The Crusades 1095 to 2007

The Crusades 1095 to 2007

The Crusades were fought from 1095 until 1291 AD by

Christian armies to re-capture the sacred places in the

"Holy Land" from the Muslims. Pope Urban II started the first

crusade in the name of Christianity, to avenge the wrongs done

against Christians and to recapture the Holy Lands. "It is the

will of God!" he declared, "Ð'....(those who) shall offer himself to

Him as a living sacrificeÐ'....shall wear the sign of the cross of

the Lord on his forehead or on his breast." ("Wars that are not

Just Wars") When the crusaders finally captured Jerusalem in

1100 AD after bitter fighting, mass killings of Muslims were

carried out in the city. The event served to embitter the

relations between Muslims and Christians for centuries. Even now

the word "crusade" invokes strong feelings. Throughout this

paper, I will discuss the crusades and their many relations to

the present climate of the Middle East.

The Crusades had an enormous influence on the European Middle Ages. At times much of the continent was united under a powerful Papacy, but by the 14th century the old concept of Christendom was fragmented, and the development of centralized bureaucracies (the foundation of the modern nation-state) was well on its way in France, England, Burgundy, Portugal, Castile, and Aragon partly because of the dominance of the church at the beginning of the crusading era. Although Europe had been exposed to Islamic culture for centuries through contacts in the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily, much Islamic thought, such as science, medicine, and architecture, was transferred to the west during the crusades. The military experiences of the crusades also had their effects in Europe; for example, European castles became massive stone structures, as they were in the east, rather than the smaller wooden buildings they had typically been in the past. The need to raise, transport and supply large armies led to a flourishing of trade throughout Europe. Roads largely unused since the days of Rome saw significant increases in traffic as local merchants began to expand their horizons. This was not only because the Crusades prepared Europe for travel, but rather that many wanted to travel after being reacquainted with the products of the Middle East. This also aided in the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy, as various Italian city-states from the very beginning had important and profitable trading colonies in the crusader states, both in the Holy Land and later in captured Byzantine territory. Despite the ultimate defeat in the Middle East, the Crusaders regained the Iberian Peninsula permanently and slowed down the military expansion of Islam.

The crusades had profound but localized effects upon the Islamic world. In the Middle East where the equivalents of "Franks" and "Crusaders" remained expressions of disdain, Muslims traditionally celebrate Saladin, the Kurdish warrior, as a hero against the Crusaders. In the 21st century, some in the Arab world, such as the Arab independence movement and Pan-Islamism movement, continue to call Western involvement in the Middle East a "crusade." The Crusades were regarded by the Islamic world as cruel and savage onslaughts by European Christians.

For the governments and peoples of the Middle East the Crusades brought about, or at least strengthened, the Muslim's religious fundamentalism. What was at stake for them was not only a matter of interests, religion, and policies, but the whole future direction of their societies.

Religious fundamentalism enjoys several advantages against competing ideologies. It is readily intelligible to both educated and uneducated Muslims. It offers a set of themes, slogans and symbols that are profoundly familiar and therefore effective in mobilizing support and in formulating both a critique of what is wrong and a program for putting it right. Religious movements enjoy another practical advantage in societies like those of the Middle East and North Africa that are under more or less autocratic rule: dictators can forbid parties, they can forbid meetings, they cannot forbid public worship, and they can to only a limited extent control sermons.

As a result the religious opposition groups are the only ones that have regular meeting places where they can assemble and have at their disposal a network outside the control of the state or at least not fully subject to it. The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to the fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositions.

Militant Islamic radicalism is not new. Several times since the beginnings of the Western impact in the eighteenth century, there have been religiously expressed militant opposition movements. So far they have all failed. Sometimes they have failed in an easy and relatively painless way by being defeated and suppressed, in which case martyrdom brought them a kind of success. Sometimes they have failed the hard way, by gaining power, and then having to confront great economic and social problems for which they had no real answers. What has usually happened is that they have become, in time, as oppressive and as cynical as their ousted predecessors. It is in this phase that they can become really dangerous; when, the revolution enters the Napoleonic or, perhaps one could say, the Stalinist phase. There is also the possibility that they might have nuclear weapons, either for terrorist or for regular military use. Whatever doubts one may have about the ability of the fundamentalists, once in power, to achieve their declared aims, one should not underrate their capacity to gain and to use power.

Another possibility, which could even be precipitated by fundamentalism, is what has of late become fashionable to call "Lebanonization." Most of the states of the Middle East, Egypt is an obvious exception, are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the people together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to