By Jonathan Riley-Smith
(Columbia University Press New York 2008)
Jonathan Riley-Smith, the eminent English historian of the crusades, published last year a slim volume containing lectures originally given at Columbia University in 2007. In it, Prof. Riley-Smith challenges this consensus among the media, academia, Christian religious leadership and the Muslim world: that the Crusades were an evil, destructive event in history – perhaps even the origin of the current insoluble conflict in the Middle East. In particular, the statements of Archbishop Rowan Williams and the “apology” of Pope John Paul II (which Riley-Smith claims was not in fact such) are key evidence of the thinking of the Western Ecclesiastical Establishment. These contemporary Western religious leaders, moreover, make the further claim that the Crusades are an aberration in Christian history – that they are essentially alien to the Christian faith.
Riley-Smith’s book undertakes to refute these claims. Its first two sections define the correct nature of the Crusades. They were essentially a religious phenomenon – a penitential pilgrimage. There is no evidence that contemporaries viewed them as imperialistic or profitable ventures. There was no exclusive focus on the Moslem world, either: Crusades were called against pagan Prussian and Lithuanian tribes in the Baltic, against the Albigensian heretics and against other Christians opposed to the religious and even political agenda of the Papacy.
The entire logic of the Crusades is intimately connected with the Christian “just war theory”. Indeed, for much of the age of the Crusades the leading just war analysis (following Augustine) was even more supportive of war than its scholastic successor.
The Crusades fit into a pattern of later Holy Wars: the struggles of the Knights of Malta on land and sea, the battle of Lepanto – right up to the siege of Vienna and the Christian reconquest of Hungary at the end of the 17th century.
Riley-Smith illustrates the ongoing vitality of the theology of the Crusade in Christian tradition by Pope Leo XIII’s praise of the past efforts of the Knights of Malta and his support of a semi-ludicrous late 19th century attempt to organize a “Crusader” police guard for Catholic missionaries in Sub-Saharan Africa. To assert that the Crusades form an aberration in Church history and theology is simply wrong. Rather, it is the current theology of Western European Christianity that has radically broken with the consensus that obtained in the Middle Ages and beyond. Riley-Smith points out that up to the end of the 17th century Catholics Protestants and Orthodox were united in support of the ideal of holy war.
European views on holy war and the Crusades began to change radically with the Enlightenment. The new perspective was embodied in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. In them, the Crusaders are depicted as uncivilized barbarians and the Moslems as advanced Europeans of the 19th century. This obviously preposterous view became a new orthodoxy. Riley–Smith points out that the popular 20th century history of the Crusades by Sir Steven Runciman “is almost what Scott would have written had he been more knowledgeable.” By the way, Riley-Smith observes that the level of civilization in Europe and in Islam was far closer in the 12th century than Scott and his successors imagined.
Regarding current Moslem views equating the Crusades with “imperialism’, Riley-Smith shows that they date back no later than the early 20th century. Prior to that, Islam basically had no interest in events outside the Moslem world, They are essentially a regurgitation of one school of the western European thought regarding the Crusades: the predominant “liberal” view of the 19th century. Like the secular nationalism imported at the same time, it is a by-product of the intrusion of the imperialistic West into the Moslem world.
This work is a must for anyone seeking a succinct, informed introduction to the Crusades, the theology that prompted them as well as some insightful views on the present political situation. For the Catholic, it is a useful antidote to the “apologies” and historical and theological distortions of clerics eager to please the secular establishment
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