The Crusades

For two centuries, from the eleventh to the thirteenth, the Christian West launched armed expeditions toward the East to recover the holy places and to defend threatened Christians: the Crusades. They are among the most debated pages in the history of the Church. To understand them requires seeing what they were, where they came from, and what they became, without adorning them with holiness or blackening them to excess.

Where the Crusades Came From

Distant causes had prepared them. Since the seventh century, the Muslim conquest had taken from Christendom its most ancient lands: the Holy Land, Egypt, Syria, North Africa, the homeland of Augustine, then part of Spain. The Christian East kept receding. In the eleventh century, the Turks took from the Byzantines almost all of Asia Minor and made perilous the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which Christians had visited from the beginning. The emperor of Constantinople, hard pressed, called the West to his aid. The Crusades were first this response: not an aggression out of nothing, but the late riposte to four centuries of conquest.

The Call of Clermont

In 1095, at the council of Clermont, pope Urban II called the knights of the West to march toward Jerusalem to free it and to bring aid to the Christians of the East. To those who would set out in a spirit of penance, he promised a spiritual grace, the remission of the penalties due to their sins. The surge was immense, and the cry “God wills it” ran through the crowd. The crusade was conceived as a pilgrimage in arms: one set out at once to fight and to expiate, the cross sewn on the shoulder, whence the name crusaders.

The Taking of Jerusalem

The First Crusade, set out in 1096, reached the Holy Land at the cost of terrible hardships and took Jerusalem in 1099. The victory was stained by the massacre of a great part of the city’s inhabitants, Jews and Muslims. The crusaders then founded in the East several Latin states, with Jerusalem for a kingdom. Of all the crusades, the first was the only one to reach its goal fully.

Blood had in fact flowed long before Jerusalem. As early as 1096, on the banks of the Rhine, bands set out on crusade massacred the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz and Cologne: the first great pogroms of Europe. Several bishops tried to shelter the Jews in their houses, though not always in time. The violence, born for the cause of the faith, turned from the very start against the innocent.

Two Centuries of Crusades

To defend these fragile conquests and protect the pilgrims, orders at once religious and military arose, in which monks also made profession of arms: the Templars and the Hospitallers. But the expeditions followed one another for two hundred years, most often to defend or recover what was being lost, and most often in vain. The Second Crusade, preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, ended around 1149 in failure. In 1187, the sultan Saladin retook Jerusalem; the Third Crusade, led by the greatest princes of the West, among them Richard the Lionheart, did not manage to retake it, but obtained that pilgrims might once more pray there. The Fourth Crusade, diverted from its route, turned in 1204 against Christians and sacked Constantinople, betraying all it had set out for. Crusades were also launched against heretics and pagans within Europe itself. In 1291, the fall of the last Latin strongholds ended the venture: the crusades had failed in their aim.

It had been diverted by the debts contracted toward Venice and by a Byzantine quarrel of succession. Pope Innocent III, who had nonetheless called it, had forbidden turning arms against Christians; he condemned the sack in scathing terms, reproaching the crusaders for having spared “neither religion, nor age, nor sex,” and excommunicated the guilty. The Church, here, stood against its own armies.

In the East at least. For in Spain the crusading effort bore fruit: the Christian reconquest of the peninsula, long of several centuries and sustained by the same indulgences, ended in 1492 with the taking of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom. The lost lands of the West were thus recovered, while those of the East were given up for good.

The most pious of the crusaders was a saint: Louis IX, king of France. He led two expeditions, one in Egypt, where he was taken prisoner in 1250, the other before Tunis, where he died in 1270. Neither his faith nor his uprightness won him victory; the Church canonized him, yet his crusades failed like the rest. Which is to say that one man’s holiness did not suffice to justify the venture.

How to Judge Them

The Crusades were born of real and sometimes lofty motives: to defend threatened Christians, to reopen the road to the holy places, to offer one’s life and toil in penance. But they were also marred by grave sins: massacres, the lure of plunder, the sack of Constantinople, the confusion of the sword with the Gospel. The Church does not offer them as a model, for the faith is not spread by conquest, but by witness and charity. They must be judged with truth, making of them neither a pure holiness nor a pure barbarism: a venture at once human and Christian, mingling faith and sin, in a world very far from our own.

It is what Christ answered Peter, when Peter drew the sword to defend him: “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” Matthew 26:52. The first of the apostles had drawn for his Master, and his Master forbade it him.