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Great was the increase, and rapid the progress, during the two hundred years of the Crusades; and some
philosophers have applauded the propitious influence of these holy wars, which appear to me to have checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe. The lives and labours of millions, which were buried in the East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country: the accumulated stock of industry and wealth would have overflowed in navigation and trade; and the Latins would have been enriched and enlightened by a pure and friendly correspondence with the climates of the East.
Edward Gibbon’s oft-quoted verdict on the Crusades. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume VI, Chapter LXI.
It is hard to argue against Gibbon’s verdict on the Crusades, given that events such as the Children’s Crusade, that are so awfully tragic and bathetic, were a creation of the Crusading phenomenon. However, I feel we perhaps need to look a little bit further than the simple action of the period and to what was occurring in the central lands of the world, and in that small peninsula of Asia called Europe at this time. The Crusades were an accelerating catalyst to a society that had been ‘hemmed in’ by Vikings, Muslim raiders and Magyars. The challenge was created by exceptional clerics who threw down a gauntlet to thuggish kings and knights to look beyond backyard blood feuds and to new horizons. There could have been no Crusades without the Cluniac reform of the Medieval Church, and without the revival of intellectual rigour in the papacy under Gregory VII and Urban II. Much of this energy had ironically been generated by classical learning ‘re-entering’ Europe via Spain and Sicily in the form of Arabic and Jewish scholars’ translations of and expansions upon classical scientific, mathematical and astronomical treatises, but equally there could have been no Crusades without the knightly adventurers’ adamantine endurance and the Italian sailors’ élan. The two components fed off each other.
What perhaps is more of an issue several centuries later is that the violence of the Crusades has commonly been divorced from its spiritual and intellectual components (though in truth they were not uncommonly separated at the time – chivalry could be just the tinsel to obscure the bloodiness of reality) and the word ‘Crusade’, like ‘Jihad’, has become a catch-it-all for violent actions, and ludicrous ideologies, divorced from any deeper understanding of the original motivations of these doctrines.
The Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, soon to be Reichsminister for the occupied eastern territories, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa embraced the martial element of Crusading but detached the religious element of selflessness:
Today we are not mounting a Crusade against bolshevism simply in order to free the poor Russians from this bolshevism for all time no it is in order to pursue German policy …
But the true Crusader and the true Mujahid were converted by their mission, and we must understand that a much more straightforward question of faith, salvation and identity was at play in the medieval age. Mediaeval communities were defined by religion, and religion demarcated identity. Salvation through allegiance was always to be sought, and Crusading and Jihad both offered it. As Urban II stated:
Let those who have been robbers now be soldiers of Christ, let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver now attain an eternal reward …
It is a hackneyed truism that the past is a foreign country and that they do things differently there, but objects can connect us to the people of that strange land and to their passions, fears, and ambitions. They help us gain a greater understanding of these peoples’ mortal faults, but also of their preternatural understanding of the eternal value of beauty and of their need to create objects worthy of reverence.