were distributed with the priestly benediction,… along with the pilgrim’s staff and wallet.

Modern man still struggles to accept that medieval Christians actually believed what they supposedly believed, and were sincerely motivated by the needs of the soul, and were truly willing to suffer and sacrifice for the sake of a heavenly and immaterial God. This limitation helped to produce, among other historical distortions, the notion that Crusaders went on Crusade for economic reasons. It is a testament to the value of honest historical research that this theory is no longer tenable: scholars now recognize that

crusading was an extraordinarily expensive activity. Many families risked bankruptcy by engaging in it… Booty was notoriously scarce, and even when available it rarely exceeded the costs of the expedition. Scholars now focus more attention on the pious motivations of crusaders, integrating participation in the expeditions into the larger economy of salvation important to medieval Europeans.

It was the economy of penance and forgiveness and grace and salvation, not of worldly wealth, that informed the actions of the Crusaders. And it was the spirit of pilgrimage, not of wanton conquest, that animated these uniquely medieval journeys into foreign and perilous lands.

Let us conclude with the example of the French nobleman and chronicler Jean de Joinville, who joined King St. Louis IX on the Seventh Crusade in the year 1248. He began his journey thus:

I set out on foot, barefoot and in penitent’s garb, and visited Blechicourt and St. Urbans and other holy relics there; and all the while … I dared not cast my eyes back to Joinville, lest my heart should fail me for the fair castle and the two children that I was leaving behind.