22 Mar Vatican-Sponsored Conference Attempts to Rehabilitate the Crusades
According to the Times (UK) Online, the Vatican sponsored a conference last weekend aimed at rehabilitating the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of reclaiming the Holy Land for Christianity:
At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were “a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places”.
“The debate has been reopened,” La Stampa said. Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II.
He said that the Crusaders were “martyrs” who had “sacrificed their lives for the faith”. He was backed by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, who said that those who sought forgiveness for the Crusades “do not know their history”. Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott’s recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as “utter nonsense”.
Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was “historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” It fuels Islamic fundamentalism by propagating “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”.
He said that the Crusaders were sometimes undisciplined and capable of acts of great cruelty. But the same was true of Muslims and of troops in “all ideological wars”. Some of the Crusaders’ worst excesses were against Orthodox Christians or heretics — as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204.
The American writer Robert Spencer, author of A Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, told the conference that the mistaken view had taken hold in the West as well as the Arab world that the Crusades were “an unprovoked attack by Europe on the Islamic world”. In reality, however, Christians had been persecuted after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.
Although I’m certainly not competent to weigh in on the merits of the debate, I fail to see what these revisionist scholars hope to accomplish by blaming Muslims for the Crusades now — other than to make relations between Muslims and Christians even worse than they already are. As the article notes,
The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day “jihad against the Jews and Crusaders”.
The Vatican’s sponsorship of the conference, it is worth pointing out, represents an unfortunate reversal of its attitude toward Islam. During the 2000 Millenium celebrations, the late Pope John Paul II tried to encourage Muslim-Christian reconciliation by asking “pardon” for the Crusades. According to the article, however, John Paul’s apologies for the past “errors of the Church” — which included the Inquisition and anti-Semitism — irritated some Vatican conservatives, most notably Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Ratzinger’s true colors were bound to bleed through his papal garments sooner or later: one has only to recall his ideological inquisition against the more articulate exponents of liberation theology. I’m forever reminding my students that, yes, Catholics are Christians too (to counter the fundamentalist evangelical rhetoric they’ve internalized), and then the Church does something like not come clean on priests and pedophilia or…this! While the Catholic Church may not be the anti-Christ, the anti-Christ has burrowed itself deep into the Church. The ‘true church’ perseveres in the nooks and crannies of Catholicism: among the Catholic Worker movement for example. Meanwhile, the Vatican remains adept at taking one step forward, and two steps backward. What a shame.
Reference is made to Patrick S. O’Donnell’s comment. Sir, your assertion that “[w]hile the Catholic Church may not be the anti-Christ, the anti-Christ has burrowed itself deep into the Church” is fatuous, assumes facts not in evidence and reveals your extreme ignorance of the Church — both today and in history.
As a Catholic, I find Pope Benedict steadfast and his beliefs and convictions are no mystery to any, given his voluminous and prolific writings. In addition, I find this conference to rehabilitate the Crusades a sign that the Church is no longer backing down in the face of constant and often deadly pressure against Catholics around the world from those professing to be followers of Islam.
Further, I know not Mr. Heller’s faith, if any, but his declaration that this “represents an unfortunate reversal of its attitude toward Islam” on the part of the Catholic church is likewise nonsense. There are Mosques in Rome within a stone’s throw of the Vatican. How many Churches are there in Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and Medina? Zero. I suggest that Islam needs a reversal of sorts more than the RC Church does..
Just for the record: I was raised a Catholic and had a Catholic education up to and through high school. I research, write and teach about religions as part of my profession, so if I’m extremely ignorant of the history of the Church, I shudder to imagine the ignorance that might afflict others. Who referred to the Jews as ‘Christ killers?’ Muslims? Who expelled the Jews from the Iberian peninsula? The Muslims? Who called the Jews ‘infidels’ during the Crusades? Why are Jewish philosophers found in anthologies of Islamic philosophy? Who instituted the notion of ‘blood libel?’ Who engaged in pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia (no, it was not Muslims). The Church’s silence during the Holocaust was deafening. Etc. Etc. I hardly feel compelled to defend the Saudi regime, but the fact that mosques are within walking distance of the Vatican speaks volumes for democracy, not against Islam. The irrational and vertiginous fear in the air is palpable…. And, should you be tempted, it won’t do to label me a ‘self-loathing Catholic.’
Mr. Tuttle,
Why is it “nonsense” to believe that, all other things being equal, the Vatican should promote Christian-Muslim reconciliation, instead of its opposite?
I’m Jewish, by the way.
Kevin
I have read the quotes (and the full article in the Times) and, quite frankly, I don’t see that the Vatican is trying to “rehabilitate” the Crusades or “blame” the Muslims. While the article notes that some in the Church’s hierarchy were against John Paul II’s apologies for various wrongs of the Catholic Church, the actual quotes you point to seem to be less an attempt at rescuing the Crusades than simply saying there was wrong on both sides as in “all ideological wars.”
There was recently an interesting dialogue on the Crusades between Thomas Madden (author of The New Concise History of the Crusades and chair of the history department at St. Louis University) and Carole Hillenbrand (author of The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, professor of Islamic culture at the University of Edinburgh, and winner of the King Faisal Foundation prize for Islamic studies). The full conversation can be found on the website of the National Catholic Reporter.
I excerpt the discussion here because I think it is possible to have a reasonable conversation about the Crusades without being a “revisionist” or an “apologist” or any other “~ist.” I also think that, given the lack of trust at the moment among Christians and Muslims, a dialogue– as long as it is honest, reasoned, and respectful– is a good thing. Rather than focusing on the fear that talking about difficult things may fan the flames of hatred, perhaps we should look at how we can use dialogue as a means to disubuse people of preconceptions that may be incorrect. It is by examining our shared history–and our views of that histroy–that we may better understand each other today.
What’s the popular perception of the Crusades in both Christian and Muslim minds today? Do the Crusades still have an effect on the wars we’re fighting now?
Madden: In the West there are two popular perceptions, one born in the 18th century and the other in the 19th. The first, which gained currency during the Enlightenment, was that the Crusades were a series of unnecessary wars in which a barbaric people steeped in ignorance and superstition attacked a peaceful and sophisticated Muslim world. The Crusades, therefore, were seen as a black mark on the history of Western civilization in general and the Catholic church in particular. This view is still very popular, although it is usually glossed with the assertion that the Crusades were a form of proto-colonialism — the West’s first attempt to subjugate the world.
The other popular perception grew out of 19th-century Romanticism. This view sees the Crusades as noble wars led by larger-than-life men motivated by honor and chivalry. Religion and the church are usually airbrushed out of this perception, leaving behind only courageous and selfless knights fighting for righteousness in far-away lands. This perception was particularly popular among colonial powers in the 19th century, but it has waned in the 20th and 21st centuries. Still, it hangs on. Run a Nexis search and see how often the word “crusade” is used to mean a noble and praiseworthy pursuit and “crusader” is used to mean a selfless and courageous individual.
Hillenbrand: As a European raised in a Christian environment, I can say that many Christians in Europe today believe that the Crusades, and especially the First Crusade, were indeed religiously inspired wars. In their view, those who took up the cross believed the pope’s promise that salvation would be theirs if they rescued the holy places from the infidel. Other contemporary Christians in Europe are more skeptical and they think that the crusading enterprise was flawed by human ambition and greed.
On the Muslim side there is a similar broad spectrum of attitudes toward the Crusades, although it has to be said that this subject, with its roots in Europe and Christianity, has not been of great interest to Muslim scholars up until now. Those Muslims who do write about the Crusades nowadays do so with a modern political agenda. Such Muslims are “jihadists” and politicians, such as Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden, who see the Crusades as Christian Europe’s first attempts to “colonize” and “pollute” the Islamic world. Such Muslim polemicists, who have a somewhat inadequate grasp of medieval Western history, draw parallels between the crusading period on the one hand and modern interventions by the West in the Middle East on the other. Some Muslim activist writers, wishing to draw attention to the unresolved issue of Palestinian sovereignty, make a comparison between the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the modern state of Israel. The fact that the latter state is not Christian but Jewish does not stop this parallel from being drawn; indeed, Osama bin Laden has spoken of the need to wage jihad against Jews and Crusaders on a worldwide scale. These and other parallels between the crusading past and the troubled present in the Middle East may not always correspond exactly to the “facts” of history and are rejected by the majority of Muslims anyway. But such rallying cries resonate in some sections of Muslim societies today.
Both of you have said that people on each side thought they were fighting in self-defense.
Madden: By 1095 when Urban II called the First Crusade, fully two-thirds of the old Christian world had been conquered by Muslim armies. Aside from the Holy Land, Muslims had conquered all of Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. In addition, Asia Minor (modern Turkey) had only recently been conquered by the Turks. The Crusades were, therefore, seen as an attempt to restore those lands to Christian control. Since the Muslims were the clear aggressors, the Crusades were self-defense. Muslims who had controlled the Holy Land for more than four centuries naturally saw the Crusader conquests of the region as unjust and their own attempts to restore it to Muslim control as a matter of self-defense.
Hillenbrand: On the one hand, in the last few decades of the 11th century, successive popes and European kings had heard with increasing alarm about the disastrous defeat of the Byzantine army at the hands of the nomadic Seljuq Turks at the battle of Manzikert near Lake Van in eastern Turkey in 1071. The Seljuqs, nominally Muslim at least, advanced across Anatolia toward the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. They had come originally from the steppes of Central Asia and seemed to be unstoppable. Thus Christianity saw the loss of Constantinople, the Great City, as a real and present danger.
On the other hand, the European Christians in northern Spain had begun their inexorable march southward (the Reconquista) well before the First Crusade and were regaining lands the Muslims had taken in the conquests of the 7th century. The conquest of Toledo, the principal Muslim city of Central Spain, by the Christians in 1085 was a benchmark in this process. Similarly, a generation before the launching of the First Crusade the Normans had landed in Sicily and by 1091 had wrested control of the island from the Muslims. Medieval Arab chroniclers could therefore look back to the arrival of the Crusaders (the Franks, as they called them) in Syria and Palestine and link this event to other European advances that had preceded it.
It has been said that stereotypes of “the other side” were formed during this time. What were some of the stereotypical ideas formulated then that persist to this day?
Madden: The most common was the Muslim stereotype that the Franks were sexually promiscuous and gave their women altogether too much freedom. It should be said, though, that Muslims and Christians did not mix very much in the Crusader states. They generally kept to themselves and indeed had very little interest in each other.
Hillenbrand: Crusaders returning home from the Holy Land would speak of the exotic countries they had left behind. The phenomenon of Orientalism from the 18th century onward and its manifestations in Western art and literature, so powerfully described in recent times by Edward Said, fed on the heritage of the Crusades. The Muslim world was the place of deserts, walled cities, veiled women, harems, eunuchs, bathhouses, intrigues, outlandish animals, clothing, languages, luxuries and an alien religion; in short, a land of romantic mystery and danger.
Contact with the Muslim world gave the Europeans a taste for all kinds of commodities, including ivory, inlaid metalwork and other luxury goods that came from the Arab world. Of these the most important were textiles: damask, fustian, muslin, organdie, atlas, satin and taffeta.
For the Muslim world, stereotypes about European Christians had been formed long before the Crusades. The coming of the Crusaders only reinforced these stereotypes. In the Muslim view, the Crusaders were lacking in civilized manners, education and lifestyle, and they were unhygienic; the Western Middle Ages have been described by a French historian as “a thousand years without a bath.” Happily the knightly class, apart from the Templars, rapidly acquired the habit of visiting the bathhouse.
I want to read a quote from an essay by Thomas Madden: “When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was.” What was Europe at that time? What was the Muslim world?
Madden: Medieval Europe in the 11th century was still picking up the pieces from its numerous invasions. In comparison to the Muslim world, be it Syria, Egypt, Spain or elsewhere, medieval Europe was poor, backward, weak and chaotic. More important, it was getting smaller, while Islam and its many kingdoms continued to grow.
Hillenbrand: Just before the First Crusade arrived in the Holy Land, the Muslim world was politically weak and disunited. Not only was there no overall political and military power in the Islamic world, there was also no overarching religious leadership. Religio-legal authority in the Islamic world had been vested, after the death of the Prophet in 632, in the institution of the caliphate. On the eve of the First Crusade, two rivals, the Shi’ite Fatimid caliph in Cairo and the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, were irreconciliably opposed to each other.
Political disunity was, however, countered by an astonishing cultural unity. The vast Islamic world stretched from Spain to India. A traveler could go from Córdoba in Spain to Samarkand in Central Asia speaking only Arabic, the lingua franca, staying in Muslim houses and performing the same ritual prayers in the mosques, wherever they were.
One prerequisite to dialogue might be the acknowldgment or recognition that ‘we are heirs,’ in the words of Richard Bulliet, ‘to a Christian construction of history that is deliberately exclusive. Western Christendom has regarded Islam as a malevolent Other for many centuries and has invented any number of reasons for holding this view. However, the reasons have come second to the malevolence. Shifting Western portrayals of Islam over the centuries make it clear that reasons for disliking Islam have been constructed as rationales for a preexisting and ongoing aminosity and not vice versa. This pattern persists to the present day.’ With Bulliet, therefore, we might examine historical narratives of ‘cultural borrowing’ rather than simply narratives of ‘violent conflict.’ Again, Bulliet: ‘Looked at as a whole, and in historical perspective, the Islamo-Christian world has much more binding it together than forcing it apart. The past and future of the West cannot be fully comprehended without appreciation of the twinned relationship it has had with with Islam over some fourteen centuries. The same is true of the Islamic world. The case for Islamo-[Judeo-?]Christian civilization as an organizing principle of contemporary thought is rooted in the historical reality of those centuries.’ [From his The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004)] So perhaps the assumptions of the dialogue might include the above premise over and above any reasonable conversation about the Crusades….
Mr Heller queries: “Why is it ‘nonsense’ to believe that, all other things being equal, the Vatican should promote Christian-Muslim reconciliation, instead of its opposite?”
You misinterpret my post. It’s not nonsense to believe the Vatican should promote ecumenical dialogue and reconciliation with the Islamic world. That’s not what my statement said. Rather I opined that your conclusion that this “represents an unfortunate reversal of [the Church’s] attitude toward Islam” is nonsense. This conference and the Church’s statement mark no such reversal.
The truth will out. Mr. O’Donnell reveals himself to be a Catholic in the mold of Garry Wills with statements such as “[t]he Church’s silence during the Holocaust was deafening.” This repeated canard continues to widely circulate, having attained a life of its own, but is demonstrably untrue.
Further while Mr. O’Donnell notes, correctly in part, that “the fact that mosques are within walking distance of the Vatican speaks volumes for democracy, not against Islam” I wonder what the current case in Afghanistan of the potential death penalty for conversion to Christianity speaks to if not the nature of Islam.
Mr. Tuttle:
Two things. First, if the Church’s silence during the holocaust is “demonstrably untrue,” perhaps you could provide the evidence you believe supports that claim. I agree with Patrick on this one — after all, John Paul himself apologized for the Church’s failure to speak out about what happened to the Jews during WWII. See this BBC article.
Second, let’s be precise about the Afghanistan situation: the death penalty is imposed not for converting to Christianity, but for leaving Islam. An indefensible law, to be sure, but not an anti-Christian one (and I’m not suggesting that you’re implying as much).
H. Tuttle:
There is no ‘essence’ (‘nature of’) to Islam, as there is no ‘essence’ to Catholicism. I do indeed admire the work of Garry Wills…and the late Penny Lernoux, Phllip Berryman, Leonardo Boff, Dorothy Day: nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about here. We might distinguish between the Vatican as an institutional source of religious and dogmatic authority and the voices of individual Catholics and Catholic groups, tendiencies, theologies, and so forth (hence the differences, say, between a Boff and a Ratzinger, Ratzinger and Rahner, Kung and Ratzinger, Opus Dei and communidades de base, etc.). Penny Lernoux’s People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (1989) well captures my own perspective on the Church. I certainly don’t expect individual Catholics to answer for the historical sins of Catholicism, that is, unless they’ve set out to defend them.
And, again for the record, I am not a Catholic (although raised as one).
Any further correspondence we might conduct in private.