[Elfsea] FW: The First Holy War

[Ciarlariello, Keith W]

I just think it is interesting how history likes to repeat itself.

Wilhelm

>  -----Original Message-----
> From: 	Kaiser, Mark A
> Sent:	Thursday, April 04, 2002 7:15 PM
> To:	Mark Kaiser (E-mail); Ciarlariello, Keith W
> Subject:	The First Holy War
>
> U.S. News & World Report (04/08/02)
>
> The First Holy War
> During the Crusades, East and West first met-on the battlefield
>
> By Andrew Curry
>
> It was the fall of 1187, and an emissary from the besieged city of
> Jerusalem had come to beg Saladin, the sultan of Egypt, for mercy. After
> barely four days of assaults, the Christian defenders saw that Saladin had
> them hopelessly outmatched. Waiting in his tent outside the city's walls,
> the Muslim ruler knew both sides had a lot riding on the outcome of this
> battle.
>
> For the city's defenders, the prospect of Saladin's wrath loomed. The last
> time Jerusalem was sacked by an invading army - a Christian one - its
> narrow streets ran red with blood. For Saladin, his honor depended on
> capturing Jerusalem. All summer his armies had battled their way north
> through the Holy Land, sweeping through the Christian fiefs like an angry
> desert wind, with only one goal: recapturing the holy city that had been
> occupied by European invaders for 88 years.
>
> Now the sultan stood on the hills north of Jerusalem. But the Christian
> emissary trudging toward him had no prize to offer, only surrender. For
> days Saladin's men had bombarded the city from the heights to the north,
> finally breaching St. Stephen's Gate. The few defenders who remained knew
> that prolonging the fight would only worsen the consequences of defeat.
>
> And so a triumphant Saladin entered Jerusalem on Oct. 2, 1187. For the
> sultan's army, it was a moment of both joy and sadness. The Christians had
> profaned some of Islam's holiest sites. The al-Aqsa mosque had been used
> as a stable for horses. Pieces of the rock from which Mohammed was said to
> have ascended to heaven had been chipped away to sell in Constantinople.
>
> But the victorious Saladin forbade acts of vengeance. There were no more
> deaths, no violence. A token ransom was arranged for the thousands of
> residents. Saladin and his brother paid for hundreds of the poorest
> themselves and arranged guards for the caravans of refugees.
>
> Sound familiar? If not, don't feel bad. Saladin doesn't get much play in
> Western history books. You're more likely to read about Richard the
> Lion-Hearted, the leader of the European expedition to retake Jerusalem -
> and even he is most often remembered as a peripheral character in Robin
> Hood tales. But ask most Muslims, and they'll tell you all about Saladin
> and his generosity in the face of Christian aggression and hatred. And
> they'll be right.
>
> The battle between Saladin and Richard marked the high point of the
> Crusades, the first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom,
> which lasted more than three centuries. And though they are only faint in
> the Western consciousness, in the Muslim world the Crusades still loom
> large in cultural memory. When Osama bin Laden declared his own jihad in
> 1998, he accused America of "[spearheading] the crusade against the
> Islamic nation." And in a tape released to his followers last year, he
> promised that the world would "see again Saladin carrying his sword, the
> blood of unbelievers dripping from it."
>
> His words tapped into a reservoir of ill will. "The impact of the Crusades
> created a historical memory which is with us today - the memory of a long
> European onslaught," says Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic studies at
> American University in Washington, D.C. Its legacy was profound. For
> Muslims, then probably the strongest and most vibrant civilization on the
> globe, the Crusader victories and the destruction that followed were a
> confidence-shaking blow. At the same time, the Crusades were a tipping
> point for Europe, pushing the continent out of an isolated dark age and
> into the modern world.
>
> Christian soldiers. From their beginnings in 1095, the Crusades inspired
> more passion than anyone expected. The First Crusade was preceded by
> droughts and famine and heralded by meteor showers. The idea of an
> expedition to reclaim Jerusalem from the unbelievers seized the
> imagination of people from all social classes. Led by deeply religious
> knights like Godfrey of Bouillon and Tancred, armies of "Latin" Christians
> (followers of the Church of Rome) from France, Germany, England, and
> elsewhere marched through what is now Hungary to Constantinople, the great
> center of Christianity in the East.
>
> When the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, they looked like one
> undifferentiated barbaric mess to their Muslim foes, who called them all
> Franks. But the unsophisticated Franks were tough. In 1099 they surrounded
> Jerusalem, assaulting the well-defended city for weeks. Finally, Godfrey
> and Tancred broke through, and the Crusaders poured in. Bloodthirsty after
> their fiercely fought siege, they swarmed over the walls and set upon the
> city's inhabitants - Muslim, Jewish, and even Christian. Later they
> boasted of wading through the city's holy sites knee deep in blood. Their
> brutality horrified the Muslim world. "Amongst the Moslems, who had been
> ready hitherto to accept the Franks as another factor in the tangled
> politics of the time, there was henceforward a clear determination that
> the Franks must be driven out," writes British historian Steven Runciman.
> "When later, wiser Latins in the East sought to find some basis on which
> Christian and Moslem could work together, the memory of the massacre stood
> always in the way."
>
> It took almost a century before a leader strong enough to unite the Muslim
> Middle East appeared. When Saladin finally retook Jerusalem, it was
> Christendom's turn to be shocked. The archbishop of Tyre, a Christian
> stronghold north of Jerusalem, hurried west to Italy on a black-sailed
> ship with news of Jerusalem's fall, along with letters begging for help -
> and a crude drawing of an Arab beating a bloodied Jesus. Chroniclers say
> that when Pope Urban III learned of Saladin's victory, he died of grief.
> His successor, Gregory VIII, sent messengers to spread the word of a new
> Crusade to wrest back the holy city. "Every person of ordinary discretion
> is well able to appreciate both the greatness of the danger and the
> fierceness of the barbarians who thirst for Christian blood," he wrote.
> "The goal of those who profane the holy places is nothing short of
> sweeping away the name of God." Echoing Urban II, the pope promised
> salvation through violence: He would "acquit before God all the sins of
> those who would bear the sign of the cross to go recover the Promised
> Land, provided that they had confessed and were truly penitent," wrote
> contemporary chronicler William of Tyre.
>
> The pope's message of salvation and the opportunity for earthly glory drew
> the most powerful kings of Europe - like the young Richard the
> Lion-Hearted, who sailed east leading armies of knights and peasants.
> Expeditions like Richard's would be repeated on a smaller scale over and
> over again for almost five centuries, from 1095, when the First Crusade
> was declared, to 1578, when the last true Crusade was launched against
> Turks in Morocco. Though historians used to write of eight distinct
> Crusades, scholars today argue that "Crusades were going to the Holy Land
> all the time during the 200 years that the Franks were able to hold onto
> their states in the Middle East," as author Karen Armstrong writes in Holy
> War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World. "Long after they lost
> these states it was not uncommon for kings and barons to take the cross
> and vow to march on Jerusalem." Many scholars now also believe that
> crusading eventually spanned the entire continent of Europe, as the church
> used it to fight "heretical" Christians and convert pagans at sword point.
>
>
> The First Crusade, in which wide swaths of the Holy Land were seized by
> Latin Christians, is the only one that can be considered a European
> victory. Crusades thereafter were either catastrophes or barely successful
> attempts to preserve European strongholds in the Middle East known as the
> "Latin kingdoms." But the Third Crusade is the best remembered, perhaps
> because of the personalities involved. Like Richard the Lion-Hearted, the
> handsome and temperamental king of England: Though known today as a
> paragon of chivalry, Richard was a merciless adversary. The son of Eleanor
> of Aquitaine, queen of France and England, he was already a veteran
> warrior and strategist when he arrived in the Holy Land in 1191 at the age
> of 33. He took a different view of war from Saladin's. After one battle,
> he had the captured men - 16,000 of them, according to William of Tyre's
> occasionally inflated account - beheaded within full view of their own
> armies. For 16 months, Saladin and Richard battled across the parched
> plains of the Holy Land. Finally, ill and leading an exhausted army,
> Richard negotiated a truce with Saladin and headed home. He never
> returned.
>
> Colonial West. But Richard did come back in the popular imagination - if
> in a different guise. Marching into a Jerusalem captured from the Turks in
> 1917, a British general, Sir Edmund Allenby, proudly declared "today the
> wars of the Crusaders are completed," and the British press celebrated his
> victory with cartoons of Richard the Lion-Hearted looking down at
> Jerusalem above the caption "At last my dream come true." The colonial
> powers glorified the Crusaders as their ideological forebears.
>
> At the same time, Western expansion into the Middle East embittered Arabs.
> "For [Muslims], imperialism is a dirty word, and they turned the Western
> memory of the Crusades on its head and demonized it," says Jonathan
> Riley-Smith, a historian at the University of Cambridge in Britain and
> author of The Crusades: A Short History. Angry Muslim nationalists adopted
> the Crusades as a convenient metaphor. It still works. "Since the late
> 19th century, Western imperialism and Zionism were portrayed as a modern
> crusade," says Hebrew University historian Benjamin Kedar. "This is why
> the topic is so timely in Arab political discourse."
>
> Undoubtedly, George W. Bush had a different sense of the term in mind
> after September 11 when he told the nation "this crusade, this war on
> terrorism, is going to take awhile." But Bush's statement resounded like
> thunder in the Muslim world. "It was precisely the worst word he could
> have used - it allowed bin Laden and others to conceptualize the nature of
> the struggle into resisting Christian and Jewish invaders and point out
> the hostility of the West to the Muslim world," Ahmed says. "Crusader lore
> is only part of this rage, but it's a significant part."
>
> This rage is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning just over a
> century ago, when memories of the Crusades were revived as a historical
> analogy to colonialism. Before Europe's colonial expansion into the Middle
> East, Muslim chroniclers paid little attention to the Crusades. "In actual
> historical reality, the Crusades were far more important for the West than
> for the Muslim world," says John Voll, associate director of the
> Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
>
> For decades, Western historians held on to the idea that the Crusades were
> a colonial venture motivated by just about everything but the cross:
> greed, lack of opportunity in Europe, territorial expansion, or just plain
> aggression. Few gave credence to the idea that the Crusaders were
> motivated by genuine religious feeling. But recently Crusades scholarship
> has recognized that faith could move people to violence as easily as could
> greed or land. The best example is the First Crusade, called by Pope Urban
> II. Eager to unite warring Christians, on Nov. 27, 1095, he spoke to a
> massive crowd gathered near Clermont in France. Describing the cruelties
> inflicted by Muslims on Christian pilgrims trying to visit Jerusalem and
> the defeats suffered by the Byzantine Christians, he called on all of
> Western Christendom to rescue their Eastern brethren. "They should leave
> off slaying each other and fight instead a righteous war, doing the work
> of God, and God would lead them. For those that died in battle there would
> be absolution and the remission of sins" Runciman writes. "Here they were
> poor and unhappy; there they would be joyful and prosperous and true
> friends of God."
>
> The response was tremendous. Urban's speech was interrupted by cries of
> "Deus lo volt" - "God wills it." Hundreds crowded up to Urban begging
> permission to go on the holy expedition. Soon tens of thousands of
> commoners and knights were heading off to the Holy Land. Across Europe,
> preachers called the faithful to sew crosses on their clothes, to mark
> them until they succeeded in their quest.
>
> United under the cross and ruled by strict religious principles, the
> Crusaders were able to set aside their differences. "Among those people
> who spoke so many different languages there were the strongest pledges of
> concord and friendship," reads a Crusader's code written in 1147. "In
> addition to this they enforced the severest laws, for example that a death
> was to be demanded for a death, a tooth for a tooth. They forbade every
> kind of display of rich clothes; and women were not allowed to go out in
> public." The key to Urban's call was a revolutionary  (and doomed)
> theology: salvation through the sword. "There is a very powerful
> devotional element," says Riley-Smith. "West European Catholics believed
> they could aid their salvation by fighting the infidel in the East.
> [Crusading is] as much a penance as fasting on bread and water. . . . This
> idea is without precedent in Christian history."
>
> "Milk and honey." Jerusalem was the medieval Christians' equivalent of
> Mecca, Christ's tomb their quest. To take up the cross in the city's
> defense was a deeply spiritual act. And more: Ever on the edge of
> starvation, usually tied to a lord's land, superstitious peasants saw the
> journey as a road to heaven. "To ignorant minds the distinction between
> Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem was not very clearly defined," writes
> Runciman in History of the Crusades. Fiery itinerant preachers like Peter
> the Hermit, whose army of starving peasants had no place in Urban's vision
> of an orderly march on Jerusalem, promised paradise. "Many ... believed
> that he was promising to lead them out of their present miseries to the
> land flowing with milk and honey of which the Scriptures spoke," Runciman
> writes.
>
> Peter's success was cited over and over again in the years to come. The
> defeats suffered by better-organized Crusades led many to believe that it
> was the humble who were destined to succeed, not the proud, rich military
> classes. In the end, these "People's Crusades" ended in disaster too. None
> ever reached the Holy Land, and most of the peasant Crusaders were either
> slaughtered as they plundered their way across Europe or disbanded before
> ever reaching a port. Without the resources to reach the Holy Land, most
> turned on more-convenient targets, namely Europe's Jewish communities.
> "[Why] are we going to seek out our profanity and to take vengeance on the
> Ishmaelites for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and
> crucified him" was the rationale, as recorded by a Jewish eyewitness.
>
> But persuading landed knights to take up the cross took more than
> antisemitic rants and vague stories of the Promised Land. Europe's warrior
> class, the fighting force Pope Urban II really wanted, had a lot to lose:
> Crusaders faced death, disease, or capture. There were also more-mundane
> risks. A knight's lands and title could be stolen in his absence. If his
> Crusade failed, the returning knight risked the scorn of those who blamed
> him for failing to do God's work. And the costs involved in crusading were
> a risk in themselves. King Louis IX of France (later to become St. Louis)
> set out in 1249 on crusade from a harbor he had specially constructed with
> an artificial canal and grand tower, stocked with plentiful supplies. He
> spent six times his annual revenue on the venture, which ended when he was
> captured and forced to pay a 400,000-pound ransom. "Most Crusaders engaged
> in a dangerous, unpleasant, unprofitable, and extremely expensive
> enterprise, and they do not seem to have expected anything else," says
> Riley-Smith.
>
> Though most were military and financial fiascoes, the Crusades had a
> long-term impact on European civilization that went beyond finding an
> outlet for the violence of warring Christian kingdoms. "[The Crusades]
> made the Continent more cosmopolitan and gave Europeans a far greater
> awareness of the wider world. Like all wars, veterans came back and had
> seen things they never would have if they had stayed in their villages,"
> says James Reston Jr., author of Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart
> and Saladin in the Third Crusade. The stories they brought back also
> sparked a creative blaze in Europe. Beginning in the 12th century, or
> around time of the First Crusade, literature and verse flowered in the
> form of memoir and song. Coming after the virtual silence that marked the
> Dark Ages, the proliferation of Crusader epics like the French Song of
> Roland is referred to by some scholars as the "12th-century Renaissance."
>
> Many chose not to return at all, especially second and third sons with no
> chance of inheriting land back in Europe. Those who stayed created a
> cultural, military, and mercantile outpost in the Holy Land. The
> fortresses they built after the First Crusade were usually transplanted
> reflections of the European feudal system, but over time the "Latin
> kingdoms" in the Holy Land also served as a powerful integrating force.
> Contact with the libraries of the Arab world opened up new worlds for the
> isolated scholars of Europe, who gradually gained access to a wealth of
> ancient Greek texts that had been preserved for centuries in Arabic.
> "Violent interactions were paralleled by economic and conceptual
> exchanges," argues Georgetown's Voll. "In some ways the Crusades' positive
> intellectual dimensions outweigh the negative impact."
>
> First contact. "The Crusades were an absolute failure, but they did
> integrate European travelers and traders into an ongoing world system,"
> says Janet Abu-Lughod, author of Before European Hegemony: The World
> System A.D. 1250-1350. Increased demand for Middle Eastern luxury items
> meant that Europeans had to come up with trade goods of their own, helping
> build industries like wool and textiles. "By stimulating an interest in
> the goods of the East, they had a double-back effect on the development of
> European economies." Even later failures may have hidden some positive
> benefits. The end of the Crusades and the Latin kingdoms meant the end of
> easy access to Asian trade goods, but not to demand. Some historians have
> speculated that the closing of the Middle East to European merchants in
> the 15th century accelerated the voyages of discovery that led to the New
> World.
>
> But even the Europeans' increasing sophistication did little to redeem
> them in the eyes of the Muslims whose land they occupied and controlled.
> To the Arabs they were "illiterate barbarians, for whom physical force is
> a supreme virtue, their religion is a despised polytheism, their medicine
> a collection of superstitions," writes historian Joshua Prawer in The
> Crusaders' Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages. "Far from
> feeling inferior to the conqueror, the conquered regarded himself not only
> as his equal but by far his superior."
>
> More than nine centuries after Urban II called the first Crusade, the
> legacy of misunderstanding and animosity is still with us today. In the
> West, many of the most lasting misperceptions of Islam stem from that
> time. In the Arab and Muslim world, the Crusades have made an unfortunate
> rhetorical comeback. "Such analogies are really not very helpful to
> understand the Crusades or present-day realities - they obscure rather
> than clarify," says Kedar. "People get so obsessed with ... the past that
> they don't react to the reality but to the reflection." With that
> reflection distorted almost beyond recognition by rhetoric and
> misunderstanding, a clearer vision of the past has never been more
> important.