The Truth About The Crusades

By Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck

The popular conception of ignorant, cruel, and superstitious crusaders attacking peaceful, sophisticated Muslims comes largely from Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Talisman [1825] and Sir Steven Runciman's three volume History of the Crusades [1951-54], the latter of which concludes with the famous summation now shared by most everyone: "the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."

Scott and Runciman did much to shape the popular and entirely negative view of the Crusades, but it isn't as if they had no material to work with. The Crusades were often barbaric and often produced spectacular failures - all in the name of Jesus. Children died needlessly. Coalitions splintered endlessly. Jews were sometimes persecuted mercilessly. Ancient cities were ransacked foolishly. And on occasion [e.g., the Wendish Crusade] infidels were forced to convert or die, while the crusaders holding the swords were guaranteed immortality. In short, many of the Christians who went to war under the sign of the cross conducted themselves as if they knew nothing of the Christ of the cross.

But that's not the whole story. The Crusades is also the story of thousands of godly men, women, and children who sacrificed time, money, and health to reclaim holy lands in distant countries overrun by Muslims. The Christians of the East had suffered mightily at the hands of the Turks and Arabs. It was only right, it seemed to medieval Christians, to go and help their fellow Christians and reclaim their land and property.

Many crusaders were knights who, with their families, left lands and titles. They saw their journey to the Middle East as an act of piety, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the center of the earth and the center of their spiritual world. To be sure, the crusaders could be arrogant and savage, but they could also be pious, compassionate [e.g., the Hospitallers], and courageous.

And they did not always fail. The First Crusade, unlike most of the others, actually worked. Against all odds, a fractious group of Christians made their way from Western Europe to the Middle East and conquered two of the best-defended cities in the world [Antioch and Jerusalem]. Their triumph was nothing short of remarkable, and for the crusaders, it signaled nothing less than the hand of God restoring His city to His people...

We are right to deplore the cruelty meted out by crusading Christians, but we should not ignore their plight. Christians lands had been captured. Surely, they thought, this could not stand. For an American, it's as if Al-Qaeda sacked Washington D.C., set up shop for bin Laden in the White House, and turned the Lincoln Memorial into a terrorist training center. It would be unthinkable, not to mention cowardly, for no one to storm the city, liberate its captives, and reclaim our nation's capital. We should never excuse the atrocities that occurred under the banner of the cross during the Crusades, but we should, at least, take pause to understand why they set out on what seems to us to be a fool's errand.

We should...resist the temptation to blame present-day Muslim extremism on the Crusades. This is not to say that the Crusades don't loom large in the Islamic consciousness. It is to say that this was not always the case. The Crusades were always a big deal in the Christian West, but for Muslims, as late as the seventeenth century, it was just another futile attempt by the infidels to halt the inevitable expansion of Islam. From the time of the prophet Muhammad through the Reformation, Muslims conquered three-fourths of Christian lands. Once the Muslims united under Saladin, the crusaders, themselves divided, were no match for the armies of Islam.

The Crusades were not a major factor in shaping the Islamic world. The term for the Crusades, harb-al-salib, was only introduced in the Arab language in the mid-nineteenth century, and the first Arabic history of the Crusades was not written until 1899. Because the Crusades were unsuccessful, they simply did not matter much to Muslims. But all this began to change when European nations colonized Muslim nations and brought their schools and textbooks which hailed the gallant crusaders and heroic knights who tried to bring Christianity and civilization to the Middle East. Like sports, like war, like life - when you're winning, you don't care who's losing; but when you're losing, it matters a lot who's beating you.

Though we should not be fans of the Crusades, we must be careful in our denunciation of them and other parts of the church's history we deem to be criminal. Today, we fight for nation-states and democracy. Back then, they fought for religion and holy lands. Their reasons for war seem wrong to us, but no more than our reasons would seem wrong to them. Thomas Madden writes:

It is easy enough for modern people to dismiss the crusades as morally repugnant and cynically evil. Such judgments, however, tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based on our uniquely modern [and, therefore, Western] values. If, from the safety of our modern world, we are quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick to condemn us. Our infinitely more destructive wars waged for sake of political and social ideologies would, in his opinion, be lamentable wastes of human life. In both societies, the medieval and the modern, people fight for what is most dear to them. That is fact of human nature that is not so changeable. [New Concise History Of The Crusades, pg. 223]

Excerpt from Why We Love The Church by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck

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