Authors: Mark Kurlansky
A century after the death of Mohammed, Muslim armies had crossed the Pyrenees and penetrated deeply into Europe, controlling
much of the Mediterranean and ranging east as far as India. But any un-Mohammedan dreams of Islamic world dominance they may have had faded early in the eighth century when it became apparent that they were not going to be able to conquer Constantinople. After that, Islamic legal writing increasingly accepted the notion of the infidel state. Islam developed a peace concept that brought no more peace than had the Christian Peace of God. It was called
dar al-suhl,
the House of Peace, and it meant that Muslim states could honorably live in peace with non-Muslim neighbors.
The House of Peace easily crumbled. When the Byzantine Empire began aggressively moving east in the tenth century, Sayf alDawla, a celebrated Shi'ite ruler of the northern Iraqi Hamdanid dynasty, declared an annual
jihad
against Byzantium. Later in the same century, the Hamdanid rulers in what is now Turkey began delivering celebrated
jihad
sermons in ornate and rhymed phrases. The Hamdanid court had been famous for its poets. Now, using such poetic devices as alliteration and repetition, these sermons on
jihad,
considered a high point in the tradition of Arab oratory, challenged Muslims to holy war. The sermons were said to be so beautiful that people were moved to tears, and also to kill. They became an enduring model for Islamic war propaganda.
But by the late eleventh century, when the Arabs were about to face their greatest military challenge, Arab writers were complaining that nobody seemed interested in
jihad
anymore.
By this time in Europe, the Church had so skillfully perfected the ability to make peace that it held the power to make war as well. Pope Gregory VII took the next step, demanding that secular princes do their part to furnish the Church with fighters and weapons whenever he needed them “in the service of Saint Peter.”
The eleventh century was an impassioned time. The excitement about the new millennium in 2000 focused largely on whether computers would continue working; but in the year 1000, Europe was focused on the first millennium of Christ. All events—storms, comets, wars, floods, epidemics—were given momentous significance. God's wrath was seen at every turn. Christians seemed to believe
they had strayed very far from God's will. People flocked to the churches and clung to the words of the clergy. But the Church was not talking about restoring the teachings of Jesus Christ; rather, the clergy spoke of defending the Church against its enemies. In the course of the first century of the new millennium, the Church, the most powerful institution in Europe, had overwhelmed European princes, to the point where its only remaining challengers were the Saracens. The fact that these Saracens were in decline made battling them all the more irresistible. It was time for a Christian lesser
jihad.
Two popes later, Urban II, a Frenchman, launched the Crusades in a rousing speech at a “peace council” at Clermont in 1095. Urban declared that the pope could now define both the peace and truce of God for all of Christendom. Christendom itself, the idea that all Christians were a cohesive singular force, was a relatively new concept that the papacy had been nurturing for the past two centuries. He then declared peace in the West, freeing Christians to launch a “holy war” to liberate Jerusalem from the Saracens—granting Peace of God protection to the families and property of those who marched off to the Holy War. Now the doctrine of the peace movement—that without peace, God could not be served—was slightly bent to a new truth: that without peace in the West, the Church could not successfully launch its expedition to the East. This expedition was to be one final war in the peace movement, a war that would bring the Peace of God—that is, the protection of the Church—to Jerusalem, which was now called “the holy city.”
In declaring that the Saracens must be stopped, Urban said that they had “destroyed churches and devastated the kingdom of God.” Urban challenged Christendom: “Oh what a disgrace that a race so despicable, degenerate, and enslaved by demons should thus overcome a people endowed with faith in Almighty God and resplendent in the name of Christ. Oh what reproaches will be charged against you by the Lord Himself if you have not helped those who are counted like yourself of the Christian faith.”
Urban's speech became for the West what the tenth-century Hamdanid sermons became for the East, a textbook model for rallying
the troops. It contains all of the traditional lies by which people are convinced to die and kill.
The enemy is evil—in this case despicable. We, on the other hand, said Urban, have God on our side. It was an Augustinian just war. Those who did not support the war should be and would be singled out as immoral for failing to support the cause—just as in every war those who refused to fight have been vilified by the war-makers. Even questioning a war must be attacked as a sign of suspicious weakness. In June 2005, White House adviser Karl Rove accused the Democrats, because they were questioning the war in Iraq, of wanting to “offer therapy and understanding to our attackers.” The fact that no Iraqis had attacked the United States was irrelevant. The point in 2005, as in 1095, was that a failure to hate the enemy, once an enemy had been declared, was unacceptable.
Urban also claimed that the soldiers would be rescuing a poor oppressed people who desperately needed their help. This tactic generally works best if a case can be made that the people in need of being rescued are people like us. This was why Abraham Lincoln preferred to speak of “saving the Union” to “freeing the slaves,” why Roosevelt wanted to save freedom rather than save the Jews, and why Ronald Reagan in 1983 did not want to rescue the black Grenadians from an evil coup d'état but instead claimed he was rescuing a handful of American medical students. White Christians generally want to rescue white Christians, which was at the heart of Urban II's message.
Of course not all of these elements are always lies, though they were in this case. The Nazis were actually worse than Allied war propaganda's depiction of them. But history teaches that somewhere behind every war there are always a few lies used as justifications.
When Urban II finished his speech, those present shouted,
“Deus volt!”—
It is the will of God.
Deus volt!
became a battle cry for the Crusaders. The Christian version of a “holy war” had been established, and warfare became Christian. Clergy even asserted that a Christian could obtain divine salvation by going to war against the
Saracens. The concept of holy war is one of many ideas that Christians and Muslims borrowed from the Old Testament, which describes numerous wars sanctified by God to deliver God's wrath. In the promotion of the Crusades as a holy war, the Church made frequent references to the Maccabee victory in which the Jews had re-taken Jerusalem, the basis of the Chanukah holiday. This was at a time when Jews had little regard for Chanukah as a holiday, but despite Jewish ambivalence this martial festival was the one moment of the Jewish calendar that excited Christians. Holy war also borrows from the Roman wars in which the enemies were considered “barbarians” regardless of the sophistication of their civilizations.
The labels
Crusade
and
Crusader
did not come into usage until one hundred years and four Crusades after Urban II's rallying cry. By then, the concept of a Christian holy war was well entrenched. The First Crusade was termed a pilgrimage. In this Orwellian lexicon of the Church, in which a “peace movement” promoted warfare, why couldn't a ruthless bloodletting be called a pilgrimage? According to Muslim sources, the Christians killed 70,000 people in the taking of Jerusalem. In time the figure grew to 100,000, many of whom were reportedly slaughtered in the Dome of the Rock Mosque, whose siege by Christian soldiers on a holy mission was described by the crusader Raymond of Aguilers:
Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much at least, that at the temple and portico of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and the bridle reins.
This was not what Augustine had had in mind, and although the papacy made constant subliminal references to Augustine and his concept of just war, the actual phrase “just war” was carefully
avoided and rarely was the name of Augustine invoked during the two centuries of Crusades.
At the start of its campaign, the Church manufactured for propaganda purposes both the threat and the evilness of the enemy. The Church had spent many years developing a Western hatred of Muslims so that it could take Muslim lands. This, too, is a lesson: a propaganda machine for hate always has a war waiting. The adversary must first be made into a demon before people will accept the war. This was why during the Cold War, the U.S. government became infuriated at any suggestion that the Soviets were their “moral equivalent.” Eleventh-century chroniclers drastically revised early medieval history to demonize Muslims. A famous example is the beautiful eleventh-century poem
Le Chanson de Roland,
which depicts a 778 engagement in the Pyrenees between Charlemagne and the evil Saracens, describing an ambush by the deceitful Muslims in which the Christians valiantly defended themselves. Like the Muslims, the Christians, too, could write poetic war propaganda. In truth, Charlemagne had already made a deal with competing Muslim leaders and easily took Spanish cities by a prearranged collaboration. But then, having not fought any real battles, on his way back to France he sacked Pamplona, a Basque city. It was the Basques and not the Muslims who attacked his rear column in the mountain pass. In reality there were not two all-powerful forces, the Christians and the Muslims, but many warring groups. Urban II unified the Christians by creating this myth of a single, all-powerful Saracen, which for a time was a great Christian advantage since there was no unity among the Muslims.
Another example is the eleventh-century account of the 732 rout of Emir ‘Abdarrahman by Charles Martel near Poitiers, France. At the time this was just one more battle in an endless series between various warlords, some of whom were Muslim and some of whom were Christian. In eighth-century Europe, Christians fought Christians, Muslims fought Muslims, and sometimes Christians fought Muslims. But in the eleventh century this battle took on great symbolic importance because it had been the northernmost engagement of the Saracens and they had lost—thus the Saracens
had been stopped at Poitiers by Charles Martel. The myth has endured, helping to keep the fires of anti-Muslim hatred fanned in Europe. Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century British historian, wrote that if it wasn't for Charles Martel, the Quran might now be taught at Oxford “and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelations of Mahomet.” In modern times Martel has been adopted as the patron saint of the French extreme right.
Eleventh- and twelfth-century Christian leaders were troubled and angered by a tendency of Christian lords to make alliances with Muslims. These could have ruined the entire concept of holy war. In the late ninth century, Pope John VIII had forbidden “impious alliances” with Muslims. His reason was uniquely Catholic in its mysticism. Since all Christians were part of the body of Christ, a Christian who joined with a non-Christian was tearing the limbs off Christ's body. This, too, was power politics. How could the Church control Christian peace and war if there were Christian lords making separate deals with Muslim lords over whom the Church had no power?
When Urban set out to demonize Muslims, he was aided by the fact that the average Christian knew almost nothing about Muslims. There is little historic evidence that the Christians of the Middle East were being oppressed by Muslims. But the Muslims were the enemy. In fact, the word
Saracen
started to be used for anyone who was an enemy. Even other Christians were sometimes cursed as “Saracens.”
The First Crusade, the only militarily successful one of the six Christian invasions, took the Muslims by surprise. They had been fighting each other and had not expected an attack from Western Europe. Searching for explanations as to why they were being assaulted by a people from another part of the world, Muslims turned to mysticism and astrology, noting that Saturn was in Virgo.
Until then, lesser
jihad
had been the duty of a community but not necessarily all individuals, leaving a choice for those who did not wish to fight. But during the Crusades, Muslim leaders declared
that when Islam is attacked,
jihad
is the duty of every individual.
After the Crusades the interpretation of
jihad
became hard line. Ebu's Su'ud wrote in the sixteenth century that peace with infidels was impossible and fighting should be permanent and unending.
The Crusades were about power, not religion. And the Muslims understood this. Initially, they began looking for ties and seeking negotiations with the four new Mediterranean kingdoms the Christians had established in the Middle East. But slowly they built their own war propaganda machine. Just as the Christians established a term for their enemy—the Saracens—the Muslims began calling all the Christian intruders
al-frani,
the Franks. Clerics began teaching that defeat at the hands of the Franks was God's punishment for their failure to carry out their religious duties. And one of those duties was
jihad.
By reviving the culture of
jihad
the Saracens were able to build a counter-Crusade and drive out the Franks. It has happened throughout history: peoples who go to war tend to become mirror images of their enemy—another lesson.