Deep Dive
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In 2017, I was in Jerusalem filming scenes about the Crusades for a documentary called For the Love of God. There's a link in the show notes. We were given permission to film at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, which sits on the massive plaza known as the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount. Sharing the plaza is the Dome of the Rock. That's the beautiful golden dome that appears in every Jerusalem postcard.
Almost 30 American football fields would fit into this giant 150,000 square meter open air court. On July 15th, 1099, something like 10,000 European crusaders burst through Jerusalem's protective walls. They marched through the narrow streets of the city and fought anyone who resisted.
They made their way up to the Haram al-Sharif, where they discovered thousands of residents cowering in fear, hoping against hope that their sacred precinct would provide them with protection, practical or divine.
But these fighting men, these pilgrims as they called themselves, had been marching for two years. They had journeyed 2,000 miles from France to Jerusalem. They had been besieging the city for a month. They were not about to let a victory go to waste. The crusaders whipped themselves up into such an unholy frenzy that they slaughtered men, women and children.
They threw some victims over the plaza's high walls to their deaths three stories below. They butchered the rest with swords, daggers, fire, arrows and spears. They even gave chase to those who'd climbed the roof of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and had them killed on the spot. The blood reportedly filled the great promenade between the mosque and the dome.
We have eyewitness accounts of the events. With gruesome glee and obvious exaggeration, Ramond of Aguierre, a leader of the First Crusade, wrote about this fateful day in the Ides of July. Here's Director Mark putting on his best Ramond.
But now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell from the towers. Others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses.
In the temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.
The next day, 16th of July, the pilgrims held a Thanksgiving service in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, just 500 metres away from the site of the massacre the day before. Again, Ramon of Aguiller tells us...
How they rejoiced and exulted and sang a new song to the Lord. This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation.
It's a confronting fact of history that a church originally designed to mark the place of the unjust and brutal crucifixion and resurrection of the humble man from Nazareth became the venue of jubilant songs and prayers to celebrate a ruthless military victory in Jesus' name.
I had to stand in the sacred plaza outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque and retell these horrible events to camera over and over until I got them right. And in my eyeline was our Muslim guide, and she was disturbed.
This brutal slaughter marked the end of the First Crusade. They had recaptured Jerusalem and parts of the Holy Land. They'd regained control and care of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, probably medieval Christianity's most sacred site. Most of the crusaders packed up and went home, bolstered in their belief that God had been with them and given them this great victory. Job done.
So, why the need for a second crusade? Or a third, fourth or fifth for that matter? I'm John Dixon and this is 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.
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This is the second in our two-part series on the Crusades, and we're speaking with the incomparable Christopher Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford. In the English-speaking world, there's probably no more widely recognised expert in the field. Now, if you missed part one, stop now and find it in your podcast app. We'll wait here for you, won't we, Mark? Indeed we will. MUSIC
The Holy Land in the dark days of the Third Crusade, when the flower of all Europe's knighthood, under the command of Richard of England, Richard the Lion-Hearted, swept over the plains of Acre, the Valley of Zora, on their mission to redeem the Holy Sepulchre, only to be challenged at the very gates of Jerusalem by the living God of the Saracens, Saladin the Magnificent, leader of a thousand desert tribes.
That's the 1954 epic King Richard and His Crusaders, starring Rex Harrison, Virginia Mayo and George Sanders. It's a terrible film, whatever director Mark says. It's actually listed in a book called The 50 Worst Films of All Time.
But you get the vibe. The Third Crusade is painted as an adventurous romp with figures like Richard the Lionheart on one side and Saladin the Magnificent on the other.
The Second to the Fifth Crusades take place on and off from a generation after the First Crusade, 1145 to be precise, for about 80 years until 1229. Despite the legends, especially around King Richard, the Crusades were mostly a failure. I want to ask you to do the impossible. Can you sum up the success or otherwise of the Second to Fifth Crusades?
Well, I think the obvious answer in terms of taking Jerusalem or achieving military success in the Near East, if you look at other Crusades, it's obviously less successful. The Second Crusade, en route, some Crusaders take Lisbon from the Moors in what's now Portugal. But in the Levant itself, their attempt to...
Take Damascus, fails. So in a sense, the geopolitical balance in the Near East is not influenced by the Second Crusade. The Third Crusade, 1188-92, takes place after Jerusalem has been lost to Saladin. Saladin was the most famous of Muslim warrior heroes.
He defeated crusader strongholds, recaptured Jerusalem, and then successfully defended it against the Third Crusade. When he took Jerusalem in 1187, Saladin planned to avenge the slaughter of Muslims from the First Crusade back in Jerusalem in 1099. But the crusaders surrendered and Saladin spared them.
And most, almost all, the Western Christian settelments in the Levant had been overrun. Not all, but the vast majority. The Third Crusade succeeds in reconstituting a more or less viable Western Christian enclave in Palestine.
and southern Syria. It creates a sense of two-state solution to the Palestinian geographical political position. The coastal ports are largely retaken, small amounts of the hinterland. Jerusalem is not.
there is a limited success. However, this enclave does actually survive for another century until 1291.
The Fourth Crusade, some of the Fourth Crusade goes to the Holy Land and there's a small campaign in Egypt that doesn't achieve much. The bulk of the Crusade goes to Constantinople, where it thought that the Greeks would then subsidize the campaign further on to the Holy Land. It doesn't work out like that.
It really doesn't work out like that. This Fourth Crusade is a debacle. Along the way to the Holy Land, officials decided to attack Constantinople itself. This was a Christian city. This was the city that had asked for help in the first place to get the whole crusader thing going. The crusaders took the city and plundered it.
This is just one of the many shocking departures from the principles of just war. Back in the First Crusade, one of the main preachers was a monk known as Peter the Hermit. He rallied thousands of Europeans to head to Jerusalem. But along the way to the Holy Land, he and his men engaged in wholesale slaughter of European Jewish communities along the Rhineland.
Partly for their supposed responsibility for the death of Christ centuries earlier, partly for their alleged complicity in Muslim attacks on Christian sites, and perhaps partly just for fighting practice. Anyway, back to the Fourth and Fifth Crusades.
So one of the consequences of the Fourth Crusade, 1202 to 1204, is that you have French lords taking possession of estates and regions in Greece. And these last four
a century or so in various forms. Constantinople is held by a Latin emperor from 1204 to 1261. The Fifth Crusade, 1217 to 1221, is a massive affair
involving regular detachments going from Western Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean, where they attack the Nile Delta and take the port of Damietta.
which they hold for a couple of years. Egypt is seen as the key to the Levant, which it is, in terms of population, in terms of the economy, in terms of commerce, et cetera, et cetera. Without Egypt, you can't really hold southern Palestine. That was the theory. So you have, essentially, for four years, you have a Western European army in the Nile Delta,
But in the end, military defeat means that they have to evacuate and therefore it achieves more or less nothing. So you have these repeated failures. How the Western authorities deal with this is, of course, they say, well, it's all because of sin and failure is because we aren't worthy enough.
And this, in a sense, allows them to have an explanation which doesn't actually suggest that the whole enterprise is worthless. Whether or not the Crusades were worthless, there were critics of the enterprise at the time. Obviously, there were some political critics.
who said, why are these people leaving home, leaving their wives, children, estates exposed? There's a tradition of saying that kings shouldn't go for the same reason. There's also, within the Christian church, there's also a pacifist tradition that continues. It is the wrong way to do it. How can you justify it?
this sort of violence. And certainly in the 13th century, you have a number of intellectuals, particularly amongst the friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who say that actually you've got this the wrong way around, that by attacking Islam in this way, or attacking Islam in this particular region, because the Crusades are not necessarily against all Islam, they're against recapturing the Holy Land,
They say, well, this is the wrong way to do it because all you're doing is you're antagonizing. What you do is to convert.
Here is where I get to introduce you to Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order and the namesake of the current Pope Francis. Francis was one of the most charismatic and influential clerics of the Middle Ages. He journeyed to Egypt in 1219, warned the crusaders they were destined to fail, and insisted that God wanted to convert the Muslims through his simple persuasion.
He somehow convinced the Crusader authorities to let him venture into enemy territory to preach the gospel of Christ's death and resurrection to the Sultan al-Kamil himself. He was mocked by the Christian Crusaders, and Francis responded by predicting that the Crusaders would fail in their campaign to take the Islamic stronghold of Faraskur, 20 miles down the Nile River from the Mediterranean Sea.
Whether a lucky guess or something else, he was proved right in August 1219. As a result of this successful guess or prophecy or whatever it was, Francis was given permission to cross over into enemy territory and plead with the Islamic forces to become Christians and make peace. The crusader leadership made clear, though, that they were washing their hands of him.
Over several days, Francis of Assisi attempted to convert the Muslim army. Sultan al-Kamil received Francis cordially at first. He was given a large audience and Francis made his case through translators on behalf of the Christian faith. The sultan's religious advisors gave a response and Francis was invited to embrace Islam.
When it became clear that Francis had no intention of becoming a Muslim, and indeed that he was trying to convert them, the Sultan's advisors recommended that Francis, along with the poor monk colleague that he'd brought with him, be executed for preaching against Islam. After being insulted and beaten and receiving threats of torture and death, Francis was dismissed by the Sultan, lucky to escape with his life.
Like the Crusades themselves, Francis' attempt at evangelisation of the leading Muslim warrior in the world was a failure. 68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.
Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.
"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." Luke 6. I regard these words as the most sublime ethical teaching ever given.
Perhaps this is just confirmation bias on my part, but for several years now I've periodically posted a challenge on social media inviting skeptical friends to find a block of teaching from anywhere in the pre-modern world that matches Christ's emphasis on love and mercy towards everyone, including enemies. The challenge hasn't yet been met, but perhaps that's more of my bias.
I'm not suggesting Jesus was the only moral teacher from antiquity to put love at the center of ethics. It certainly wasn't emphasized by the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the Romans. But love did feature in Jewish ethics. The Jewish scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, enjoin things like love your neighbor as yourself, Leviticus 19.18.
In context, this instruction is just one of 613 commandments of the Old Testament. But one influential teacher from just before Jesus brought this love command to the fore.
Rabbi Hillel, 1st century BC, characterised his Judaism as "loving peace and pursuing peace, loving people and drawing them near to the Torah" . A humorous story, admittedly written several centuries after Hillel's death, is told about a certain heathen, a Greek or Roman, who wanted to become a Jewish proselyte or convert.
He first went to another famous rabbi of the period called Shammai, but he didn't have much luck. So he went to Hillel and got a delightful answer. Here's the text. On another occasion, it happened that a certain heathen came before Shammai and said to him, make me a proselyte on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot. Shammai drove him out with the builder's cubit, a big stick, which he had in his hand. When he went before Hillel,
Hillel's, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor," is similar to Jesus' teaching, "Do unto others as you would have them do to you."
Jesus' saying seems like an intensification of Hillel's saying. We don't just avoid doing what is hateful to others. According to Jesus, we do the good to others that we ourselves would like done for us. The revered Jewish scholar, Professor David Flusser of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, memorably wrote about how Jesus intensified Jewish traditions.
Those who listened to Jesus' preaching of love, Flusser writes, might well have been moved by it. Many in those days would have agreed with him.
Nonetheless, in the clear purity of his love, they must have detected something very special. Jesus did not accept all that was thought and taught in the Judaism of his time. Although not really a Pharisee himself, he was closest to the Pharisees of the school of Hillel, who preached love. But he pointed the way further to unconditional love, even of one's enemies and of sin.
This, Flusser concludes, was no sentimental teaching. Flusser goes on to make the crucial point that Jesus not only intensified an already existing Jewish emphasis on love, but that he presented this intensification as an extension of his own life and mission. Flusser writes,
It was not simply his total way of life that urged Jesus to express loving devotion to sinners. This inclination was deeply linked with the purpose of his message. From the beginning until his death on the cross, the preaching of Jesus was in turn linked to his own way of life. Flusser isn't doing theology. He was Jewish, not Christian. He's just making an historical observation.
Love of enemies was central to Christ's teaching, not as an arbitrary moral innovation, but as a reflection of the entire course of his life. The narrative of all four New Testament gospels inches inexorably towards Jesus' self-sacrifice. The arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus get roughly the same space in the gospels as the Sermon on the Mount, about 2,000 words.
This is where the love of enemies finds its clearest expression. Jesus willingly gave his life on a cross, not as a martyr for a cause, but as a savior taking the place of sinners. You can press play now. One common view is that the Crusades eventually come to an end
Because Europe became more secular and enlightened and therefore more peace loving. Once we sidelined religion a little, Europe became more peaceful and the Crusades disappeared. Is that what accounts for the demise of crusading in your view?
Well, I think it's quite hard to see 16th, 17th, 18th centuries as time of European peace. I think that's enlightenment, arguably, you know,
the French Revolutionary Wars, the Permanent Wars, you know. I think that's a myth, let alone the secular 20th century, which is a century of mass carnage. So I think one has to discount that view. But also, of course, there's another great change, the Reformation, the reforms of the 16th century,
One, Luther's great attack on the Roman Catholic Church is due to indulgences.
is to do with the Roman Catholic penitential system, at the heart of which is the Crusade. By the end of the Middle Ages, you can take the cross, you can redeem it for cash, you can buy a Crusade indulgence. Some of the earliest printing are indulgence forms that Gutenberg produced in Mainz in the 1450s. But this was big business for the church. The attack on the Roman Catholic penitential system
inevitably attacks indulgences, which are crucial to the religious appeal and the spiritual appeal of the Crusades. The Crusades are specifically targeted by Protestant apologists.
Holy war isn't. They think, okay, you can fight the Turks and God will be on your side. But the actual, the ideological underpinning of the Roman Catholic penitential system is critiqued by Protestants, but also by Catholic reformers.
Crusades still continue. The cross, you take the cross. Some individuals are taking the cross right into the early 18th century. But as a weapon of geopolitics, it dies out partly because it's poor business and partly because it's no longer business.
The Crusades didn't come to an end because the world got more secular and therefore more peaceful. Most certainly not. The appetite for crusading, for waging war as a way of purchasing forgiveness from God, diminished because Christians themselves began to speak out against it. There was a reform within the church from the newly formed Protestants, but also from some within Catholicism.
As at other moments in history where the church has committed or has been complicit in atrocities, other Christians rise up, point to the Gospels and condemn people for their way of life. Throughout history, there's been this self-reforming spirit within Christianity. It, of course, goes back to Jesus' own warnings about religious hypocrisy and calling for self-assessment.
And this is a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient.
That was President George W. Bush giving an answer to a journalist on the South Lawn of the White House on September 16, 2001. That's just five days after the horrible coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States organized by al-Qaeda. He was heavily criticized for using the term crusade.
A term which, as the Wall Street Journal put it, is shorthand for something else, a cultural and economic Western invasion that Muslims fear could subjugate them and desecrate Islam. What can be said about how the Islamic world told the story of the Crusades, both back in the time when the Crusaders tried and failed and in the modern world?
Well, at the time, the contemporary Muslim writers saw, once they had assimilated this, was rather different from their relation, say, with the Byzantines. Anger, resentment, fear, hostility.
Ideas about jihad, which were more or less dormant, were revived in the Near East as a way of consolidating political opposition and uniting. Leaders used the jihad against the Crusaders as a way of asserting political power. Saladin, a great Parvenu and usurper, legitimized himself by using jihad rhetoric
So you then of course have a sort of triumphalism that we threw them out. We got back the Haram al-Sharif, we got back Jerusalem, we then 100 years later finally expelled them from the Dar al-Islam. And that's a story of success and triumph.
The attitude of course then changes where from the 18th century onwards, particularly in the 19th century, Westerners, after Napoleon and all that, start re-penetrating the Eastern Mediterranean.
600 years after the last crusaders were expelled from Palestine in the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople, faced a revolt from their Balkans territories. They also faced strong pressure from Britain and France to grant independence to Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.
The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic-run superpower, one of the mightiest and longest-lasting dynasties in history, ruling large swaths of the Middle East, Eastern Europe and North Africa for more than 600 years. But in the 19th century, its power was beginning to wane.
The response from the Ottoman ruler, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, was to declare that Europe had begun a new crusade against Muslims. It sounds very similar to what President Erdogan has recently done.
But at the time it was reported right across the Arab press. A few years later, the first Muslim history of the Crusades was written in 1899. The author, Sayyid Ali al-Hariri, cited the Sultan in his introduction. Here it is: "Our most glorious Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, has rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a crusade against us in the form of a political campaign."
This was something completely new at the time, but the idea really caught on. Western bullying of the Islamic world, which has been far more effective in modern times than it ever was in crusader times, was now called crusading. Here's the irony. The fact that modern Western bullying of Islamic lands has been pretty successful has created an impression in the modern mind
that the actual Crusades, centuries ago, were also some kind of successful campaign to suppress Muslim power. But as we've heard, they were nothing of the sort. Whatever the Crusades were, whether just wars, attempted just wars, or just stupid wars of bigotry, they were not successful. And Muslims at the time knew it.
And so suddenly the attitude to the Crusades becomes more one of reminding people of the insult, the intrusion, but with a tinged sense of victimhood. Instead of triumphalism, you have a sense of victimhood.
And if you look at these textbooks, school textbooks, all slightly different in Lebanon or Egypt or Syria or Iraq, you have this discourse of insult and victimhood, despite, of course, also the Elmer Daltrumpfism. And the conundrum is, how come?
we won the Crusades, how come these bastards are back, as it were? And it's very salutary to look at the Crusades from modern Egyptian or Syrian academic perspectives and see, A, how peripheral
The vast majority of Islam is not included in the Crusades. This is a peripheral activity that ultimately fails. The great triumph of the Ottoman Empire totally overshadows it. But nonetheless, there is a modern view
that can't simply be we won, but is informed by the sense somehow, since the 18th century, they've got back at us in a subtler, but more sinister way. And so it's woven into a modern discourse of exploitation.
Victimhood and resentment. The resentment is, in a sense, constant from throughout, which is not entirely illegitimate, it seems to me. Most major wars in history leave an indelible mark on the winners and the losers. Resources change hands, ideologies are promoted or quashed, and new borders are drawn up.
This can't really be said of the Eastern Crusades. With the exception of the island of Cyprus, which fell to Richard I in 1191 and has been Western and Christian pretty much ever since, the Western crusading in the Holy Land has left few traces.
There are some wonderful archaeological sites that you can still visit, the Crusader Fortress at Caesarea in Israel, for example. And there is a bitter historical memory about the Al-Aqsa Mosque slaughter of 15 July 1099. But there's not much else. Not much else, that is, of the historical significance of the Crusades.
How the Crusades are invoked in modern propaganda for various causes, both East and West, is another matter altogether. What lasting impact then, if any, did these Eastern Crusades have on the world, on Europe, on the Middle East?
I think more generally, what we were talking about right at the beginning, the Crusades had left historical memories, historical myths that still exert power.
that the way in which jihadist groups can talk about the Crusaders as current Westerners, the way that they ironically and historically describe the state of Israel as in a sense akin to Crusaders, which is obviously bizarre.
So there is a present legacy of the Crusades, which is why I feel that it's probably important for discussions of the Crusades to be based on historical evidence and interpretation rather than the crude stereotypes of populist ideas.
because lives matter. People are, in a sense, at risk by misunderstanding what the Crusades were. This propaganda can be seen in many quarters.
In Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad against the United States, he referred to Americans as crusaders. Then there's the manifesto of the lone gunman who murdered 51 people worshipping at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which actually quoted Pope Urban II, the instigator of the first crusade.
And the guy carried guns daubed with references to crusader battles. And producer Kayleigh tells me that the masthead of a prominent white supremacist website, she's seen the pictures, that's how committed she is to research for this program, contains a cartoon image of a crusader knight with the phrase, Deus Vult, God wills it, the very thing that kicked off the first crusade.
The stereotypes, either the bad crusaders and the good Muslims or the bad Muslims and the good crusaders are completely misleading and highly damaging if taken seriously. And of course can be whipped up by populists on all sides, whether you have jihadists on one side or right-wing evangelicals in the US on the other.
The fact is the Crusades have left a mark that can't be washed away. The most long-lasting impact of the Crusades has little to do with borders, Middle Eastern politics or the relative size of the world's two largest religions.
The real legacy of the Crusades is the way they stand as a symbol in the modern world of the violent dark ages of the church and the church's all-too-human capacity for dogma, hatred and violence toward enemies. I don't actually think the Crusades were all bad. I think, at least initially, they were in large part about defending other Christians and halting the march of Islam.
but no one can deny the crusades often morphed into debased campaigns of hatred brutality and greed militarily they were unsuccessful spiritually they were an abject failure
Hey, I hope you don't mind if I raise something I'm a little embarrassed about. This pod is part of a larger Undeceptions project. We research, write and speak to let the truth about Christianity out. And I'd love your help to make this thrive. I'm able to do this full time currently because of a small group of benefactors who keep Undeceptions afloat. You know who you are and I'm really thankful.
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