Crusades: Legit Response to Muslim Aggression?

Great Debates
41

Note the second aspect of my comment. Despite LoneomePolecat’s assertion that Fadden represents some consensus of historians, he has presented no evidence of this claim and, as I explicitly noted, Fadden provided no references to support his claims regarding what the so-called Muslim world “intended.” (And any idiot that refers to the original plans for the Enola Gay display at the Smithsonian as “revisionists” who “manufactured” history and not “mainstream” historians displays a brutal ignorance that hints of a definite personal agenda.) His odd claims in the Op-Ed piece linked provide no evidence of any other “mainstream scholars” who support his claim that Islam had waged a continuous war against Christian Europe for over 450 years. His points regarding the attitudes of the crusaders he does support with evidence, but his claims against Islam he simply declares true, providing not one shred of evidence for that claim.

The call for a Crusade in 1094 was in response to the changes in attitude towards Christians living in and making pilgimage to Jerusalem that began about 1071, as the culmination of deteriorating attitudes over the previous 60 years, along with a plea for help from the Byzantine emperor that he was beset. However, the conflict between three successive Muslim empires and the Byzantine empire had more to do with the conflict between any adjacent empires than it did with a specific intention by the entire Muslim world to “subdue” Christian Europe. From 637 until 1010, differnt Muslim governments treated Christians and Jews in the Levant more harshly or less harshly, but there was no effort, for around 400 years to actually suppress the Christians who lived in the heart of Muslim lands.

Once the westward push following the death of the Prophet ran out of steam in Spain, the next 700 years saw no serious effort for the Muslims to press on into France and serious fighting only resumed when various Christian kingdoms, having squabbled long enough for one of them to come out as supreme, decided to expand their lands to conquer the Moors.

Sicily was attacked a bit later, with mixed results, but no Arab settlement. Then, following a revolt against the Greek emperor, a Sicilian strong man invited the Arabs to come help him out. As was common in most of such silly decisions, (see the Jewish appeal to Rome at the time of the Hasmonean civil wars, the Norman-Irish appeal to England, and numerous other dumb moves), once the powerful “helpers” were invited in, they decided it would be easier to run the country themselves rather than to simply provide aid to someone who had already demonstrated faithlessness to his sovereign lord. So, rather than a clear case of “Islam” attacking “Christian” Sicily, we have one more example of people with weapons and a desire for more property subduing weaker people who were, coincidentally, of a different religion.

Note that I have made no claim that the Crusaders were simply rogues looking for plunder or that there were no legitimate (for the era) reasons to go to war.
I do not challenge those points that Fadden made regarding the mindset of the Crusaders (which Fadden actually bothered to support with citations).

My specific argument is with the broad claim that the Crusades were some sort of defensive counterattack against an otherwise inevitable conquest of Europe in a single-minded multi-century war of aggression by Islam.
If someone wants to argue that position, let us see the ongoing claims from the 600s through the 1100s by leader after leader of the many various dynasties within Islam stating that they need to conquer Europe or the world or whatever.

42

Please present authorities of the same caliber as Madden who reject this view of the Crusades. Recent ones, too, please. Don’t get some outdated bit of scholarship from fifty years ago and present it as if it were the latest research on the subject.

43

Please present authorities of the same “caliber” as Madden who support his view of the Crusades. Recent ones, too, please. Don’t get some outdated bit of scholarship from fifty years ago and present it as if it were the latest research on the subject.

You claimed “consensus” and neither you nor he have provided a single supporting voice.

44

Okay, we’ll ignore Runciman, Madden’s academic bete noire :stuck_out_tongue: ( actually even Madden included a Runciman essay in a collection of essential readings on the Crusades and I believe has commented favorably on his prose - he is indeed outdated, but was once a giant in the field ).

Personally, my main beef with the Madden ( who is indeed a very prominent and respected historian of the Crusades ) essay you linked to would be the last sentence. So going on that line:

In this review of three recent works on the Crusades by Thomas Asbridge, Jonathan Phillips and Christoper Tyerman, Madden makes note that, in so many words, Tyerman and Asbridge do not agree with the notion that the west was saved by the Crusades or that there was an overwhelming external ( Muslim threat ) cause at all. The discussion on Phillips doesn’t address the issue since his work was focused specifically on the Fourth Crusade.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/MaddenCrusaders.php

And in this cordial discussion/interview featuring the historians Carole Hillenbrand and Madden, that exact question regarding that exact line was put to Hillenbrand and she also disagreed.

http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2006a/022406/022406a.php

Thomas Asbridge, Christopher Tyerman and Carole Hillenbrand are all modern, respected experts on Crusading history. So there’s three, on that particular question at least ;).

I’ve read the Asbridge and Phillips books reviewed above, but not Tyerman’s. I’ve also read Hillenbrand and Runciman. But I don’t think I’ve read any of Madden’s yet. Though I might have to check my shelves - it’s possible I may have and am forgetting. Just in case that points out any biases in my own influences.

45

I always thought the Crusades were more about Western moralists (Church figures and some nobles) seeking an outlet for the constant aggression of the knightly class to draw the knights away from fighting each other in Europe. There seems to be a feeling of casting about for some way to get the knights (and the mercenary companies) to simply leave, if they won’t stop fighting each other, in a lot of accounts I’ve read (notably Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror). I kind of got the impression that attacking Islam / freeing the Holy Land was as much an excuse to get them to leave as it was a real goal. Kind of like making the kids play outside when they’re rowdy.

This was the time period, after all, when some chroniclers contemptuously referred to the knight as “the terrible worm in the iron cocoon.”

Sailboat

46

Most countries have had laws for quite a while against murder and theft. Most of those countries, while having those laws, have nevertheless engaged in aggressive war. So there’s a distinction in those countries’ minds, at least.

47

And once again, what is this distinction? How are the two situations not comparable?

48

Well, for one thing, murder and theft are individual actions, while invasion is a state action, and traditionally, states haven’t been judged using the same standards as individuals…states can tax, conscript, imprison, and execute their citizens, for example, while it’s generally not ok for individuals to do that sort of thing.

Another difference (related to this one) is that there are laws against murder and theft…there’s a greater authority than the individual which will punish them. Ultimately, murder and theft are legal questions. War is, as Clausewitz, reminds us, a political question, carried on by two parties equal in authority, in a state of anarchy, with no controlling legal authority.

Along with that, as individuals, we have legal means to settle disputes. If we are neighbors and have a disagreement over our mutual border, we can go to a judge and each present our survey reports and our arguments, and the judge will decide where the border should be. This is not so much the case on an international level. International arbitration exists, of course, and sometimes is used to successfully settle such disputes, but the large number of irredentalist groups out there shows that is isn’t always successful.

49

So, there is no moral dimension to the actions of governments? If a state undertakes a course of action, there is no standard by which we can say, “This was an evil act,” or “This was a good act”? At what level of organization does this freedom from moral consequence attach? I presume it does not lie solely at the individual level, else we’re going to have to drastically re-evaluate the entire concept of organized crime, just for starters.

50

Well, who is it who’s setting the standard? I mean, obviously, you can call the act good or bad, but you calling it that doesn’t have a consequence, in practical terms, because you can’t enforce that judgement. I’m sure you’ve heard the famous quote by Sir John Harington:

“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Now, as was pointed out, the United Nations charter does prohibit the waging of aggressive war, and the members of the UN are committed to uphold that principle. But, you of course know, that that provision of the charter is honored more in the breach. In fact, in the Nuremburg trials (the only time that people were tried and convicted of crimes against peace), sitting on the tribunal were judges from the Soviet Union, which had committed much the same acts as Germany (having annexed the Baltic States, as well as parts of Poland, Finland, and Romania). So why were the Soviet crimes against peace ok, and the German ones not? Why wasn’t Molotov sharing a cell with von Ribbentrop and Zhukov with Jodl? The world was willing to accept Soviet acts of aggression and not German acts, because the Soviets were part of the group that won the war.

You might say that the world has agreed that acts of conquest are inherantly wrong, but that’s clearly not true. The world has agreed that acts of conquest are wrong if some more powerful country cares enough to try to stop you, which is the way it’s always been.

51

So, “moral” is whatever you can get away with? If there’s no one to punish you for an act, there’s nothing wrong with committing that act?

52

Are you a moral relativist or a moral absolutist?

I tend toward being a moral absolutist, but an ethical relativist. In that I do believe that there is a moral constant, as defined by God, that is the optimal way to act. We are of course free to deviate from it. If we did not deviate from it, laws of man would be entirely unnecessary, as would all of the institutions that derive from such laws. We do not as such act in accord with this, therefore we must have some sort of leeway. This is where I become an ethical relativist.

As a moral absolutist, I believe that murder is always and absolutely wrong. As an ethical relativist, I can justify murder at the hands of soldiers in the name of the overall good of ‘my people’. Absolutely war is immoral, it is always wrong. Once we engage in it, we are building our sense of justification on a flawed moral framework, so we must adhere to our morals as best we can given the imperfection of our goals.

So with the Crusades, how do we justify using the remnants of the Imperial apparatus of Rome to fight the Muslims, under the banner of a man who said not to concern oneself with worldly things, to devote oneself completely to the purification of the spirit?

By what criteria do we judge the moral efficacy of any war? What makes a good war or a bad war? How do we even judge the criteria we used to judge the war? Where do our cultural biases come in to define such a judgment?