How the Crusaders Changed the World

In February GÜNTHER SIMMERMACHER made a private visit to the Holy Land. In the fifth of a series of six articles, he considers the Crusaders and their legacy.

When the terrorists of ISIS announce their plans to ethnically cleanse Christians, they usually do so by reference to the followers of Christ as “crusaders”. You wouldn’t want to take history lessons from those murderous maniacs.

You can’t even accuse ISIS of spreading “fake news”: the crusades took place nine centuries ago; they are as much news to us now as the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

For one thing, the Christians in Iraq, Syria or Egypt mostly descend from the original Christians at those cradles of the faith. Their unbroken presence there precedes that of Islam by at least six centuries.

As communities, they do not descend from the Crusaders, nor are most of them adherent to Latin-rite Catholicism, the denomination which the Crusaders represented.

You can’t even accuse ISIS of spreading “fake news”: the crusades took place nine centuries ago; they are as much news to us now as the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

And ISIS, with its notions of sovereignty over land being determined by theology, should appreciate the fact that the aim of the crusades was the reconquest of lands that once were Christian. The Crusaders and ISIS aren’t that different.

The First Crusade accomplished its objective with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The pretext for the crusades was Pope Urban II’s desire to return the Holy Land to Christian control and make it safe for pilgrims.

But the broader context was to give military aid to the Orthodox leaders in the East, who were subject to advancing Muslim conquest in Asia Minor. Urban’s hope was that by joining forces with the Eastern Church in temporal terms, the great schism of 1054 could be healed.

As it turns out, it didn’t, and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches remain divided.

The Sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade in 1204 — for which Pope Innocent III excommunicated the Crusader leaders — entrenched an enmity which has lasted for centuries. The damage done to Constantinople (or Istanbul, as we know it now) ultimately prepared the ground for the great city’s calamitous conquest by the Ottoman Muslims in 1453.

Crusaders: Good and bad

The Crusaders were heroic, committed, resilient and strong. They showed great piety — and sometimes behaved abominably.

They showed both qualities on their long way to Jerusalem, suffering extreme hardships, and in turn visiting hardships on others. But all that was a prelude to the deplorable conduct that would follow in the Holy City.

By the laws of physics, it’s not possible that blood might flow ankle-deep through the streets of Jerusalem. Today the bragging of the Crusaders is being used by the critics of Christianity and those who just don’t know better

The conquest of Jerusalem led to several massacres of civilian Muslims and Jews. In many cases the victims were people already under arrest.

The common memory of soldiers walking ankle-deep in blood is an obvious exaggeration. That very likely was the result of Crusaders taking poetic licence to impress their bloodthirsty audiences back home who were baying for the blood of Saracens.

By the laws of physics, it’s not possible that blood might flow ankle-deep through the streets of Jerusalem. Today the bragging of the Crusaders is being used by the critics of Christianity and those who just don’t know better (such as, for example, former US President Bill Clinton).

But let there be no doubt that the Crusaders murdered with atrocious abandon. Several thousand defenceless people, including women and children, were slain. The best guess at the number of victims is about 3000.

We can’t ascribe this to the signs of its times. Conquest was rarely civil, but even in the 11th century it did not normally involve the massacre of innocent civilians. The vanquished population could expect to lose their possessions and be held to ransom. And those who couldn’t pay a ransom would suffer the awful fate of enslavement. But massacres of civilians were not the norm.

It is absurd to hold Christianity today accountable for the actions of soldiers more than 900 years ago, but in the history of our Church, the events of 1099 are a stain.

The history of the crusades is complex, and mostly marked by discord with the popes. Their rule of the Holy Land didn’t even last long. They were defeated by Saladin in 1187, in 1228 negotiated control of Jerusalem, were driven out from Jerusalem in 1244, and finally from their last stronghold in the region, the port of Acre, in 1291.

The Crusader legacy

But in that brief period of their rule of the Holy Land, the Crusaders made a lasting mark. For one thing, Crusader rule gave rise several chivalric orders which we still know, or know of, today.

The Hospitallers of St John were founded to provide medical care to pilgrims and the poor of any religion, and later to accompany pilgrims under armed protection for safety.

The order still exists in various forms. The Catholic Order of the Knights of Malta — which is, remarkably, a sovereign entity in international law — is the direct successor of the Hospitallers.

Various Protestant descendants of the order, such as St John Ambulance, the Johanniterorden in Germany and variations of these, operate throughout the world.

These days the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre work to support the Christians of the Holy Land and the maintenance of the sacred sites there.

The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem also still exists. It was founded to protect holy shrines and Christian pilgrims, but the order’s biggest task was to oversee the rebuilding of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, which had been destroyed in 1009 by order of the mad Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, the “Nero of Islam”.

These days the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre work to support the Christians of the Holy Land and the maintenance of the sacred sites there.

It has a South African chapter, of which Archbishop Stephen Brislin of Cape Town is the prior. My friend Rimon Makhlouf, the Catholic tour guide from Jerusalem of whom I have written before, is also a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.

Those two orders have survived. The most powerful of them didn’t.

The Knights Templar — or, to give their full unsnappy title, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon — were chiefly a military order. But the order also became a financial institution; indeed, it can be said that the Templars invented the modern banking system.

Their wealth led to their demise. When the Holy Land was lost, the Knights Templar lost public support. And King Philip IV of France, a man of many debts and few scruples, took the gap to suppress the order, execute its leaders, and confiscate its riches on absurd pretexts, with the reluctant acquiescence of the pope.

The Crusader capital

Remains of the Crusader presence pepper the Holy Land. Some are ruins of old churches and other structures; others are simply spectacular. For me, three places in particular stand out: the church of the Holy Sepulchre, which has remained almost unchanged since its reconstruction was completed around 1149; also in Jerusalem, the church of St Anne, the traditional birthplace of Our Lady with its remarkable acoustics; and thirdly the Crusader citadel of Acre.

Acre, known to locals as Akko, is on the Mediterranean coast.

As the hub of import and export, and the centre of the Crusaders’ many lucrative commercial activities, Acre was rich and powerful.

These days the great port in the area is in nearby Haifa, but in Crusader times Acre had a huge harbour.

Much of it is now subsumed by the sea. Looking down from the Crusader fortress wall one can see remnants of port structures sticking out of the waters. It is an impressive sight.

But the highlight is the Crusader citadel in Akko’s old city, a town which until 1948 was populated mainly by Arabs, many of whom died of disease when, according to the Red Cross, the water-supply was poisoned by the besieging Zionist militia. Akko is now mostly Jewish, but the Old City, where the citadel is located, is mainly Palestinian.

The citadel is now a well-curated museum which provides a glimpse into life in the Crusader kingdoms of the Holy Land, about which I will write in the concluding part of this series.

Previous articles in the series:

The Faith of Palestine’s Christians
To Stand Where Jesus Once Stood
Fixing up our Holiest Churches
Sites of Holy Week in Jerusalem