A while back a thread appeared on Reddit concerning Real
Crusades History. The title of the thread is “What’s the Consensus on Real
Crusades History?” and in this thread, a user called “Water_nut” asked some
users on Reddit for their opinion on my videos about the Crusades. One user, thejukeboxhero,
answered the question, and his answer is incorrect and misrepresents my
positions on the Crusades. This article will respond to and debunk the claims
of thejukeboxhero concerning Real Crusades History.
Thejukeboxhero wrote some commentary on my video “How the Crusades
Saved Europe”. This is what he wrote:
“His understanding of Islam as a monolithic hive mind bent
on devouring Christian Europe is ludicrous and reflects his own ignorance of
the diversity and complexity of one thousand years of Islamic civilization.”
Thejukeboxhero is setting up a strawman here and
misrepresenting my position. Of course I understand that Islam was incredibly
diverse and encompassed a wide variety of dynasties and peoples. I have
discussed many of these divisions in my videos. For example, I have discussed
the conflict between the Umayyads and the Abasids, the struggles between the
Zengids and Ayubids, and the rivalries between the Seljuks and the Danishmends,
just to name a few. However, this individual didn’t bother to look at any more
than a single of my videos before he dismissed my entire channel, which shows
that he in fact is guilty of making broad, ignorant judgments that do not
reflect reality.
One thing that thejukeboxhero never does at any point within his commentary is quote me directly. He never addresses a single point I actually make, rather, he sets up straw men of what he believes to be my position, and thereby addresses nothing. Another thing he never does is quote any historical sources. However, I am going to do both those in this post – I am going to deconstruct his actual commentary, and I am going to demolish his inaccurate perception of history with scholarly material.
Thejukeboxhero next says:
“There is no evidence that if unchecked, Islam (whatever
that means, the Ottomans aren't the Almoravids, or the Safavids, or the
Fatimids) would have conquered all of Europe.”
Notice how thejukeboxhero keeps referring to the diversity
of groups and dynasties within Islam as if that means Islam as a whole has no
overarching identity. Earlier he said, incorrectly, that I viewed Islam as a
“monolithic hive mind bent on devouring Christian Europe” and he also says
“Islam (whatever that means)”. In other words, he is proposing that the term
Islam itself isn’t even useful in describing any sort of group identity. This
is absolutely absurd. Of course there were dynastic and sectarian divisions
within the larger Islamic civilization, but that doesn’t detract from the fact
that when we say “Islamic civilization”, we are referring to something unified
enough to be given a name. Both medieval Muslims and medieval Christians
understood this to be the case, and despite divisions within their own groups,
looked at the world this way.
Let’s take an example:
Ibn al-Athir was a Mesopotamian Muslim chronicler who wrote
during the late twelfth century and early thirteenth century. He wrote an
enormous book entitled, The Perfect History, which covers the whole of the
Islamic world. His family was partial to the Zengid dynasty, but nevertheless
he did not view his identity as ending with the Zengids. He considered himself
part of an overarching Muslim world that stretched across the Mediterranean.
Look at how Ibn al-Athir writes about Muslim societies far
away from his own in Spain and Sicily:
‘The power of the Franks first became apparent when in the year 478 (1085-86) they invaded the territories of Islam and took Toledo and parts of Andalusia… Then in 484/1091 they attacked and conquered the island of Sicily and turned their attention to the African coast. Certain of their conquests there were won back again but they had other successes, as you will see.’ Ibn al-Athir in Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 3.
This passage alone reveals the inaccuracy of thejukeboxhero’s
comments. Here Ibn al-Athir, a Mesopotamian Muslim chronicler associated with
the Zengid dynasty, is referring to the Latin Christian Kingdom of Leon’s
conquest of Toledo, formerly held by the Iberian Umayyad Arabs. He also writes
about the Norman conquest of Sicily from the Kalbid Arabs. But he doesn’t
describe any of it that way. Instead, he lumps the Iberian Christians and the
Normans into one group – the Franks, which, incidentally, was the term used by
Arab authors at this time to refer to all Western Christians. He also doesn’t
differentiate between the various Muslim dynasties, but simply says “the
territories of Islam”.
Ibn al-Athir’s language is far from uncommon. Muslim authors
discuss the wider conflict between Christian and Islamic forces like this
throughout the Middle Ages. Now this doesn’t mean that individual dynastic and
sectarian identities weren’t important, they most certainly were on both sides
for Muslims and Christians. But Muslims and Christians also tended to view
themselves as part of larger identities as well, and they understood there to
be a more overarching conflict at work of roughly Christendom vs. Islam. To
deny this aspect of medieval consciousness is to deny history.
Let’s take a look at another example, this time from a
medieval Christian author. This is from the Latin Chronicle of the Kings of
Castile, an important primary source for medieval Iberia. However, the author
also concerns himself with the wider affairs of Christendom, and references the
conflicts going on between Christians and Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean
in a manner similar to what we see in Ibn al-Athir. In discussing the Third
Crusade, the chronicler says:
“At the same time, Philip, King of the French, and Richard,
King of the English, after establishing mutual peace between themselves,
crossed over the sea with dukes and counts and many other barons and knights,
and landed at Acre, which the Saracens still held. The kings forcefully
besieged it; vigorously attacking it, they took it by force. Now King Richard,
before he came there, seized the island of Cyprus and subjugated it to himself.
“King Philip, however, suffering from a grave illness, so
much so that his life was despaired of, crossed the sea again and returned to
his kingdom. But King Richard, brave and high spirited, remained and stayed
there for a long time in that region, defending what the Christians held and
newly acquiring other places.” –Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile, p. 64.
Once again, notice how this author, who comes from the Kingdom
of Castile in modern day Spain, is not describing Richard as an Angevin or Philip
as a Capetian, but as leading the forces of “the Christians”. He also doesn’t
say that they were fighting the Ayubids and their coalition of Turkish and
Kurdish forces, but “the Saracens”, which is a very general medieval term used
by Christians to describe followers of the religion of Mohammed. He says that
Richard and Philip “landed at Acre, which the Saracens still held,” and he says
that “King Richard, brave and high spirited, remained and stayed there fore a
long time in that region, defending what the Christians held.” Thejukeboxhero appears
not to grasp the complexities and multi-dimensional qualities of medieval
civilizations. Of course this author from Castile had regional perspectives and
dynastic perspectives, but he also had a wider, metapolitical worldview of
himself and his identity, which included all of Christendom, and which cast
Mohammedan regions and kingdoms as “the Saracens”, a generalized, cultural and
religious identity that existed in opposition to “the Christians”.
Let’s continue to explore this issue, this time with a
selection from a primary source dealing with the life of the famous Mohammedan ruler
Saladin. This is from Baha ad-Din, one of Saladin’s own close associates who
wrote an account of this iconic ruler’s life. Here Baha ad-Din quotes his
master Saladin discussing his conquest of the Crusader states:
“I think when God grants me victory over the rest of
Palestine I shall divide my territories, make a will stating my wishes, then
set sail on this sea for their far-off lands and pursue the Franks there, so as
to free the earth from anyone who does not believe in Allah.” –Baha ad-Din in
Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 101.
Notice that Saladin doesn’t say, “When I have finished
conquering the Latin states in Palestine, I’ll sail to the territories of the
Capetians and Angevins and expand the holdings of the Ayubid dynasty there.”
No, indeed, Saladin is lumping the Crusader states in with the various dynastic
kingdoms and territories of all of Christian Europe. He’s simply referring to
Christian Europe as “the lands of the Franks”, “Franks” being a term used by
Mohammedans during this period as a general description for all Western European
Christians regardless of their dynastic or regional associations. And on top of
that, Saladin is casting his designs on “the lands of the Franks” in terms of
this larger conflict between Christendom and Mohammedanism, saying he wants to
“free the earth from anyone who does not believe in Allah”. You see, like all
medieval Mohammedans, Baha ad-Din and Saladin had complex worldviews as well.
Saladin himself was a Sunni, who belonged to the Aybud dynasty. He spent most
of his career fighting other Sunnis, struggling against the Zengids, and he
also fought the Shia Fatimids. So Saladin certainly had concerns for his own
personal sub-group within Sunni Islam, and wanted to dominate other local
Mohammedan dynasties, but he also participated in this more expansive idea of
the Mohammedan world versus the Christian world. His wars against the
Crusaders, for example, served multiple purposes, helping establish himself as
a champion of Mohammedanism who could claim to be justified in dominating other
Sunni groups, but also fulfilling his own personal religious zeal and
satisfying his sense of outrage at the presence of Christian kingdoms on Syrian
and Palestinian soil. Again, thejukeboxhero just isn’t grasping this complexity.
I have provided just a few primary source examples here, but
I could quote passages like this endlessly. The Ottomans, for example, although
they rose to prominence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, saw
themselves as continuing the legacy of the early Mohammedan conquerors, the
Umayyads, seeing themselves as the heirs to the original caliphs in spreading
the religion of Mohammad, and this despite the fact that the Ottomans were
Turks and the original Mohammedan conquerors were Arabs. Again, multiple levels
of identity existed here. As it is, the examples I’ve provided do the job of
debunking the comments of thejukeboxhero on this matter.
Let’s continue to reveal the problems with his comments:
“The notion that crusading proved to be the crucial event
that united Europe is silly as well. It is certainly symptomatic of the more
universal identity pushed by the reforming popes of the eleventh century, and
while the international scale of the conflict is certainly novel, to suggest
that crusade (sic) saved Europe assumes that there was actually a concerted
effort by the Islamic world to destroy it.”
Nonsense. Crusading extended far beyond the ambitions of the
reform popes of the late eleventh century, and the crusades were not merely
“international”. The Crusades represented an enormous movement in European
Christendom, which would echo down the centuries. I’ve discussed this in many
videos. To start with, the First Crusade created a universal shared experience
by the bulk of European Christian societies, with each region having heroes
they remembered from that conflict, and whose exploits in this Crusade would be
commemorated for generations. After the First Crusade, for centuries to come,
Europe’s kingdoms, constantly embroiled in regional and dynastic conflicts with
one another, would nevertheless draw on this Crusading consciousness to unite
in times of struggle against a threat which they believed transcended petty
rivalries among Christian princes, and threatened Christendom itself: the
civilization of Mohammed, or as the medievals referred to it, “The Saracens” or
“The Moors” or “The Turks”. Wars as far removed from one another as the
campaign at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 both
drew on this shared legacy. Europeans viewed their own wars with each other
very differently than they did the wars called Crusades – wars sanctioned by
the popes as holy and for which the participants earned spiritual rewards. For
example, when Fernando III of Castile and Leon achieved a stunning victory over
the Moors of the Iberian peninsula, Louis IX, the King of France, sent him a
thorn from the relic of Christ’s crown of thorns as a symbol of the sacredness
of Fernando’s victory over the ancient enemy of Christendom. Louis would have
never done that had Fernando won a war against the King of Portugal or the King
of Aragon or one of his other Christian rivals. What I am talking about here is
how European Christians themselves perceived of these things.
I would like to pay particular attention to this comment
from thejukeboxhero:
“to suggest that crusade saved Europe assumes that there was
actually a concerted effort by the Islamic world to destroy it.”
This is a strikingly inaccurate comment. How could one
honestly look at the history of Christendom’s
interaction with Mohammedan
civilization and conclude that there was no long-running ambition in the Muslim
world to take control of as much of Christian Europe as possible? Islam emerged
in the 7th century, and within a few decades had taken control of
some two-thirds of the Christian world: the bulk of Christian Asia and Africa. Two
well-run military campaigns in the early 8th century, one led by
Charles Martel in modern day France, and one led by Emperor Leo III at
Constantinople, put an end to that expansion at that time. Now this is usually
the point at which more left-leaning commentators might like to insist that a
sort of equilibrium settled in between Christendom and Islam, without much
effort from the Muslims to conquer any more Christian territory. But all
throughout the ninth and tenth centuries the Byzantines were engaged in a desperate
struggle with the Arabs for control of Asia Minor and Syria, as is clearly
displayed in sources like the chronicle of John Skylitzes. During this period
the Muslims also penetrated into Sicily and southern Italy, which they would
rule for two centuries. They even tried to conquer Rome. The rise of the Seljuk
Turks in the eleventh century would see renewed expansion by Islam into
Byzantine territory, and the Almohad and Almoravid dynasties in North Africa
would renew the expansive energy of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. Finally the
rise of the Ottoman Turks in the late Middle Ages would see the Muslims win
some of their most extensive conquests yet, with enormous portions of Eastern
Europe falling under their rule, and Italy itself being threatened with
conquest on numerous occasions. It wasn’t really until the late seventeenth
century, during the Great Turkish War, that Ottoman designs on Western Europe would
be put to an end, and by then the long-running conflict between Christendom and
Islam spanned a thousand years.
Now through all this long history of many wars, there were
quite a few Muslim dynasties, kingdoms, ethnic groups, etc. This was by no
means some single, monolithic Mohammedan super-state responsible for a
thousands years of imperialism. But all of these various Muslim powers shared a
conception of themselves as custodians of this thing called Islam, which was at
the heart of their sense of identity. They all agreed that Islam was the truth,
and that the world should submit to it. Whether you were an Umayyad or an
Almoravid or a Seljuk or an Ottoman, your popular culture embraced the notion
that the Christian kingdoms of Europe should rightly be ruled by Muslim
princes, and that Islam should one day reign supreme where the cross is now
dominant. What sort of blindness would make a student of history unable to
grasp this basic historical fact?
Throughout the centuries of warfare between Muslims and Christians, one thing alone prevented Mohammedans from expanding further: Christian military victories. Regardless of how we might think of the Crusades, for Europeans during this period, Crusading was the way they conceived of their resistance to Muslim expansion. The popes called Crusades in every region where there was a frontier with Islam, in Spain, Italy, Eastern Europe, Syria and Palestine. Christians from various regions would unite on these occasions, often after only recently and temporarily putting aside their own rivalries with each other, to recapture some city or prevent the advance of some Muslim army. It was broad, it transcended regions, and it was a tradition that went on for centuries. So when I stated in my video that the Crusades were a unifying force that facilitated the survival of European Christendom, I was entirely correct.
Now, let’s get back to thejukeboxhero’s comments:
“Again, check out my post on the justifications of crusade
in the years following the conquest of Jerusalem. The author of the video seems
to take such rhetoric for granted and is generally uncritical of the (two)
primary sources he cites.”
No, wrong. I’m not using those two primary sources
uncritically. I’m not “taking the rhetoric” of these sources for granted at
all, I’m merely providing them as an example of a commonplace way of viewing
the world among medieval Europeans during the age of the Crusades. My video
“How the Crusades Saved Europe” is all about how medieval Europeans conceived
of themselves and conceived of the Crusades. The two primary sources to which
thejukeboxhero is referring are Fulcher of Chartres and Guibert of Nogent.
There is absolutely no doubt that these two sources represent an attitude that
was mainstream and widespread among Europeans in the aftermath of the First
Crusade and for centuries to come as Europeans continued to engage in warfare
with Mohammedan powers. So without question, I used those two primary sources
effectively.
“The video is concerned with proving that the Crusades were,
in the long run, a 'good thing'. From an academic and educational point of
view, this line of inquiry is problematic at best, intellectually dishonest at
worst.”
No, again, wrong. Where in my video “How the Crusades Saved
Europe” do I state that the Crusades were, in the long run, a “good thing”? I
never said that. Thejukeboxhero made that up himself. In that video, I set out
to explain one thing: how the Crusades as a new paradigm provided Europeans
with a way of conceiving of themselves engaged in a sacred, united effort to
defend their societies against Islam. That’s all I set out to say in that
video, and that’s what that video demonstrates. At the end of the video I do
state that if you like diversity you should probably like the Crusades, because
the Crusades ensured that Christendom and Islam existed in a territory where
only Islam might have existed as a dominant power otherwise, but that was a bit
of a tongue in cheek remark poking fun at the concept of “diversity”, which is
often championed by people who get very indignant about the Crusades.
“You're better off finding a solid introductory text to the
period, such as The Crusades: A Short History by Jonathan Riley-Smith.”
I certainly agree with thejukexboxhero that this book by Jonathan Riley-Smith is excellent, as I have used it and many other books by Riley-Smith in my videos as sources. Unlike thejukeboxhero, I make liberal use of primary sources and Crusades scholarship from top-level Crusades historians in all of my videos. I am constantly encouraging viewers to explore the many fantastic works that deal with the Crusades, from authors such as Malcom Barber, Jonathan Philips, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Thomas Madden, Christopher Tyerman, Helen Nicholson, Joseph O’Callaghan, Roger Collins, Edward Peters, Susan Edgington, and on and on and on. If you’ve consistently watched my videos over the years, you have been exposed to the works of a tremendous amount of quality historians. My videos are meant only as an introduction to the Crusades, with my goal being to inspire viewers to get their hands on some books and start exploring this era for themselves.
I certainly agree with thejukexboxhero that this book by Jonathan Riley-Smith is excellent, as I have used it and many other books by Riley-Smith in my videos as sources. Unlike thejukeboxhero, I make liberal use of primary sources and Crusades scholarship from top-level Crusades historians in all of my videos. I am constantly encouraging viewers to explore the many fantastic works that deal with the Crusades, from authors such as Malcom Barber, Jonathan Philips, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Thomas Madden, Christopher Tyerman, Helen Nicholson, Joseph O’Callaghan, Roger Collins, Edward Peters, Susan Edgington, and on and on and on. If you’ve consistently watched my videos over the years, you have been exposed to the works of a tremendous amount of quality historians. My videos are meant only as an introduction to the Crusades, with my goal being to inspire viewers to get their hands on some books and start exploring this era for themselves.
So there you have it, the comments of Thejukeboxhero on
reddit thoroughly debunked.
Sources:
-Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans. Francesco Gabrieli,
(Barnes and Noble, 1993)
-The Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile, trans. Joseph
O’Callaghan, (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002)
-Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to
Jerusalem, 1095-1127, trans. Frances Rita Ryan, (University of Tennessee Press,
1969)
-Baha ad-Din, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin,
trans. D.S. Richards, (Ashgate, 2002)
-Ibn al-Athir, The Chronicle for the Crusading Period, Part
1, trans. D.S. Richards, (Ashgate, 2010)
-The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and
Other Source Materials, ed. Edward Peters, (University of Pennsylvania Press,
1998)
