Two weeks ago I laid out several of the popular misconceptions about the crusades and made a rebuttal. Today I want to look more closely at the persistent myth that the crusaders were "less civilized" than their Muslim opponents.
The crusaders are primarily portrayed as
"barbarians" today because they are seen as brutal aggressors
against "peace-loving, tolerant, and highly sophisticated" Arab
societies in the Middle East. This ignores the fact that
the Arabs had taken the Holy Land by the sword, not with sweet
words, persuasion, or peaceful tolerance. And that expansion continued far
beyond the Holy Land!
Muslim armies attacked Constantinople 678. In 698 the
Christian city of Carthage fell to the sword Islam. In 713 Corsica was
conquered. By 720 the Muslim invasion of Spain was nearly complete. In 732
an invading Muslim army had almost reached the Loire before it was crushed by
the Franks under Charles Martel and pushed back behind the Pyrenees. In 827
Muslim armies started the conquest of Sicily, and ten years later landed in
Italy. In 846 Rome was attacked and St. Peter's sacked by Muslim armies. in 934
Genoa was sacked. In 997 the Muslims sacked
Santiago de Compostella, the most important pilgrimage church in the West. In
1009 the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by the Byzantines in the reign of
Constantine the Great (306 – 337), was utterly destroyed.
Meanwhile, however, the Muslims had divided into
Shiites and Sunnis and engaged in bloody wars in which they murdered, raped,
pillaged and burned rival Muslim cities. Zengi, atabeg of Mosul, for example,
according to a Muslim source ordered the “pillaging, slaying, capturing, ravishing
and looting” of Edessa, but was feared in Damascus because of “his
exceptionally cruel and treacherous behavior” – to his co-religionists.
The great “chivalrous” Saladin spent more of his career fighting his fellow Sunni Muslims
than he did fighting the Christians.
Attempts to depict the crusaders as illiterate brutes
lacking in cultural accomplishments also miss the mark. The “unwashed masses”
might not have been very cultivated—but nor were the peasants and common
soldiers of the Byzantine Empire or the Turks. The upper classes in 11th century
Europe, on the other hand, had already started to develop arts and architecture
to a high degree of sophistication as manuscripts, artifacts and the
architectural record shows. Literacy may have been confined to an elite and
fostered mostly by the clergy, but the leaders of the crusade themselves were
highly educated. (And, by the way, at this time classical Greek scholars had
been re-discovered and were being studied in the West.) Furthermore, literacy
was not exactly universal in the Byzantine and Muslim worlds either. While it
is fair to say that in certain fields (mathematics and astronomy) the Muslim
world was more advanced than Western Europe, in other fields (shipbuilding,
transportation and agricultural technology), the West was more developed. As
earlier entries have stressed, medicine in the West was on about par with the
East, not hopelessly more backward as so often portrayed.
However, two features of Western European feudal society set it apart from the East into which the crusaders came so suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of the 11th century.
First was the decentralized system of government based on complex, feudal relationships. Both the Byzantine and the Muslim world in this period were intensely hierarchical societies in which the Emperor (in the one) and the Caliph (in the other) theoretically held supreme and absolute control over his subjects. To be sure, reality looked slightly different. By the end of the tenth century the Syrian Caliphs were virtual prisoners of the Abbasid dynasty, and changed masters when the Seljuk Turks captured Baghdad in 1055. Thereafter they were puppets of the Selkjuk sultans, while the Fatimid Caliphs were at the mercy of their viziers.
But whether the theoretically absolute rulers wielded actual power or not, their powerful “protectors” always ruled in their name; they considered – and called themselves – slaves of their masters. Western feudalism, in which kings were little more than the “first among equals,” was utterly alien to the Eastern mentality, and so was the outspokenness and (from the Easter perspective) impudence of vassals. The Eastern elites saw the inherent dangers of such a fluid system and associated it with primitive tribal structures. Yet it was exactly these feudal kingdoms that gradually devolved power to ever wider segments of the population until (through a series of constitutional crises) they eventually developed into modern democracies. Meanwhile, the Eastern states remained mired in autocracy.
The other feature of Western European society that the
Muslims (though not the Byzantines) found disgusting and incomprehensible was
the presence of women in public life. The fact that women had names and faces
that were known outside the family circle was viewed as immoral and
dishonorable (much the way the Athenians viewed Spartan women) by the Muslims
of the 12th and 13th centuries. The fact that women not only had
names and faces, but a voice in civic affairs and could play a role in public
life including controlling wealth and influencing politics was even more
offensive. Yet modern developmental research shows a strong correlation between
societies that empower and enfranchise women and development. Societies that
insist on muzzling and oppressing half their population are nowadays considered
less “civilized.”
Whether you view the crusaders or the Saracens as more civilized depends on how you view democracy and womens’ rights. And modern commentators who feel compelled to “apologize” for the crusades are either utterly ignorant of the issues at stake and the comparative cultures of the antagonists—or implicitly reject the very Western values they allegedly defend.
In my three part biography of Balian d'Ibelin I endeavor to portray the crusader society as accurately as possible.
Professor, You do realize that, should you and I live anotehr fifty years, you'll have to make this same defense to prove that Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson weren't "barbarians," yes?
ReplyDeleteIt's getting to where I don't bother with "the young" (and stupid).