God's Battalions

The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark

As usual, Rodney Stark wrote a quite readable book which I recommend.

The modern textbook pieties about the Crusades are by and large false.

• The Crusades were not unprovoked invasions; quite the contrary
  
• They were not driven by trying to find occupations for otherwise troublesome younger sons; they were often staffed by families.
  
• They were not an attempt to enrich the West; they were a serious ongoing resource drain on an already well-off West.
  
• They were, contra the textbooks but in line with the older stories, really inspired by religious fervor.
  
• The Byzantines, not the Muslims, ruled the seas. Their armies, on the other hand, were generally mediocre or worse.
  
• Thanks to superior weapons and armor the Western knights, while not invincible, could in fact win against overwhelming odds and did so frequently. Though most of the Crusader forces died before they reached their destination, and most of the rest were not knights, the remaining knights were seasoned, committed, and formidable.
  
• Large chunks of the Crusader armies went home before they reached their destinations.

What else? The Byzantine empire was luckless enough to be governed by incompetents without much integrity, and the Crusaders learned the hard way that they were not to be trusted. The Crusader's plans originally called for Byzantine forces to hold restored territories, but the Byzantine rulers had insufficient confidence in either the staying power of the Crusaders or the capacities of their own armies, and declined to make the effort--and later emperors actually made treaties with Muslim leaders to combat the Crusaders. The infamous 4'th Crusade wasn't the unprovoked slaughter and rampage that it is usually depicted.

The often beatified Saladin was not a paragon of chivalry--by and large he adhered to the same rules of war as the Crusaders--if a city surrenders before the final assault give reasonable terms, but if it holds out until you have to scale the walls (as with Jerusalem) kill punitively.

The role of the Catholic church was both inspiring (providing the religious fervor that launched the Crusades) and disastrous (trying to suppress Orthodox rites in favor of Roman ones was no way to win friends). And when religious leaders directed military strategy the result was uniformly ruinous.

Muslim testimony says that Muslims under Crusader rule were generally better off than in neighboring areas--possibly because the Crusaders weren't interested in imposing religion and weren't involved in Sunni/Shiite conflicts.

Jerusalem was not defensible, since the Crusader strongholds had to be sustained by sea.

The wars ran on money, and required lots of it. The Crusades started to become unpopular when kings started getting involved, and raising taxes for the expeditions.

Original sources for some things are readily available online: this is a translation of Memoirs of the 4'th Crusade.

The Crusader kingdoms lasted about as long as the USA has been a country.

Arab history in subsequent centuries didn't really care much about the Crusades (they were seen more as attacks on the hated Turks) until the West started making a big deal of it in the 19'th century.

And there's more. Read it.

My thoughts (not Stark's):

That the West should react against the perpetual attacks and raiding is nothing to apologize for; and even if it were blameworthy this ended in defeat centuries ago and has nothing to do with us or them today. Scenes of Western leaders abjectly apologizing for the Crusades are distasteful and counterproductive.

The question of whether the Church was wrong to sanction a religious war is a different matter, of course. Certainly it was far out of line to assert that there'd be divine pardon for sin or penalties of sin for fighting for Jerusalem; that's hardly debatable. For the Church to positively endorse a war at all stretches its mandate considerably.

An era and culture that prizes ambiguity will have a hard time understanding one built on the confident call that "Paiens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit." But it is worth the effort to understand, even if you, as I, would never think of going on a old-style Crusade.