The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-02-13)

28 The New York Review

Whose Crusades?

Robert Irwin

The World of the Crusades :
An Illustrated History
by Christopher Tyerman.
Yale University Press, 517 pp., $35.00

Crusaders:
The Epic History of the Wars
for the Holy Lands
by Dan Jones.
Viking, 425 pp., $30.00

The Accursed Tower:
The Fall of Acre and
the End of the Crusades
by Roger Crowley.
Basic Books, 254 pp., $28.00

There are certain historical
subjects—Mary Queen of
Scots, Napoleon, the American
Civil War, and the downfall of
Hitler among them—that have
attracted such a mass of writing
and rewriting that they have
acquired a gravitational pull
and, rather than discouraging
other historians from produc-
ing more books on these well-
worn subjects, attract yet more
retellings. The Crusades is an-
other one. The story started to
be told, shaped, and reshaped
almost as soon as it had started.
The medieval chroniclers of the
Crusades—such as the anony-
mous author of the chronicle of
the First Crusade known as the
Gesta Francorum; William,
archbishop of Tyre, the chroni-
cler of the twelfth- century
Kingdom of Jerusalem; and the
“Templar of Tyre,” the eyewit-
ness of the final downfall of
the great coastal city of Acre
in 1291—tended to present
the history of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem as a morality tale
whose past and future had
been marked out by texts from
the Bible. God gave victory to
the deserving, while defeat and
death were the punishments for
sin and lack of faith.
When the army of the First
Crusade conquered Jerusa-
lem in 1099, a slaughter of the Muslim
and Jewish inhabitants took place, and
contemporary chroniclers reported
that when the Christian knights rode
through the Temple area of the city,
the blood of the slaughtered rose to
the level of their stirrups. This was not
documentary reportage. The aim was
rather to present the conquest of the
city as a fulfillment of Revelation 14:20 :
“And the winepress was trodden with-
out the city, and blood came out of the
winepress, even unto the horse bridles.”
The Books of Maccabees were par-
ticularly favored by preachers and
participants in Crusades, dealing as
they did with the redemption of Israel
through warfare. According to one
source, Urban II cited Maccabees in
the sermon at the Council of Clermont
in 1095, which launched the First Cru-
sade. A few years later, when the army
of the First Crusade victoriously con-
fronted the Seljuk Turks at the Battle
of Dorylaeum, the writer Raymond of
Aguilers described how the Christian
force had been aided by “protectors:
‘two handsome knights in flashing

armor, riding before our soldiers and

seemingly invulnerable to the thrusts

of Turkish lances.’” He was probably

borrowing this inspiring image from

the second book of Maccabees, in

which “five comely men upon horses,

with bridles of gold” shield Maccabeus

from the enemy. Isaiah was also useful.

Innocent III, in arguing that the target

of the Fourth Crusade should be god-

less Egypt rather than Palestine, cited

Isaiah 31:3: “Now the Egyptians are

men, and not God.” (In fact the Fourth

Crusade went and sacked Constanti-

nople in 1204.)

When the Crusades failed (and ex-

cept for the first they all failed), defeat

was only occasionally explained as a

result of poor strategy or lack of man-

power. Confronted with the failure of

the Fifth Crusade to conquer Egypt,

Oliver of Cologne preferred to ascribe

it to sin: “If it is asked why Damietta re-

turned so quickly to the unbelievers the

answer is clear. It was luxury- loving, it

was ambitious, it was mutinous. Be-

sides, it was exceedingly ungrateful to

God and to men.” When in 1216 the

churchman Jacques de Vitry arrived

in Acre, the capital of a Kingdom of

Jerusalem that no longer included Je-

rusalem, he was horrified by what he

found there: Orientals, deviant Chris-

tians, prostitutes, outlaws, sorcerers,

murderers, and people who could not

be bothered to come to his sermons.

This was a city that would be doomed

by its sinfulness.

The story of the Crusades, like the

books of the Bible, drew upon miracles

and prophecies. In The World of the

Crusades, Christopher Tyerman de-

scribes the background to Pope Urban

II’s call in 1095 for a Crusade. His “de-

cision to include the liberation of the

Holy Sepulchre” in Jerusalem from the

Fatimid Caliphate

carried wide significance, not

least by tapping into current es-

chatological excitement, a percep-

tion, encouraged by some popular

preachers, a series of poor harvests

and some unusual celestial phe-

nomena, that the world was fac-

ing the Apocalypse, as prophesied

in the Book of Revelation when

Christ would return with a New

Jerusalem.

After the army of the First Crusade

had successfully taken Antioch in

northern Syria, but were then besieged

by an enormous army commanded by

the Turk Kerbogha, they were encour-

aged to sally out and defeat that army

by an opportune vision that had led to

the discovery in the city of the Holy

Lance that had pierced Christ’s side on

the cross. When, more than a century

later, Oliver of Cologne called for the

Fifth Crusade in front of a Frisian audi-

ence, he reported that he was helped by

the appearance of a miraculous cloud

with a white cross on it, and this was

followed by

another cross of the same color

and shape, thirdly a great cross

appeared between and above

these... which had on it the form of

a human body, so it seemed, as tall

as a man, naked... his head leaning

on his shoulders and his arms not

stretched out straight but raised up

above. There were, clearly visible,

nails through the hands and feet.

Such wonders validated the Crusading

enterprise.

The Muslims were also attracted to

miraculous explanations. After the fall

of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291 (hijri

year 690), the emir charged with the

destruction of the city found a lead tab-

let written in Greek that, when trans-

lated, predicted the imminent global

triumph of the followers of Muham-

mad: “His community shall possess all

the regions of Persians and the Franks

and others, and if they enter the year

700 his community shall possess all the

lands of the Franks.”

The presentation of the Crusades

as a kind of morality roman fleuve

has continued into modern

times, most notably in Steven

Runciman’s stylishly writ-

ten three-volume A History

of the Crusades (1951–1954).

Runciman’s history, which

owed a great deal in its gen-

eral approach and detailed

referencing to René Grous-

set’s three-volume Histoire des

croisades et du royaume franc

de Jérusalem (1934 –1936), has

never been out of print. He

excelled in set-piece tableaux,

such as his opening descrip-

tion of the Caliph Omar, riding

on a white camel and dressed

in filthy robes, taking peace-

ful possession of Jerusalem in

638—a description that serves

as a perfect counterpoint to his

appalled account of the Cru-

saders’ sack of Jerusalem in

1099, including a description

of Raymond of Aguilers visit-

ing the Temple area and hav-

ing “to pick his way through

corpses and blood that reached

up to his knees.”

Runciman, an admirer of

Byzantine and Muslim cul-

ture, was certain that the Cru-

sades were a mistake, and as

Tyerman notes in his conclud-

ing survey of the afterlife of

the Crusades, for Runciman

“the crusades bore witness to

the eternal dangers of unbri-

dled ideo logical passion pitted against

civility.” Tyerman adds:

From a vertiginous pose of confi-

dent intellectual eminence, Run-

ciman passed timeless adamantine

judgements, none more so than his

famous condemnation of the Cru-

saders’ sack of Constantinople in

1204: “there never was a greater

crime against humanity than the

fourth Crusade,” a verdict deliv-

ered in 1954, just years after the

principle of crimes against hu-

manity had first been defined and

internationally accepted in the

aftermath of the atrocities of the

Third Reich, Japanese imperial-

ism, the Holocaust and the Second

World Wa r.

Viewed as history, Runciman’s work

presents quite a few problems—he

was consistently biased in favor of the

Byzantines and didn’t critically exam-

ine the sources he needed for his ex-

citing story—but viewed as literature

it is superb, and it is possible that the

A battle during the First Crusade; illustration from Sébastien Mamerot’s Les Passages d’Outremer, circa 1474

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