The Crusades: "God Wills It!"
The Crusades are the most well known events of the Middle Ages, a bitter flowering of “faith” that saw vast armies clash over God and gold. Pope Urban II’s call to arms in November 1095 ignited the first of eight Crusades.1 The cataclysm of violence unleashed against the “enemy ” — whom he called “an accursed race, a race wholly alienated from God, a generation that set not their heart aright, and whose spirit was not steadfast with God” — affects the world to this day, and so does the reasoning that launched such wars... The Pope’s wording allowed such enemies to be found not just in the Middle East, but wherever were found those who did not have the Crusaders’ “Catholic faith,” who did not give “the honor which you render to the holy Church.”2
This “enemy” — the Seljuk Turks — threatened no Roman Catholic nation. They did not even border one. For many years they had allowed Christian pilgrims access to their holy places in Palestine. This “accursed race” of the Turks, and in a larger sense the Muslim society of which they were a part, gave many signs of not being “alienated from God ” in their consciences, as their dealings with one another and even their enemies showed.
The Muslims seem to have been better gentlemen than their Christian peers; they kept their word more frequently, showed more mercy to the defeated, and were seldom guilty of brutality...3
In reality, the Muslims showed far more evidence of “setting their heart aright” with God, as seen in their actions, than their Christian opponents.
For five centuries, from AD 700 to 1200, Islam led the world in power, order, and extent of government, in refinement of manners, in standards of living, in humane legislation and religious toleration, in literature, scholarship, science, medicine, and philosophy.
This was beyond the understanding of European Christians. Their religious concepts did not take into account the natural law — the instinctive knowledge of good and evil. They especially had no concept that the instinctive knowledge was at work in those outside “the holy Church.” In such an amoral faith, all unbelievers were by definition evil and almost certainly not worthy to live.
The Seljuk Turks did threaten the Eastern Roman Empire, but as events would prove, they were not as great a threat as the Christian Crusaders. In a shocking display of violence and cruelty, the Fourth Crusade captured, looted, and slaughtered the Greek Orthodox capital in AD 1204. What the Turks did provide was a common enemy against which to unite, and a source of land and plunder the Crusaders could have with more than a “good conscience.” They could have it with the blessing of God.
Telling them Europe is “too narrow for you” Urban admonishes them, in what is surely the most remarkable aspect of his world-shaking speech, to “Let hatred depart from among you” and go forth instead to take the land “from the wicked race.”
Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage war, and that very many among you perish in intestine strife. Let hatred therefore depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.4
Their hatred need not depart from “the wicked race” who barely qualified as human beings. Foundational to their Christian theology is the teaching that all men are totally depraved, whose only possible rescue is faith in the Church. All unbelievers were sure candidates for eternal destruction, so there was little hesitation and little to no wrong in violently sending them there early.
More than Just War
According to the teaching of Augustine, the greatest Christian theologian, the Crusades were “just” wars — not because they were devoid of “the real evils in war,” which he said were the “love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like.”5 Far from it, as the Crusaders’ own histories tell.6 They were to be considered “just” for the most fundamental reason of all: that they were waged at the command of God! In Augustine’s own words:
How much more must the man be blameless who carries on war on the authority of God, of whom every one who serves Him knows that He can never require what is wrong?7
And who better to declare a war just than the Pope himself, the Vicar of Christ on earth? In the Roman Catholic Church, a vicar is a priest who acts for another higher-ranking clergyman. The Vicar of Christ acts for Christ. On that fateful day in November, over nine hundred years ago, after Pope Urban II promised the Crusaders “remission of their sins ” and “the assurance of the reward of imperishable glory in the kingdom of heaven” for waging war, they all cried out in unison, “It is the will of God!”
In response, Pope Urban told them that Christ was in their midst and God in their spirits. Therefore, when they attacked the enemy, it was the will of God.
