Dan Jones is a great chronicler. He knows how to turn dry events into vivid stories, which characters to focus on so his narrative always has a humanly anchor point, and when to make witty quips without being seen as overly opinionated. Some writers have the talent to captivate their audience with no more than the charm of their language – I think Jones is one of them.
“Crusaders” covers nearly four centuries of medieval history, from the end of the eleventh century CE, when Pope Urban began to preach the Holy War against the infidels in the east, to the conquest of Jerusalem by the Ottman empire in 1517. Officially, crusading met its calamitous end in 1291, when Acre, the last stronghold of the Christian kingdoms in the east, fell to the hands of Mamluks. However, as a phenomenon, crusading continued until Columbus’s discovery of America––which was “full of things to trade or steal, and teeming with people to subjugate, convert or kill”—convinced Western Christendom that its future “lay to the west, not the east”.
Out from this eventful and bloody chapter of human history stand a few prominent and complicated characters that I think deserve some ink even in a brief book review.
Richard the Lionheart, the legendary king of England who spent most of his adult life in France, was the commander in chief in the Third Crusade. Rumored to be a gay, Richard was famed for his martial prowess, courage and generosity. He also was a man of letters who loved lyric poetry and music and courted poets of High Middle Ages. Under Richard’s leadership, crusaders retook Acre and delivered a string of humiliating blows to the army of the mighty sultan Saladin of Ayyubid Dynasty, but ultimately fell short of seizing Jerusalem itself. The struggle ended with a negotiated truce that placed the coastal towns between Jaffa and Acre under the Christian rule, while allowing Christian pilgrims and merchants to access the Holy City. Although the settlement helped stabilize the Kingdom of Jerusalem for decades to come, it forever transformed crusading from a religious imperative into an enterprise of colonization.
Like many powerful men of his age, Richard was often reprimanded in history books for being lustful, greedy, and cruel. I suspect some of Richard’s vices were exaggerated by the clergymen who resented him for being forced to pay for his military adventures. That said, the extent of Richard’s cruelty is indisputable. The most notorious episode was the execution of 2600 unarmed and bound prisoners of war at Acre, as a retaliation against Saladin’s failure to fulfill his promise to “return the relic of the True Cross and pay his bounty”. Be technically legal as it may, noted Jones, this despicable act of cruelty was “excessive even by the standards of the day”. Little wonder Richard’s name has acquired such an infamy in the Muslim world that it was often invoked by impatient moms to calm their unruly children.
Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice, was the hero––or the villain, depending on who you ask––in the Fourth Crusade. He took the cross at an incredibly advanced age of 95, having gambled his country on a military alliance according to which Venice would equip and supply the Fourth Crusade in exchange for 85,000 silver marks. When Dandolo realized his airheaded partners could not pay their dues, he decided to save Venice from bankruptcy by what essentially amounted to organized robbery. His first target was the city of Zara, a possession of King Emeric of Hungary who was not only a pious Chrisitan but also a fellow crusader. Zara’s sacking infuriated Pope Innocent III as he had explicitly forbidden it. As a result, all Venetian crusaders were “excommunicated”, i.e., officially expelled from the Catholic Church. Dandolo couldn’t care less. He soon seized another opportunity that promised even more money, by injecting the crusaders into a conspiracy aimed at dethroning the Byzantine emperor. There is no space to recall the entire drama – suffice to say that it led to the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1204. Once again, Dandolo’s allies failed to hold their side of the bargain, so it seemed as if he almost had no choice but to help himself with what was promised to him. For three days, the crusaders vandalized the richest city in the West. The estimated total value of the loot amassed during their plundering is believed to be around 900,000 silver marks. If this figure is accurate, then Venice’s investment in the Fourth Crusade yielded a staggering tenfold return. Dandolo thus exemplified the notion of prospering by doing God’s bidding – a modern entrepreneur from Silicon Valley would recognize this as the medieval version of “doing well by doing good”.
At the time, many ancient and medieval Roman and Greek works were stolen and sent back to Venice. The most notable were the four bronze horse statues from the Hippodrome, believed to have been crafted in the second or third century CE. When I visited Venice in the summer of 2023, a replica of these magnificent statues was indeed, as Jones teased, “still proudly displayed at Saint Mark’s Basilica.” Our Venetian tour guide was careful not to dishonor what is considered a national treasure in her country. The horses, she told us, were “brought back” from Constantinople 800 years ago.
Dandolo died a year after the fall of Constantinople. He was 98 and had been visually impaired for more than three decades. The crusaders understandably cheered what they had accomplished under the command of the aged and fragile man as a miracle. To many a Christian, however, the brutal sacking of Constantinople was a dark and scandalous chapter in the history of their faith. The cruel irony—a mission sanctioned by the Catholic papacy resulting in the destruction of the spiritual capital of the Eastern Orthodoxy—was simply beyond the pale. Jones summarizes Dandolo’s controversial involvement in the crusade aptly:
“He had bravely defied his physical disability and his decrepitude, and his pragmatic leadership and dauntless personal valor were beyond question. Yet in the end Dandolo had turned his talents to a wholly disreputable end, playing a leading part in a dreadful episode that, even by the cruel standards of the crusading era, thoroughly deserved the epithet leveled against it by Choniatēs: “Outrageous.”
Another fascinating historical figure from this era is the leader of the Sixth Crusade, Frederick II, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. His famed grandfather, Frederick I “Barbarossa”, drowned while attempting to cross a river during the Third Crusade. About 750 years later, Adolf Hitler, in a seemingly ironic twist, named his ill-fated Russian campaign after the elder Frederick. However, Frederick II succeeded where his progenitor faltered. Through an agreement reached with the Ayyubid sultan Al-Kamil, he regained control of Jerusalem in 1229, a feat that three costly crusades had failed to accomplish in four decades. To be sure, Frederick II enjoyed good fortune, as Ayyubids were distracted by potential conflicts with its Muslim brethren in Syrian and Mesopotamia. However, there is no question that the emperor’s intelligence, personality, pollical acumen and breadth of knowledge also played a crucial role. Fredreick II was, in the words of Jones, “a shockingly liberal intellectual and a bluntly pragmatic ruler”. He spoke six languages, including Arabic and Greek, boasting a reputation as a polymath.
Fredreick was a man with an insatiable curiosity about the natural world that extended far beyond the tenets of Christian Scripture. He loved natural sciences, astrology, logic, rhetoric, medicine, law, philosophy and mathematics…(and) surrounded himself with Latin, Greek, Muslim and Jewish tutors, advisers, poets, scholars and bureaucrats. Well into adulthood, he retained a personal Arab tutor in logic, and he corresponded with Jewish and Arab scholars in southern Spain.
In short, Frederick was a philosopher king in the Platonic ideal, reminiscent of figures like Marcus Aurelius of the Roman Empire and Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty in China.
Paradoxically, the “greatest and least bloody crusading victory” won by Fredreick was met with universal condemnation rather than exaltation among his fellow crusaders. When the emperor left Acre, it was reported, he was “hated, cursed, and vilified”. Why? Ostensibly, the reason was that his participation in the Six Crusade was technically illegal because he had been excommunicated by the pope for allegedly failing to honor his previous crusading pledge. However, his quarrels with the papacy ran deep and deteriorated following his triumph in the east. Eventually the most successful crusader of his time would become himself the target of a crusade officially endorsed by the Catholic church. Although Fredreick “could be infuriating, overbearing and self-serving”, concluded Jones, it is still difficult to “conceive of a greater perversion of the institutions and language of crusade than for such a war to be preached against” him.
Beneath the veneer of glory surrounding these crusading kings and generals lay unspeakable violence, horrific human suffering, and ferocious atrocities. After all, as Jones noted, “there was precious little time for thoughts of human rights on either side” of the crusading divide.
When Baldwin II of Kingdom of Jerusalem laid siege to Aleppo in 1124––toward the end of his futile effort to break into the Syria interior—his army reportedly engaged in “elaborate rituals of depravity” against the Muslim residents. According to Jones, the crusaders
“raided Muslim funeral chapels, took coffins to repurpose as storage chests for their camp, then goaded the citizens with the sight of their dead relatives’ corpses being grotesquely desecrated…Whenever the Franks captured an Aleppan Muslim, they cut off his hands and testicles.”
During the Fifth Crusade, Damietta, the third-largest city in Egypt, endured a siege lasting a year and a half. Even the battle-hardened crusaders were apparently horrified by what they saw in the once-thriving city. It had transformed into a ‘fetid, disease-ridden graveyard, inhabited by mere skeletons and ghosts.’ The few survivors were overwhelmed, unable to bury the countless corpses that littered the streets, and the stench “was too much for most people to bear”. Shocked as they might be, the crusaders showed little pity, much less remorse. Soon enough, wrote Jones, “Christian thieves” began to “run around taking what they could” and force starving Muslim children to undergo baptism.
When Jerusalem fell to the raid of a Khwarizmian (花刺子模) mercenary army of Ayyubid sultan in 1244—only 15 years after Fredrick’s diplomatic victory—it was utterly devastated. The Khwarizmians hunted down and slaughtered six thousand Christian civilians trying to flee the abandoned city. Then, on August 23,
the Khwarizmians entered the almost empty city of the Israelites and in front of the Sepulchre of the Lord they disemboweled all the remaining Christians who had sought refuge inside its church. … The marble around Christ’s tomb was either smashed or scavenged and the tombs of all the crusader kings of Jerusalem buried near Calvary were opened and their bones tossed away. Elsewhere other highly revered Christian churches and shrines received the same treatment: the priory at Mount Sion, the tomb of the Virgin Mary in the valley of Jehosophat and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem were all desecrated.
Ironically, the Khwarizmians were themselves victims at the hands of an even more formidable force. About 25 years earlier, the horde of Genghis Khan had besieged and pillaged Samarkand, the capital of their empire. In some sense, he was indirectly responsible for the terrible losses of Christians in 1244, as the collapse of the Khwarizmians empire had left its jobless soldiers to scatter around, much like a deadly shock wave sweeping through the Middle East. The Mongols, of course, did not discriminate between Christians and Muslims. When they captured Baghdad, arguably “the most civilized of cities” at the time, they killed at least 100,000 Muslims. Yet, their worst crime against humanity was probably destroying the great city’s House of Wisdom, a library that “contained the largest and most sophisticated collection of books on earth” – so many books were thrown into the Tigris, wrote Jones, “that the water was said to have flowed black with ink.”
No medieval horror movie would be complete without mentioning the hideous crimes against Jews. In fact, the First Crusade marked a tragic turn in the fortunes for Jewish diaspora in Western and Central Europe.
In 1096, even before leaving their own country for the First Crusade, French and German crusaders turned on local Jewish communities. At Mainz, they stormed the residency of archbishop Ruthard where seven hundred Jews sheltered for his protection. The indiscriminatory slaughtering by this mob was so appalling that many desperate Jews killed each other to avoid execution by the “weapons of the uncircumcised”. Similar mass murders took place elsewhere. In Cologne, according to Jones, “young men and women threw themselves into the Rhine and fathers killed their children rather than see them fall into the hands of the enemy”. This “orgy of anti-Semantic violence”, collectively known as Rhineland massacres, is widely seen as a harbinger for what was coming for Jews in Europe in the next millennium.
About a hundred years later, the fervent zeal ignited by the Third Crusade engulfed the English populace. Months of riots against England’s Jews ensued. During this period, it was not uncommon to witness mobs chasing and assaulting Jews in the streets, forcing them into coerced baptisms. The worst incident occurred in York in March 1190, when hundreds of Jews, seeking refuge in the city’s castle, were either killed or forced to commit mass suicides. The persecution of Jews in England would continue and culminate in 1290, when the country officially expelled its Jewish population and enacted a ban that would last nearly four centuries.
Shortly after I finished reading “Crusaders”, on October 7th, 2023, Hamas militants perpetrated the worst mass murdering of Jews since the Holocaust. There is no need to recite the details of the crimes. Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, summed it up well: “depravity in the worst imaginable way”. Viewing this incident in the context of crusade, however, I felt that I have seen the movie before. The latest version is set on the same stage and has a similar plot, though played by different actors. In this movie, it was Jews, rather than Christians, who were the infidels that Muslims tried to expel from the land they believed was righteously theirs.
History has never stopped projecting the conflicts in Palestine through the lens of the Crusades. When British general Edmund Allenby marched into Jerusalem as a victor in 1917, ending the four-hundred-year control of the Holy City by the Ottoman Turks, he proclaimed, allegedly, that “the wars of the crusades are now complete”. Whether he said it or not, the forecast was wrong. The British mandate of Palestine would give way to the rebirth of the Jewish state in what many Muslims saw as a continuation of the medieval crusades, only this time Jews and Christians were co-conspirators. Surely that was how Osama Bin Laden saw it. In the ‘Letter to the American People’, now widely circulated thanks to Tik-Tok, he wrote,
Palestine has been under occupation for decades, and none of your presidents talked about it until after September 11. … You should be aware that justice is the strongest army and security offers the best livelihood; you lost it by your own making when you supported the Israelis in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine.
Likewise, President George W. Bush once likened the US response to the 9/11 attack to a crusade, warning the American people that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while”.
Even the rhetoric sounds eerily similar, and it always invokes some version of a just war, i.e., the “violence that was regrettable but legitimate and even moral, so long as it was undertaken to protect the state and would ultimately serve to produce or restore peace.” Bin Laden put it more bluntly, “it is a sin to kill a person without proper, justifiable cause, but terminating his killer is a right.” What remains unsaid and perhaps unknowable, however, is who gets to decide what causes are proper and justifiable, and how far back in history one must trace them.
Hence, the life-and-death struggle for the Holy Land, waged in the name of that One True Faith, has never really ended. And the idea of crusading will perpetuate cycles of violence and plight as long as there are crusaders on Earth.
Marco Nie, Northwestern University
December 30, 2023