Mind your language | 9 April 2011

Colonel Gaddafi was making something of a point when he kept referring to the Western coalition against him as crusaders. It harked back to  President George Bush’s words five days after the outrage of September 11, 2001: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.’ He was immediately jumped on, not only by Muslims abroad but also by people at home to whom it was self-evident that crusades were bad things.

How quickly fashions in language change. Until recently a crusade was self-evidently good. Harold Wilson, bound for Downing Street, told the Labour party conference in 1962: ‘This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.’ Roosevelt’s address to his nation on D-Day 1944 called on God to give them ‘faith in our united crusade’. A Pathé film from 1937, about giving a million slum-dwellers decent housing, was called The Great Crusade. The Christian youth movement the Crusaders, founded in 1900, held out until 2007 before changing its name to Urban Saints. It still counts 20,000 followers.

The Arabic for ‘crusaders’, I am told, is salibiyyun (nominative plural). Salib refers to the cross. It is often noted that salibiyyun came into use only in the 19th century. The Muslims of the Holy Land did not complain about them by this name in the 12th century. But nor were they called crusaders in English at the time. Only in 1575 did anyone borrow the French croisade. Other English forms of the word were croisado, crusado, crusada. The familiar crusade popped up only in 1706.

The only medieval English word for a crusade was croiserie (first found in 1290), borrowed from Old French. In written Latin it was normal, as Matthew Paris, the 13th-century chronicler from St Albans did, to use the phrase crucem assumere, ‘take the cross’.