Foss - People of the First Crusade : the truth about the Christian-Muslim war revealed

In the eleventh century the Christian lands of western Europe were in trouble. Afflicted by repeated invasions from north and south and east, by the collapse of internal order and safety by the often cynical and always brutal oppression of the weak and the poor, by the laxity and ignorance of the clergy, and by the unrestrained tyranny of feudal war-lords, life in the West was (in the words of a famous philosopher) nasty, brutish, and short. And the problems were compounded, in the mid-century, when a new influx of raw, rough, nomadic soldiers recently converted to Islam - the Seljuk Turks - overran Jerusalem and the Holy Land, began to throw back the borders of the Byzantine Empire, and thus threatened to inflict severe damage on the territory of the West and on the body of Christendom itself.

All this was known and lamented in the West. Thoughtful people, particularly in the Church, for many years had clamoured for reform. But all the prayers, the sermons, the condemnations and the appeals had amounted to little until, in November 1095, Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in the French town of Clermont. For his largely ignorant and unreflective audience, the pope threw a harsh light of criticism on the failings of western society. But in doing so he also illuminated a way out of this anarchy. He pointed out, for the lawless feudal bandits of the West, a path towards the East where military prowess and grasping ambition might be reconciled with a work of Christian charity. The recapture of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the infidel Muslims was a redemptive task worthy of men who might then truly call themselves soldiers of Christ.

This, in the simplest terms, was what was meant by a crusade. At a stroke, Pope Urban intended to divert the reckless and violent men of the West into the path of righteousness. They could practise warfare to their hearts content, in a holy cause. They could plunder the rich and cultivated lands of the Middle East as much as they wished, well away from their European homelands. They could strike a blow for Christ and true faith, by taking and holding the Holy City and the Holy Places.

The proposal made by Pope Urban was accepted by the West - by both knights and ordinary pilgrims - with riotous enthusiasm. But it was a delicate and incalculable business to add religious idealism and a symbolic event - the capture of Jerusalem -to a familiar policy of warfare and conquest. Though it powerfully motivated the people, it was a dangerous conjunction leading to unforseen consequences. Where did the rights of Christ end, and the interests of self begin? How much was owed to faith, and how much to ones own posterity? These were puzzling questions for unsophisticated folk.

The first interest of this book is to follow the adventures of these crusaders in all their puzzlement, to see how rogues discovered conscience and how others, who should have shown conscience, became rogues. And in the middle were very many who were sometimes heroes and sometimes villains. For the history of this crusade is as much a study in character as a story of warfare. In hope and ignorance the crusaders met, and often transcended, fear, pain, disease, want and suffering, leading in so many cases to an early death. What pattern of life and thought made them endure? They also met an enemy - the men of Islam - that was as courageous, selfish, suffering and religious as themselves, but even more disorganized. In a word, the Muslims were just as puzzled as the Christians as to their real aims, and the epic meeting of these two religious cultures, so full of surprises and doubts, is the second interest of this book.

This fateful clash between Christianity and Islam still teaches a lesson for our own times. For the attitudes and prejudices that were expressed in the First Crusade, on both sides, became the basic currency for all later exchanges, even in our own day, between the two great monotheistic faiths of Mohammed and Christ.

At the beginning of the tenth century the bishops of Rheims lamented the state of their age in words that echoed, more or less, the sentiment of all western Europe. The wrath of the Lord is breaking out before our very eyes, they wrote. Towns are emptied, monasteries razed, holy houses of God burnt, farms and fields desolated. Everywhere the strong oppress the weak. Like the fish of the sea, men devour each other blindly.

The tale that was told of poor lives seemed a story without end of pain, pillage and death. For ordinary folk, desolation was the lesson of the times. The poor and the peasants, an English chronicler explained, have few friends, if any at all. And this is not surprising, for powerful lords, rulers and landowners, are wholly concerned with worldly things, not with spiritual matters. It is hard enough for a strong man to force a way ahead, to secure even a little prosperity in these bad days - who can spare a thought for the common good? It was a woeful record, but the folk of the West, who could neither write nor read, did not need this book-learning. The history of their suffering was impressed on their lives, not written on parchment.

Silence, isolation, superstition, a profound ignorance put a limit on their understanding of the world beyond their gates, but they knew enough to be afraid. Such is the way with the weak and they began to see - it was a further cause for despair - that their lords and masters, to whom they were so closely bound by ties of land and service and from whom they expected their only protection, were also afraid.

T hey went on, the peasants, in the familiar round of their day. They cut trees, cleared land, planted and harvested. Long ago, their forefathers had been part of certain large migrations, travelling westward from steppe-land and arid zones. No one could remember exactly what made them set out. Warfare, demographic pressure, a change in climate, grazing rights, curiosity, some unspoken ache of the spirit, all these things seemed to throw them westward, driven forward by the rising sun. They wandered until they found space to settle or were halted by some gross feature of the earth - an impenetrable forest, a mountain-range, a strong broad river, a seacoast. The new life that they started in these places was not necessarily better, but at least the usual hardships of the fight for survival were arranged in a different way, richer in interest and in hope.