The Christian Drang nach Osten

We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades. Were they, as the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’? Were they, as muscular Christians and imperialists suggested in the 19th century, a matchless epic of human heroism, in which the defeat of the ‘right’ side had been happily reversed in their own age? Were they an immoral act of unprovoked aggression for which western Christians should apologise to the Muslim world, as the last Pope has rather absurdly purported to do on their behalf? Moral judgments, it is said, are not the historian’s province, but in this field they are hard to avoid. The casualties of the crusades, both human and material, were too high, the images too potent, the modern analogies too awful.

The main problem about the crusades, for contemporaries and moderns alike, is that the first one succeeded. By rights, the volunteer armies of Peter the Hermit, Ademar of Le Puy and Godfrey of Bouillon, which crossed a continent to occupy the birthplace of Christ between 1097 and 1099, should have been beaten for their presumption, as soundly as most of their successors were. In fact, they not only conquered much of Syria and Palestine, but founded states there that endured in one form or another for two centuries. If the maddest of the crusades succeeded so triumphantly in its objectives, then by what standard is one to condemn the others as pointless? If their objectives were immoral, were they any more so than any other armed migration? It is hard to blame the kings and popes of the Middle Ages for finding these questions hard to answer. Historians and moralists have done no better, in spite of having had five centuries to think about them.