The Crusades — what really happened

Few subjects come up more often when Christians talk about their faith in public. "What about the Crusades?" is asked by secular sceptics as proof that religion causes violence, and by Muslims as proof that Christians have no moral standing to criticise anyone. It is a fair question, and it deserves a real answer — which means knowing what actually happened.

The overview in The medieval church gives the outline in a few paragraphs. This article goes further: the background, the main expeditions, the motives, the atrocities, and how to talk about it.

The background: four centuries of conquest

The Crusades did not come out of nowhere. Within a century of Muhammad's death in 632, Arab armies had conquered the ancient Christian heartlands: Syria, Palestine, Egypt, the whole of North Africa, and from 711 most of Spain. Jerusalem surrendered around 637. Sicily followed in the ninth century.

These lands remained largely Christian in population for generations, and Christians under Muslim rule were often allowed to worship as dhimmi — protected but subordinate communities paying a special tax. Conditions varied enormously by ruler and century. Some periods were tolerant; others were not. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the church built over the traditional site of Jesus' tomb.

Then came the Seljuk Turks. In 1071 they destroyed the army of the Byzantine Empire — the Greek-speaking Christian empire centred on Constantinople — at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. Within twenty years Turkish forces controlled most of what is now Turkey. Pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem became dangerous.

In March 1095 envoys of the emperor Alexius I Komnenos came to a church council at Piacenza in Italy and asked for Western soldiers. Alexius almost certainly wanted mercenaries under his own command. What he got was something nobody had seen before.

Clermont, 1095

In November 1095, at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II preached a sermon calling the knights of Western Europe to march east, help their fellow Christians, and free Jerusalem.

We do not have a transcript. Several chroniclers wrote versions of the sermon, most of them after the First Crusade had succeeded, and they differ in important ways. What is clear is the central offer: those who went with the right intention would have the journey counted as a full penance for their sins. In the medieval system, confessed sins still required penance — prayers, fasts, pilgrimages. Urban turned an armed expedition into the greatest pilgrimage of all.

The crowd's reported response, Deus vult — "God wills it" — became the crusade's cry. The word "crusade" itself came later; people at the time spoke of a pilgrimage, a journey, or "taking the cross", because those who vowed to go sewed a cloth cross onto their clothing.

The First Crusade and the massacres

The response was far larger than Urban expected. Before the organised armies left, popular bands set off in the spring of 1096, some led by the preacher Peter the Hermit.

The Rhineland. Some of these bands, especially one under a count named Emicho of Flonheim, turned on the Jewish communities of the Rhine valley. Their reasoning — why march thousands of miles to fight God's enemies when others were at home? — was a perversion of everything Urban had said. In May and June 1096 they massacred Jews at Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne, many of whom chose death rather than forced baptism. Several bishops tried to protect them: the bishop of Speyer did so successfully, the archbishop of Mainz sheltered Jews in his palace but could not hold it. This was the first mass violence against Jews in European history on this scale, and Jewish chronicles still remember it.

The march. The main armies crossed into Asia Minor in 1097, took Nicaea, survived a desperate siege at Antioch in 1098, and reached Jerusalem in June 1099.

Jerusalem, 15 July 1099. After five weeks of siege, the crusaders broke into the city and killed a great part of its inhabitants — Muslims sheltering on the Temple Mount, and Jews in their synagogue. The Christian eyewitnesses describe blood up to the ankles or knees; these are partly biblical echoes (compare Revelation 14:20) rather than measurements. Later Muslim writers gave a figure of 70,000 dead; most modern historians think the real number was much lower, perhaps a few thousand, and letters found in the Cairo Geniza show that some Jews were ransomed. But on any reckoning it was a massacre of civilians, and the chroniclers present it as a triumph.

When Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, most of its inhabitants were allowed to ransom themselves and leave. The contrast with 1099 was noticed at the time, and it is still noticed.

The later crusades

The crusaders set up four states along the eastern Mediterranean: Jerusalem, Antioch, Tripoli and Edessa. They lasted, in shrinking form, until 1291.

• The Second Crusade (1147–1149) was preached by Bernard of Clairvaux after Edessa fell. It achieved nothing in the East. To his credit, Bernard intervened in Germany to stop a monk named Radulf who was stirring up attacks on Jews.
• The Third Crusade (1189–1192) followed Saladin's capture of Jerusalem. Richard I of England won battles but not the city; after taking Acre he had around 2,700 prisoners executed when ransom negotiations broke down.
• The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) never reached Muslim territory at all. Owing a vast debt to Venice for ships, the crusaders first attacked the Christian city of Zara on the Adriatic — for which Pope Innocent III excommunicated them — and then became entangled in a Byzantine succession dispute. In April 1204 they stormed Constantinople, sacked it for three days, looted its churches and set up a Latin emperor. The wound this left between Eastern and Western Christians is explored in The Great Schism.
• The Fifth Crusade (1217–1221) besieged Damietta in Egypt. In 1219 Francis of Assisi crossed the lines unarmed to preach the gospel to Sultan al-Kamil, who heard him courteously and sent him back safely.

Crusading also turned inward. Crusades were preached against heretics in southern France (the Albigensian Crusade from 1209), against pagans in the Baltic, and against the pope's political enemies in Italy. Once war could be a penance, almost any enemy of the church could become its target.

The Reconquista

In Spain the conflict had a different shape. The Christian kingdoms of the north had been pushing south against Muslim al-Andalus since the eighth century, long before Clermont. From the twelfth century this war was given crusading status.

The decisive battle was Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212; the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, fell in January 1492. What followed is a warning about what happens when church and state become one weapon. The same year Spain's Jews were ordered to convert or leave. Within a decade Muslims in Castile faced the same choice. The Spanish Inquisition investigated the sincerity of the converts, and their descendants, the Moriscos, were finally expelled between 1609 and 1614.

Why did they go?

For much of the twentieth century the standard explanation was economic: land-hungry younger sons looking for estates, Italian merchants looking for markets. Some of that is true, especially for the Venetians in 1204.

But the evidence points elsewhere for most crusaders. The historian Jonathan Riley-Smith spent decades studying the property charters of the First Crusaders. He found that going on crusade cost something like four or five times a knight's annual income, that families sold and mortgaged land to pay for it, that a large proportion died, and that most survivors came home with little or nothing. The charters themselves speak again and again of sin, penance and the salvation of souls.

That is a more troubling conclusion than greed. It means many of the men who killed at Jerusalem believed they were doing God's will, and were doing it because the church told them so.

The last line surprises people. Medieval Muslim writers saw the Crusades as one episode among many, and Saladin was a relatively minor figure in Arab memory for centuries. Riley-Smith and the historian Carole Hillenbrand both trace how the Crusades became a central symbol of Western hostility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when European empires really were ruling Muslim lands and the old word gave a name to a new grievance. The grievance about colonialism is real. But it is not the same thing as a continuous memory from 1099.

An honest moral verdict

Two easy stories are available, and both are wrong.

The first says the Crusades were the original act of Western imperialism, an unprovoked attack on a peaceful and sophisticated civilisation. This ignores the conquests that came first and reads the Middle Ages through the lens of the British Empire.

The second says the Crusades were a justified defensive war and Christians should be proud of them. This ignores what was actually done, and, more seriously, ignores what Jesus actually said.

The Christian just war tradition, from Augustine onwards, allows that a ruler may sometimes use force to protect the innocent. Even within that tradition, the deliberate killing of civilians, the execution of prisoners, the murder of Jews and the sack of a Christian city are not borderline cases. They are clear wrongs. And the promise that fighting would win forgiveness of sins contradicts the gospel itself, which says forgiveness is a gift received by faith, not a reward earned by works of any kind (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Jesus and holy war

The deepest answer to the Crusades comes from the New Testament itself.

Jesus lived under military occupation, in a land full of men ready to fight for God's kingdom. The Zealots wanted exactly what the crusaders later wanted: the holy city freed by the sword. Jesus refused that path at every turn. When James and John wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village, he rebuked them (Luke 9:54-55). When Peter drew a sword to defend him, he said, "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52). To Pilate he said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting" (John 18:36).

He told his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:43-44). Paul wrote that "the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh" (2 Corinthians 10:4), and that Christians should never avenge themselves but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:19-21).

The crusaders carried the cross into battle. Jesus carried it to his own death, and there he prayed for the men who killed him.

Talking about it with Muslims

Many Muslims, especially in Nigeria's north and across the Middle East, have heard the Crusades presented as the defining story of Christian behaviour toward Islam. A few principles help.

1. Agree first. "Yes, terrible things were done, and they were wrong. Christians should be ashamed of them." This is true, and it disarms.
2. Distinguish the founder from the followers. Ask whether Jesus ever taught his followers to fight for his kingdom. Invite your friend to read the Gospels and look.
3. Be fair about the context, if asked. It is reasonable to mention that the Crusades followed centuries of conquest, but say it as history, not as a counter-charge.
4. Raise the deeper question gently. For a thoughtful friend, the real issue is not which side behaved worse in the Middle Ages but what each founder taught and did. That conversation is better carried on with respect, over time, with the Gospels open. Reaching Muslims with the gospel and Evangelising Muslims — a complete guide offer practical help.
5. Live differently. In parts of Nigeria where Christians and Muslims have both suffered violence, the most persuasive answer to the Crusades is a Christian who refuses revenge.

The Crusades are not an embarrassment the church must hide. They are a case study in what happens when Christians forget what their Lord said — and the strongest condemnation of them comes from the Lord himself.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" (Matthew 5:9).