Deep Dive
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In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a history teacher in the suburbs of Paris, was decapitated. A month earlier, he'd shown one of his classes an insulting caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, published in the French magazine Charlie Hepto. He was trying to illustrate the type of free speech that is protected in France, in this case, religious satire.
But a parent took issue with showing the image. In Islam, images of the Prophet are strictly forbidden, as is insulting Muhammad. The dispute became very public and a radicalized 18-year-old took tragic revenge.
In response to the attack, French President Emmanuel Macron announced further crackdowns on Muslims thought to have links to radical groups. In one media interview, Macron called Islam a religion in crisis. His comments stoked what was already a simmering feud between France and Muslim-majority countries, particularly Turkey. Insults were thrown between Macron and the Turkish President Erdogan.
Erdogan promptly found himself the subject of a Shali Hebdo caricature the next week.
Adding fuel to the fire. This cartoon mocking President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, published by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, has sparked fury in Turkey. Accusing the publication of "sowing the seeds of hatred and animosity", Ankara has vowed to take legal and diplomatic action. Erdogan meanwhile said he had not seen the caricature himself and accused Western countries of launching a crusade against Islam. In a speech to his AK party members in parliament.
The West was once again headed to a period of barbarity, said Erdogan, describing colonial powers as murderers, for their record, in Africa and the Middle East. They literally want to relaunch the Crusades, he declared. Since the Crusades, the seeds of evil and hatred have started falling on these Muslim lands, and that's when peace was disrupted.
923 years after the launch of the First Crusade, world leaders like the Turkish president and others are still invoking the memory of the Crusades to explain ongoing conflict. How plausible is that?
What were the Crusades? How did they start? What did they achieve? And why did they stop? And does their shadow really fall over modern tensions between the West and Muslim lands? All of that across this special two-part episode. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan's brand new book, Bullies and Saints, an honest look at the good and evil in Christian history by some guy called John Dixon. Every episode, Undeceptions explores some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth...
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Religion starts most of the wars of history.
That was the very firm claim of the man sitting opposite me at a sumptuous lunch at a friend's house overlooking one of Sydney's lovely harbours. The
The conversation started, as they often do in my life, with my acquaintance asking me what I did for a living. It either kills the conversation or ignites it. I mumbled something about, oh, I research and lecture about history and religion. He explained he didn't have much time for faith. And when I asked him why, he told me plainly, religion starts most of the wars of history.
I naturally probed a little. Which ones? I said. He paused, thought about it for a moment and said, well, there's the Crusades. Another pause. And the troubles of Northern Ireland too. These were his only two examples.
I'm not sure about the troubles. Have a listen to our single from a little while ago for more on that one. I feel inclined to give him the crusades, though. They were religious wars. They were Christian wars, and they were pretty awful, as we'll see.
But whether we're a Christian or sceptical, chances are much of what we think we know about the Crusades is just wrong. Well, so says my guest today. Professor Tymon, you've written that most of what passes in public as knowledge of the Crusades is either misleading or false. Were you just being provocative? Or what are the myths we need to be undeceived about?
Well, I think particularly the broadest one is that the Crusades form part of some eternal clash of civilizations.
Christopher Tyerman is Professor of the History of the Crusades at Hereford College, University of Oxford. In the English-speaking world, there's no one more widely recognised in this field. He's written over eight books on this topic, but perhaps his magnum opus is the thousand-plus-page God's War, A New History of the Crusades, published by Harvard University Press.
There is some eternal conflict between what some people construct as Western values and what some people construct as Eastern values. As soon as you put it in those terms, of course, it's meaningless. What is the West and what is the East? But there is a popular perception, in particular vis-à-vis Christianity and Islam,
that the Crusades form part of a contest that goes back to the early days of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. And some people say it continues today, 9-11, ISIS, etc., etc. And this, of course, is totally unhistorical.
and corrosive in historical terms, although of course the perception of this contest informs current
emotions and sentiments on both sides, if you like. Western apologists will say, oh, well, there's always this malign threat to Western values from Islam. And in particularly the Near East, there is the perception that foreigners, particularly from the West, from Europe and now the United States, are constantly trying to take our land.
under the bogus pretense of their superior values. So I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding. We should locate the Crusades in their own time, their own place, and their own causation.
I suppose there are minor, within that, there are minor misconceptions about motives, about the details of campaigns, about portraying some crusade leaders as great heroes or villains.
portraying some opponents of the Crusades as heroes or villains. I think it's nicely put, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, it was pointed out when the French were demanding a mandate in Syria because of their historical links through the Crusades, they were asked, just who won the Crusades?
And they were sort of ignored, of course. And the rights of the local leaders were ignored. So the past has two aspects.
in a sense, realities. One is its own reality of the past, and the other is a constructed reality in the present, which shifts. And the Crusades, of course, have become, since 9-11 in particular, rather toxic in that context. So I suppose why I made that provocative remark was in a sense to...
remind people that the past is the past, it is not the present. The past is not defined by the present. Many popular historical works assume the reverse. Tymon is urging us to take history as history.
The Crusades were not a precursor to modern conflicts in the Middle East. There are parallels, yes, but as Tyman notes, the point about parallel lines is that they don't meet.
Modern politicians like the Turkish President Erdogan just last year, US President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks, or the French at the Paris Peace Accord following World War I have all invoked the Crusades for their own means. But this often conceals the real political, economic, and territorial concerns. The real historical Crusades have nothing to
to do with modern politics. But there's probably no escaping the reputational damage the Crusades have brought upon Christianity. And of course, that does continue today, as my lunch companion made clear. But let's wind back. Where did the Crusades come from?
They certainly didn't pop out of nowhere. Pope Urban II, the instigator of the First Crusade, didn't wake up one morning and invent the notion of holy war out of whole cloth. There is a tale to tell of compromise and distraction.
So let's go back to the 11th century and of course before. What were some of the theoretical precursors to the notion of Christian holy war? I mean, if some of my listeners have opened up Matthew chapters 5 to 7, they don't see Jesus waxing lyrical on holy war too much.
No, they don't. There are, I suppose, two strands, intellectual strands, that lead to this development of holy war. One is the classical tradition. You have Aristotle, for example, the Greek philosopher, talking about just war, talking about the just end of war. If war is fought to preserve or create peace, that is a justified use of violence.
You then have Roman law, people like Cicero, who add to that the idea of the just cause. That there's a just end, there's also a just cause. If you want to assert your rights, peace obviously comes from the Latin word for doing a deal. So you have a theoretical construct, particularly associated with the state, due public authority.
legitimate authority can authorize war for good reasons, for good ends, for the public good. And it is interesting that the most common Latin translation of the Bible
in the Middle Ages, the Vulgate syndrome, Vulgate, draws a distinction. When Christ says, forgive your enemies, the Latin word that Jerome uses is inimicus, which means a personal enemy, not hostis, which means a public enemy. And there is an interesting intellectual divide. So you have a classical tradition of just war associated with the state. The Christian tradition of
takes much of its impetus from the Old Testament, where you have God commanding the Israelites to commit violence. Saul loses favor of God because he does not fully exterminate all the Amalekites. He does not commit genocide.
He leaves some of the animals alive. He shouldn't have done that. And some of the people. Joshua is a hero, commits genocide in Canaan. The Book of Maccabees, which although is often placed in the Apocrypha, was a very popular text in the Middle Ages. There you have perfect examples.
of legitimate war fought by a religious community for their own religious autonomy and independence, committing violent acts, including mutilating bodies and things like that, with the support of God. Okay, so there's a few Old Testament references to clear up.
The account of Saul's life is in the book of 1 Samuel in the Old Testament. He was Israel's first king and he ruled in the 11th century BC. God tells Saul to completely destroy the Amalekites, one of Israel's enemies. It's one of the most violent and difficult to read passages in the Bible. Saul doesn't quite kill everything. He lets some of the animals live and because of that, he loses God's favour.
The conquest of the Canaanites by Joshua is another really difficult part of the Old Testament. God ordains a holy war against the Canaanites to turn these pagan lands into Israel's promised land. I think there's probably a whole episode to do on Old Testament violence. So watch this space.
Anyway, the third warrior tradition Timon mentions isn't in the Jewish or Protestant Bible, but it is in the Catholic Old Testament. The books of 1 and 2 Maccabees tell how an aristocratic Jewish family named the Hasmoneans organized a rebellion against the Greco-Syrian ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes.
The architect of the Jewish campaign was a priest named Judas, nicknamed Maccabeus, the Hammer. And his forces astonishingly beat the pagans and re-consecrated the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah, dedication, comes from all of this.
We'll have links in the show notes for more on all of these difficult things. The point for now is that the Old Testament does have some violent stories that the Crusaders could draw upon. So you have these Old Testament texts, and what's interesting, you find, whereas in the early days, the Old Testament of the Christian church...
The Old Testament texts are reinterpreted and the new covenant takes these texts as metaphors, not literally models to be followed. But as time goes on, the association with the state, you look at the church fathers, the interpretation of these Old Testament texts becomes to some extent more literal
So that by the time you get to the 12th century, you have Bernard of Clairvaux, a very influential thinker, taking St Paul's text about putting the breastplate of God on and all that, the letter to the Ephesians, literally, and when he writes his text in support of the new military order of the Templars,
I should probably jump in here and say something about Bernard of Claveau, 1090 to 1153. He really was one of the foremost clerics of the age. He helped establish the famous Knights Templar. He was already famous for his preaching and writing about love and devotion to God. Now he proclaimed an extraordinary message of violence on behalf of Jesus Christ.
The newly established Knights Templar were a large organization of devout Christians during the medieval era who carried out an important security mission, we might say, to protect European travelers visiting sites in the Holy Land that had come under the West's control. They were a wealthy, powerful, and some would say mysterious order.
that has fascinated historians and the public for centuries. Go and look up the Da Vinci Code to find one of the modern conspiracy theories about them. Anyway, in preparation for the Second Crusade, Claude told his Knights Templar, But now, O brave knight, now, O warlike hero, here is a battle you may fight without danger to the soul.
That was Director Mark's best Bernard. I'm particularly struck by the way Bernard of Claveau took New Testament military metaphors and concretized them.
In Paul's letter to the Ephesians, the first century apostle likens the Christian life to warfare against temptation and persecution. The symbolic nature of the paragraph could hardly be clearer. Therefore, take up the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand, therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness."
As shoes for your feet, put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Ephesians 6, 10-17 Paul's armour of God is metaphorical. He even explains each item. The belt is truth, the breastplate is righteousness, and so on.
But a thousand years after Paul, Bernard of Claveau alludes to this same New Testament imagery to endorse actual armor and actual weaponry.
The knight who puts the breastplate of faith on his soul in the same way as he puts a breastplate of iron on his body is truly intrepid and safe from everything. So forward in safety, knights, and with undaunted souls drive off the enemies of the cross of Christ, that is, Muslims in the Holy Land. In this way, Bernard of Claveau made an extraordinary interpretive manoeuvre.
So you have a general intellectual development
fueled by first the association of the Christian church with political power, the assumption of the church's role as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, and then the context, the political context, particularly in Western Europe, of rule by a military elite, a military aristocracy, the successors to the Roman Empire,
empire, whose social cultural values are those of warriors. And these become, in a sense, Christianized. So you have figures such as Charlemagne, who is regarded as a Holy Roman Emperor, who fights wars, to some extent supported by, to some extent on behalf of Christianity. And his contemporary propagandists,
most of whom are clerics, not all, but most are, portray him in that light. So there is a cultural process whereby justifying war in defence, protection and to some extent furtherance of the Christian church becomes respectable, becomes in a sense necessary.
And the reason for that is that religion in the Middle Ages, and we can see it in various parts of the globe today, religion is bound up intimately with communal identity, social identity. You define yourself as part of a community. Well, what defines that community? What defines that community is shared rituals, shared beliefs, a shared religion.
And so you can see how this process develops. So the texts in the New Testament are interpreted, not by everybody, but by authoritative voices, conveniently, you may say, but socially, I mean, inevitably, in ways that support just war.
Long before Bernard of Claveau's call to his knights, church leaders were devising a distinctively Christian account of violence, that is, state violence. One of the most politically consequential intellectual developments in the first millennium of Christianity came from Saint Augustine in the 5th century, who started to theorise about just war in a Christian context.
Emperor Constantine had declared his faith in Christ almost a century earlier, in the early decades of the 300s. And over the next few generations, Christianity became not just legal and widespread, but intimately connected with the state. But by the time of Augustine in the early 400s,
More and more Christians filled administrative positions in the empire, and more and more bishops gained access to the imperial ear. And conversely, more and more governors and emperors went to Christian intellectuals like Augustine for advice on how to do imperial business, including warfare, in a Christian way.
How does the religion of the cross of love your enemy provide advice to the most successful military machine the world had ever seen? Well, the broad principles of Augustine's just war theory can be pieced together from both his giant tome, The City of God, and his various letters to Roman officials from around the same time.
Here's the thing, he utterly rejected the usual Roman justifications for war, like enlarging the empire, protecting honour, removing hated nations. For much of Roman history, peace, the great Pax Romana, was almost defined as subjugation to Roman order.
Augustine, by contrast, argued that military force can be just when its goal is 1. To establish mutual peace. 2. When it's waged only in self-defense or to recover stolen property. 3. When soldiers exercise maximum restraint in hostilities. 4. When fighting is conducted with such respect for humanity as to leave the opponent alone.
without the sense of being humiliated and resentful. And five, when prisoners of war are preserved, not executed. So that's what a just war might look like. That's not exactly what the Crusades looked like 600 years later.
The crusade on the other hand is slightly different because whereas a war, a just war, is seen as a necessary product of a sinful world, public authorities protect through violence, only war is different. The crusades are different from other forms of warfare.
Because these are wars fought directly at God's command, not politicians, but the leaders of the Crusades of Media fulfilling God's command. And the violence itself is a religious act. And to illustrate that, in 1066, the Normans invaded England under a papal banner.
They wore relics around their necks, et cetera. Nonetheless, the troops, the Norman troops after Hastings had to do penance for the slaughter. If they could declare that they fought for the just cause of reading England of a schismatic and a perjurer, et cetera, et cetera, then they received a lesser penance for killing or homicide.
30 years later, the first crusade, the killing itself, the warfare itself is the penitential act. You don't have to do penance for fighting on the crusade. Itself is a religious penitential act. That is a significant conceptual change. And this comes about in a particular context. So the crusade is a just war. It's also a holy war.
The West, of course, wasn't the only society to develop the concept of a holy war. In the East, Islam had a well-established doctrine of jihad in the way of God, that is, fighting unbelievers to spread Islam.
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More on that after the break. It's difficult to read the primary sources of the Crusades without being confronted by the strong religious motivations and aims expressed, like the importance of defending fellow Christians elsewhere in the world, upholding the honour of sacred sites, and bringing glory to Jesus Christ over the advancing unbelief of Islam.
It's clear the instigator of the Crusades, Pope Urban II, had a spiritual mission in mind when he officially called for the First Crusade. Whatever his political ambitions, whether to exert a unifying force over a fractious Europe or to join together Western and Eastern Christendom, it was a theology that undergirded his thinking. It's also worth noting what was happening over in the East.
Muslim armies had spread throughout the Middle East, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, and it looked like they were heading for Europe. By the 1050s, Islamic forces had captured much of the old Byzantine Empire, which was a Christian empire, roughly corresponding to Turkey.
Within a few decades, they were knocking at the door of Constantinople, the center of the Eastern Christian Kingdom, which had been continuously ruled by Christian emperors for 700 years.
The Byzantine Christian emperor at the time was Alexius I, whose retreating kingdom lay on Islam's Western Front. Alexius sent envoys to the Pope begging for assistance. Surely Western Christianity wouldn't stand to see the last remaining outpost of Eastern Christianity swept away.
Islam from the beginning had a highly developed and successful practice of holy war or jihad. Muslim armies sought to spread the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and a bit like ancient Rome actually, they saw the establishment of Islamic rule and religion as a kind of peace for the whole world. In a very real sense, the Crusades were a belated defensive war.
Much of the Christian world - Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa - had been conquered by Islam in the centuries before. And now Islam was on Europe's doorstep. In this sense, and perhaps only this sense, the Crusades first developed as a hyper-religious version of just war. But there were also political dimensions.
Can we talk about the immediate trigger of the First Crusade, and in particular, what were Pope Urban's main motivations, so far as we can tell, in calling for the Crusade?
Well, as you say, as far as we can tell is a significant detail. We have very little of Urban's own thoughts to excavate. We have a few of his letters, some of which have really been tampered with over time. And so one doesn't quite know the proximity to his own thought.
However, there are other contextual pieces of evidence that we can perhaps hazard a guess.
Urban II was faced with a very tricky position in Western Europe. There was a rival pope supported by the German emperor who was claiming the legitimacy vis-à-vis Urban. Urban was part of a particular faction in the Catholic Church promoting papal power and supremacy. And the First Crusade is very much part of this.
One of the phrases that the papal reformers of the 11th century used, one of their propagandist phrases, was libertas ecclesiae, freedom of the church. In Urban's letters about the First Crusade, he uses that phrase to talk about not merely libertas ecclesiae, the Western church, but also helping the Eastern church to free itself
from conquest by the Seljuk Turks. So there is a political diplomatic context of helping Byzantium, which has the benefit to prove in the West that Urban II is the true Pope, is the arbiter of religious policy in the West, not his rival.
So there is, in a sense, a twin track element to that. After a four-month preaching tour throughout France promoting his plan, Pope Urban officially called for the First Crusade in a sermon delivered outside the cathedral in Clermont in central France on 27th of November 1095. The central theme was clear –
With full papal blessing, this war wasn't sinful, but redemptive. Any pilgrim, which is what they call themselves, who was willing to go to the east, fight the Muslims and reclaim Jerusalem for the Lord would receive pardon for sins and the promise of salvation.
Whoever, for devotion alone, not to gain honor or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God, he declared, can substitute this journey for all penance. Urban writes of how he imposed on the crusaders the obligation to undertake such a military enterprise for the remission of all their sins. Salvation is apparently found in fighting the infidels.
Some reports suggest the crowd that first heard Irvin's sermon at Clermont responded in unison, perhaps led by the Pope's assistants, God wills it. An army of Jesus Christ, which bears his holy cross, cannot be beaten. That's from the Ridley Scott Crusader epic, Kingdom of Heaven. As the Count of Tiberias suggests that it could be, there must be war. God wills it. God wills it.
And so can we say anything about the motivations of the Crusaders themselves? I mean, yes, if it's hard even to read Urban, it must be incredibly hard to read the mind of a soldier. But were they... Can we tell if they were motivated by going and helping our brother Greeks and win back Jerusalem? Were they taking revenge on Muslims or was it also...
they actually saw that this was a way of salvation. They actually felt, wow, I might be saved through this endeavour.
Well, as you say, it's very difficult to tell because even where you have personal documents of, say, crusaders raising money from the church, we have charters recording the reasons they're doing that, the reasons why they're going crusading. They talk in terms of remission of sins, salvation. But these charters are written by the clerics themselves, the beneficiaries of the grants.
I think the answer to your question is that all the things that you mentioned were part of the motives. Riches, the word devotees is used in a description of a campaign war cry.
at a battle in early 1097, spring of 1097, in Asia Minor saying that we stand fast and defend ourselves. We hope that God this day will give us devotees
The standard English translation of trans says that as booty, but it actually means riches. I think the key is that people go on crusade in search of riches and they are spiritual riches, they're spiritual rewards. They can also be material rewards, but two are not contradictory. If you do something that is good, God will reward you either in this life and or the next life.
The Crusade Decree promulgated by Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 talks about going for devotion alone, not for honour and glory. It doesn't say you can't get honour and glory, but your motive has to be correct. And that's the key thing. So, yes, I think it's very clear from all the sources that your promised penance is essentially salvation.
if you follow God's command. But within that, there is also adventure, there's tourism, there's escape from your particular condition. There is a desire to enhance reputation, which becomes very important. And a lot of crusaders don't have a choice. If you're a household knight,
of a lord who goes on crusade, you've got to follow him, otherwise you're unemployed. The entourage of the great leaders don't necessarily have any choice. There are some who go as young men on the make, who see this as an opportunity to enhance their social prestige.
And in the past, a lot of historiography has argued about, you know, are they motivated by greed? Are they motivated by piety? It seems to me that this is a false dichotomy, that if you ask anybody who joins an army, why do they join the army? They will probably give you some idealistic motive. If you then ask them, well, would you do it for no pay? You might get a rather different answer.
You know, that doesn't make them hypocrites. I think the point about the Crusades is that, as anything else, it's an obvious thing to say, but often historiography ignores this. It's an extremely human activity and therefore contradictory, confusing, confused and mixed in terms of motive. The soldiers' motives might be mixed.
But the religious nature of the First Crusade is clear. It's underlined by the key piece of theatre performed by all crusading soldiers who took the vow to win back Jerusalem. They each received a piece of cloth in the shape of
of a cross, and they sewed it into their garments as a sign that they were obeying the words of Christ himself. Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.
That's Mark 8, 34 to 35. Any modern reader of the passage is going to protest that there's no way Jesus meant this to be a justification of fighting. It was all about bearing persecution for his cause all the way to death. It plainly doesn't mean fighting.
Let's go and do holy war. But in France, in the 11th century, the key public interpretation of this passage, and it was a favorite passage, was that able-bodied Christian men should bear the cross of fighting against the enemies of Christ. The very word crusade comes from the Latin crux or cross, referring to this ceremony of taking up the sacred emblem.
It took the first crusaders three years to get to Jerusalem. Of the approximately 100,000 men and some women we think who set off, historians estimate that one in 20 crusaders didn't make it to Jerusalem. Some died in battles along the way, others simply gave up and went home. It took a month-long siege to actually capture Jerusalem.
But to the surprise of almost all involved, the first crusaders were victorious. But that's certainly not the end of the story. There were at least four other crusades that were not as successful. In fact, they were mostly a dismal failure.
This is the first of a special two-part episode on the Crusades. We've got a bunch of stuff over at underceptions.com related to this episode, including links to my new Bullies and Saints, which has chapters on this topic. But we've also got links to the amazing work of Christopher Tymon. Next episode, we'll be looking at why in the world people felt they needed a second, third, fourth and fifth Crusade. It's not pretty.
And we'll explain why the Crusades suddenly stopped. It was because we all became secular and humanitarian, right? No. See ya.
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