The truth about the Crusades

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general.

It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. But like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although nowhere as brutal as modern wars).
So what is the truth about the Crusades? Much can already by said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, under extremists in Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. The Christian world, where it
spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born, was therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense. The first goal was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote: “How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held in slavery and torture?” The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. “Crusading,” Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith argues, was understood as an “act of love”
The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of rescue and restoration.

Despite St. Bernard frequently preaching that no captives were not to be persecuted (Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. “Not for their destruction do I pray,” it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered) and his numerous letters from Bernard demanding that a traitor, Radulf, stop his cruelty, Bernard was forced to intervene personally. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders (who had betrayed the entire objective by traitors instead making financial deals with opportunists).

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies.

But the ancient faith of Christianity, as taught by Christ, with its respect for women and intense opposition toward slavery, not only survived but flourished.

The new danger for humans today - is apathy - with its attendant intellectual slothfulness and readiness to slip lazily into atheism, just because it is fashionable, despite its foundations laid in the quicksand of absence of logic.
Source: Article by Professor Thomas F. Madden “The Real History Of The Crusades”

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