Conquering Christian Crusaders

By Brian D. Wilson

A favorite topic among those who have a bone to pick with Christianity is the Crusades, a series of wars waged between the Christian Kings of Europe and the Muslim East during the Middle-Ages between the years of 1098 and 1250. The new atheists cite the period as the quintessential example of the Church’s uncanny ability for sowing seeds of conflict around the world. While C.A.I.R. (Council on American Islamic Relations), identifies it as the West’s first attempt at imperial conquest of the East.

The common narrative of such groups is that power hungry Christian crusaders began a series of evil and unjustified wars against the unsuspecting and peaceful Muslim world, which set into motion the poor relationship between East and West that still exists today. For example, Amin Maalouf in, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, writes that the Crusades were, “The starting point of Millennial hostility between Islam and the West.”1

Islamic scholar John Esposito takes this interpretation further calling the Crusades Holy wars that interrupted an essentially pluralistic Muslim civilization which gave Christians peace and human rights, “Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to a centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.”2

Such interpretations though err in two regards. They depict Christianity during this time in a far more sinister light than it deserves, and ignore the activity of the Muslim East for the several intervening centuries between the rise of Islam and the first Crusade (1098 A.D.).

With all due respect to Mr. Esposito the Islamic world wasn’t just twiddling its thumbs and writing poetry between the death of Muhammad in 632 and its war with Europe 500 years later. The time was spent in almost continuous warfare against not only the West but the rest of the known world on 3 continents.

Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born in 570, and by his death in 632 he had forged an empire that united the Arab peninsula. The new empire had two powerful neighbors; the Christian Kingdoms of Western Europe and the Eastern Roman Empire. Wasting no time an army forged from the will of Muhammad, began a series of military incursions into Egypt and Israel. Islam had reached neither nation at the time, and both nations had been Roman possessions for more than 600 years. The war would soon escalate.

However, it is common about now to hear the objection that long before Mohammad’s campaigns began it was Christians who were invading, conquering, and occupying Muslim lands. Sadly, this particular claim, at least by some, is a deliberate attempt at factual misdirection. The misdirection in acheived by omitting most, if not all of the facts concerning Christianity’s historic presence in the East before Islam arose.

It is entirely true that thousands, perhaps millions, of Christians lived in the Middle-East before Mohammad and his successors marched against the West. These Arab lands were being lived on by Christian-Arabs whose forefathers had been Christian 500 years before the armies of Islam had even arrived. The pre-Islamic Christian evangelizing of the Middle-East is an often neglected aspect of West/East historical interaction.

Christianity had two great advantages when its missionaries first began evangelizing Arab lands. The first advantage, ironically, we have forgotten, that the religion which Jesus of Nazareth started was a Middle-Eastern religion. The Apostles and their disciples were Middle-Eastern people. They spoke an Asiatic language, had Asiatic customs, and worked in occupations that Arabs and Central Asians had been doing for thousands of years.

When the disciples of this Asiatic preacher first came west they seemed quite strange to the Roman, Celtic, and German peoples who encountered them. They had hard to pronounce names that no Europeans had ever heard. There were Johns and Pauls, Stephens and Marys, Elizabeths, Mathews, Naomis, Daniels, Gabriels, and Jeremiahs, to name a few. “Who would be so cruel as to name their child Daniel,” some thought, “such an ugly name.” “No Alric, Rodheim, or Egbert is far lovelier.” They just rolled off the tongue so nicely.

When the disciples of Jesus went east however there was not as great a cultural barrier. The stories of The Samaritan at the Well and The Lord of the Vineyard, as well as the Parable of the Sower, all painted a vivid backdrop to Jesus’ life that Middle-Easterners immediately comprehended. If one really wants to speak of the invasion of a foreign religion from a far off country, Asian-Christianity’s evangelism of the West is a far better candidate than the evangelization of the Near East.

I have a question, how many people call Buddhism's evangelistic efforts in India and China an invasion? There are none. I suspect this is because Buddhism was home-grown in Asia so to speak. Yet invasion is a common term applied to Christianity's presence in the Middle-East centuries prior to the Crusades. why? It too is an Asiatic religion, founded in the Near East. It's first converts were Middle-Eastern. To those who have an agenda driven by a hatred of Christianity facts just get in the way.

The second great advantage Christian missionaries had related to how Roman imperial expansion into the East aided their evangelistic efforts. The Romans laid thousands of miles of roads as far east as Armenia and Iraq. The excellent condition of these roads combined with the Roman Legion provided the protection that made travel and evangelism far safer than in previous times.

The evangelism, not the conquest, of the Middle-East by the descendants of a Middle-Eastern religious teacher named Yeshua Honotsri (Jesus’ full name) was done very slowly and peacefully. So successful were evangelistic efforts that by the birth of Muhammad (570) all of North Africa and the Near-East to the Tigris possessed thousands of Christian centers of art, and learning, and many had Christian majorities. Finally, all the countries of the Middle East up to the borders of the Parthian Empire (Iran) were united under the authority of the Roman government. Just a personal aside, it also seems quite difficult in my estimation for Christians to take Muslim lands away, since the overwhelming majority of the Middle-East was evangelized before Islam existed.

Islam’s march westward is a different story altogether. When Mohammed began his conquest of the West in the mid 7th Century no Christian Kingdom was the aggressor. In fact the West was fighting for its life against a very able Muslim adversary.

By 642 Christian Egypt and the Monophisite Christian kingdom of East Africa would be among Islam’s first conquests. Much of Christian North Africa, a long time center of the Christian arts and sciences, was also brutally overrun.

The African bishopric of Thagaste, once the home of Turtulian, Jurist and one of the greatest Christian theologians of all time, was dismantled. The city of Hippo in present day Tunisia, home of the Roman-North African Augustine, author of City of God and Confessions, too was demolished. Alexandria Egypt was perhaps the saddest loss to many Christians. It became the home of the gospel writer and disciple Mark. Later it was a prosperous bishopric led by the brilliant Clement who sent missionaries into East Africa. It was violently taken by the armies of Islam.

Exactly a century after Muhammad’s death Arab armies had gone even farther West, taking nearly all of Spain and Morocco, both provinces of the Roman Empire. Spain had been slowly converted to Christianity during the 3 centuries following the death of Jesus. Then in the late 5th Century Spain and all of the Western Roman Empire fell to the Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, and Ostrogoths, pagan invaders originally form the northern lands between the Baltic and Black Seas. The Visigoths settled in Spain, eventually accepting Christianity.

Islamic armies overran the Visigoth-Christian Kingdom of Spain early in the 8th Century. Charles Martel, king of the Franks, finally stopped Muslim armies from completely overrunning all of Western Europe at the battle of Tours in France in 732.

Roman Jerusalem fell in the Early 8th Century. Soon after the conquest sixty Christian pilgrims from near by Amorium were crucified. Now firmly established, the Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed. Caesarea was a Christian community near Jerusalem taken by force, just like hundreds of others.

By the later 8th Century Christian pilgrims were constantly harassed, and Arab armies often threatened to pillage the Church of the Resurrection if they weren’t paid extortion money. The Muslim governor of Jerusalem banned displays of the cross, and increased the anti-religious tax (jizya) on Jews and Christians. Laws were also enacted that made it illegal for Christians to religiously instruct others, and forbade Christian parents to teach their own children Christianity.

In the year 772 the Caliph al-Mansur ordered the hands of Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be stamped with an identifying symbol. In 789 Arab armies plundered the Monastery of St. Theodosius, killing nearly all the monks. By the beginning of the 9th Century the persecutions became so bad that thousands of Christians fled to Constantinople (capitol of the Eastern Roman Emperor) for refuge.

In the year 923 on Palm Sunday Muslim armies went on a rampage in Jerusalem, plundering the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.3 Finally, as a result of the constant military incursions, The Roman Emperor moved to the offense. After 330 years of Arab aggression General Nicephorus Phocas launched a series of military campaigns to take back lost Roman domains taken by the East. The very successful military operations took back the Christian lands of Crete, Cilicia, Cyprus, and a part of Syria. In 969 Phocas retook Antioch Syria.4

Faced with a string of losses, in 974 the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad appealed to Islamic theology. There is a principle of Islamic religious law that states if any land has ever belonged to the House of Islam, no matter how short a period of time, it belongs to it forever. The Caliph used this pretext to declare Jihad. Never mind the fact that those lands had been taken by unjustified war in the first place.

What followed were yearly military campaigns to retake lands that Muslim armies had lost. Many Caliphs (Muslim potentates) joined in the war. Saif al-Dawla, ruler of the Shi’ite Hamdanid dynasty in Aleppo Syria, heard the cry of war and joined the cause. The Jihad was so successful that Muslims from as far away as Asia soon joined in the battle.5

However by 1001 religious disunity set in and Roman Emperor Basil II, capitalizing off of Arab in-fighting, concluded a 10 year truce with the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, the biggest of the war leaders. This was only 97 years before the first Crusade.

However the Emperor soon learned that treaties were pointless. In 1004 the Fatimid Caliph Abu ali al-Mansor al-Hakim (985-1021), turned violently against the Eastern Romans. He waged a 10 year war against them, ordering the destruction the seizure of church property and the burning of crosses. Al-Hakim eventually destroyed over 30 thousand churches.

In 1009 came perhaps the worst humiliation to Christendom ever. Al-Hakim enthusiastically ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, believed to be the place of Jesus’ burial, to be burned down. He then commanded Jesus’ tomb within the church to be cut down to the bedrock.

He ordered all Christians to wear heavy crosses around their necks and Jews a wooden calf. Finally, he ordered that all Jews and Christians to accept Islam or be expelled from his kingdom.6

If this were not enough to handle, in 1056, now only 42 years before the first Crusade, a race of fanatical Muslim worriers from Asia called the Seljuks fell upon the Roman East. The Selkuks instituted even more severe laws against Jews and Christians.

Seljuk worriers crushed the entire Roman army at Manzikert in 1071, taking Emperor Romanus Diogenes IV hostage. By 1076 Arab armies retook Syria. In 1077 the Seljuk emir Atiz bin Uwak sacked Jerusalem and murdered 3000 people. Then Seljuk forces entered the very heart of the Christian Roman East (present day Turkey), laying siege to dozens of cities. (Incidentally neither the Turks or the Arabs were peoples Native to Turkey. The Turks infact were invaders from Mongolia).

Emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118) finally accepted the cold truth. All of Eastern Christendom lay open to Muslim attack. Hundreds of Christian cities had been taken. Nearly all of North Africa from Morocco to the Sinai in Egypt, once Christian and Roman, was over run by the invaders.

Entire Christian countries, all of whom paid allegiance to the Emperor, were murdered, converted, or forced into a mass exodus in search of friendlier lands. Just 5 years before the West’s call for the first Crusade, and all out of options, the emperor swallowed his pride and asked Pope Urban II for help, and the first Crusade was born.

The Crusades waged against the East were a reaction to over 500 years of aggression, as well as a necessary act of self preservation. That is a fact. Does this mean that the Crusaders were sinless? Certainly not, the 4th Crusade was notorious for being largely an excuse for Western armies to pillage Constantinople, the capitol of the Christian Roman Emperor of the East. Some Crusaders burned down Jewish villages in Europe on their way to the Holy Land.

Yet this is not the point. We are asking what caused the cross-continental political tensions that led to the Crusades, not trying to determine who is perfect. If the purpose of Christianity’s detractors is to point out that Christians are not perfect, then you are right, though no Christian ever denied that.

Though I do not know what that gets you. Pointing out that Crusaders wrongly pillaged Jewish villages and killed innocents doesn’t tell you about the justness of the Crusades as acts of war, anymore than the bombing of Dresden, or the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar, tells you whether or not the U.S. was just in waging war against Germany in 1945. A white washing of the past is not what is sought, but a simple bit of intellectual honesty when recounting the Christian/Muslim past and what percipitated it.

1 Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), xvi.
2 John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, third edition (Oxford University Press, 1998), 58.
3 Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1992), 473-76.
4 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951),
30-32.
5 Runciman, 33
6 Gil, 376