”Christ may have abhorred violence, but warfare, killing, bloodshed and even genocide nevertheless remained familiar parts of Christian exegesis.”
In 1”Christ may have abhorred violence, but warfare, killing, bloodshed and even genocide nevertheless remained familiar parts of Christian exegesis.”
In 1095, Pope Urban II received a summons from Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, asking for help with removing Muslim Seljuk Turks from his lands. In a speech later that year at the Council of Clermont, he demanded the Christians of the West to wrest the Holy Land from the barbarian Turks. The volunteer response to his request was good, but it sure became more fervent when the Pope added further enticement by saying that an oath to take the cross and go to the Holy Land to fight would also include a remission of sins.
As it turned out, there were a lot of people in need of sin forgiveness, in fact, too many. People who would not be much use to fight were showing up in droves. Helen of Troy may have had the face that launched a thousand ships, but Pope Urban, not nearly as beautiful, certainly launched a thousand feet.
The first crusade was wildly successful, and each crusade that followed, oh yes there were many more, found a much stiffer response to their invasion of the Holy Lands. I do think that the Turks and the Arabs, who stood in the way of the Frankish armies, were progressively better prepared to fight. Eventually, it all came to an end with the fall of Acre in 1291.
What Dan Jones will do is take you through the crusades one by one and introduce you to the movers and shakers on both sides of the conflict in each period. You will have moments where you will feel like you are at a cocktail party full of strangers, and someone is taking you around to introduce you in lightning fashion to what feels like hundreds of people. Never fear, unlike the cocktail party, Jones supplies you with crib sheets at the beginning of the book that lists all the characters and a quick synopsis of why they are important.
I’ve never been a big fan of the Crusades, though I have, over the years, read quite a bit about them. I think of them as an incredible waste of lives and resources, and the fact that they are spurred by religious zealtry is not a big selling point for me either. The church, as time went on, used the Crusade banner to eliminate problems in the west as well, like the Cathars in France. For those who read Kate Mosse’s book Labyrinth, you already have a working knowledge of the insidious motivations behind that massacre. There were kings and counts who did not want to go to the Holy Land, where it was likely they might die or return terminally ill or, worse, experience an embarrassing defeat, who jumped at the chance to fulfill their duty to the cross somewhere closer to home.
Despite my misgivings about the subject matter, this is Dan Jones we are talking about. I’ve enjoyed his other books on the Plantagenets and the Templars. I’ve also relished his TV specials, especially The Secrets of the British Castles which became a Sunday morning event. With Jones at the tiller, I found myself getting caught up in the actions of the Crusaders. There were many moments where his descriptive powers had me enthralled.
When the Crusaders tried to invade Egypt, they ran into a Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea type situation. Not the first part where the Jews escaped between the towering walls of water, but the second part where the water descended upon the chasing Egyptian army. The Egyptians might have learned more from the Bible than the Christians.
”On that night, sluice gates, canals and irrigation ditches along the river, designed to regulate the floodwaters, were all thrown open and the land on which the crusader army stood simply disappeared, turned in a matter of hours from rock-hard, sunbaked soil into a deep, sucking, swamp. Those of the rank and file who were drunk or simply asleep drowned in their tents. Panicked pilgrims and infantry who woke and tried to scramble aboard boats overloaded them so they sank. Camels and mules carrying weapons, treasure and food were swept away.”
Can you imagine? I would have more sympathy for the Crusaders except they had tried this same thing a few years before with similar results. If you are going to invade Egypt, you need to pick a very, very dry year.
There were complete bonehead situations, like the Egyptian campaign, but there were also ingenious moments as well. I particularly enjoyed the story of Sigurd of Norway fighting pirates who have holed up behind piled stone in front of caves. He had his men haul two small boats up the side of the mountain and then lowered them down, full of men, who promptly dispatched the pirates from above. Seriously? Talk about thinking out of the box. What is most impressive is that Sigurd was around 18 when he dreamed up this plan.
How about when the Muslim assassin snuck into the tent of the crusader King Edward the First, and Edward not only fought him off but killed him? It reminded me of when Andrew Jackson used a cane to beat a would be assassin to the ground. Edward was, without a doubt, everything someone would want in a king. He was tall, even referred to as Longshanks. He was intelligent. He was ruthless. He was a winner.
Jones did not forget about the women. There was Melisende, queen of Jerusalem, who rose to power through opportunity, but also through great ability. There was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who actually went on crusade with her husband Louis VII. It proved to be the end of her marriage. She split the sheets with Louis and promptly hopped into bed with the English king Henry II. If you haven’t read much on Eleanor, you are missing out. She was a remarkable, self-confident woman who soon bedeviled Henry even more than she did Louis. One of my favorites was Anna Komnene, who wrote a book called Alexiad that celebrated the life of her father Alexios, but in the course of telling her father’s story, she also captured many important moments during the crusades. She was, in some cases, an eye witness to these events.
In later chapters, the Mongols appeared on the scene in the 1240s. ”Over that time many people had tried to stand in the Mongols’ way, and plenty more had simply held their hands up and surrendered. Anyone foolhardy enough to resist usually ended up like the Christian army that now lay earless on the Silesian soil: defeated, dead and humbled; left to rot as a warning of the consequences of resisting the most fearsome military machine the world had ever known.”
This would have been a good time, if you were a western king who was sworn to the cross, to come down with a lung rumbling cough that would delay your travels to the East.
368 pages to cover nearly 200 years of bloody history. Jones has a good eye for what a reader will find most interesting, and he doesn’t overload us with dates and names to the point that we feel we are mired in the flooded plains of Egypt. We see incompetence, bravery, grandstanding, squabbling allies, and the emergence of some very competent leadership on both sides. Chaos creates opportunity for some and complete disaster for others. I think I will always be haunted by the thought of those women and children left on the docks of Acre in 1291 as they watched the last loaded boats depart as the castle burns behind them.
I am writing this review on September 11th, and I can’t help but think of a similar disastrous moment as we had to watch people jump from burning buildings in New York because we could do nothing to save them.
”As soon as one conflict subsided, people of faith easily invented another excuse to make war against nonbelievers, pagans, and heretics, or whatever ”As soon as one conflict subsided, people of faith easily invented another excuse to make war against nonbelievers, pagans, and heretics, or whatever they called people of other religions. In the name of a peaceful and compassionate God, the religiously devout found it easy to torture, rob, beat, blind, rape, burn, drown, starve, dismember, or enslave anyone. From infanticide to genocide, no punishment was too great or too evil when directed against someone perceived as a danger to the true religion. Such killing was not a sin; it become a sacred duty, a sacrament that promised the killer eternal rewards.”
Recently, I read Gore Vidal’s novel on the 4th century Roman Emperor Julian, who attempted to bring back the old multi-God pagan system in a world that had become dominated by Christianity. Julian was not interested in replacing Christianity, but merely wanted to allow his subjects the opportunity to worship they way they wanted to worship. It was an attempt at religious tolerance that died with him on the battlefield in Mesopotamia. In fact, Jack Weatherford, the author of this book, mentions Julian as the last time religious tolerance was attempted until the rise of Genghis Khan in the 13th century.
If you practically gave yourself whiplash with the words religious tolerance being said in association with Genghis Khan, you are not alone. My neck is still a bit sore from my own reaction. If I were asked to make a list of famous barbarians, Genghis Khan would be at the top of the list. After reading this book, he might still be on that list but with an asterix. He was ruthless, but he forbade torture. He found it to be a disgusting practice and would put anyone to death who had participated in torturing another human being. He saw himself as a liberator. ”’The great ones among you have committed these sins,’ he explained.’If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you have not committed any sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.’”
Genghis was not devout. He studied all the religions he encountered, but found solace in none of them. He was spiritual rather than religious. His idea of communing with something greater than himself was to climb a mountain, fast, and raise his arms up to the sun and the heavens. After conquering a region, he would generally leave the priests of whatever religion was most prevalent in charge. They were usually the best educated people and best equipped to govern in his absence. Genghis always had a new conquest to pursue and did not want to mire himself down in local politics. He, at times, fought wars on four fronts. The only other time that has happened in world history was when the United States fought on multiple fronts in World War Two.
He was very clear to the priests he left in charge that they were to remain loyal to him and allow anyone to practice whatever religion they wished. If they defied him on either of those fronts, his punishment would be swift and brutal. A few did try, and in some of those cases, he leveled the city and killed and enslaved the population. He treated any religious extremism with the contempt it deserved and killed those who persisted in persecuting those who wished to worship differently than themselves.
There is a barbarian hidden under those silk robes. To him, he wasn’t being barbaric; he was just keeping the peace and protecting the beliefs of all people.
He encouraged his sons to marry Christian women because he felt they made good mothers for his grandchildren. Women were allowed to inherit and own property. His own wives were left to govern many regions with complete autonomy to do what they thought was best. These Christian women became very powerful. He saw no reason why women couldn’t be the supreme leader, and after his death, there were points where women were in charge of the Mongols. He was so progressive in his thinking, and part of his objective by conquering was to create peace.
”Genghis Khan invented himself from the page of his own mind.”
I love it when I read a book, and it completely changes my mind about how I see a historical figure or a historical event. I certainly had no idea of the type of society that Genghis Khan created from the ashes and blood of his conquests. All I knew was that he butchered a lot of people and spread fear and chaos wherever he went. He did those things, but with the goal of uniting everyone under one banner by eliminating religious intolerance and encouraging diverse people to work together to build a society where all had what they needed, and strangely enough, that war would prove unnecessary.
Did his ideas survive him? I’m afraid not. His sons squabbled over the empire, though they continued to be successful at adding more territory to the empire. Things continued to unravel until his grandson Kublai Khan was strong enough to bring the Mongol Empire back together. Genghis Khan came from the humblest beginnings and, by the force of his will, became one of the most powerful leaders on the planet. It is still baffling, given his upbringing, how he became so progressive. I have to believe he was a genius at leadership. He could see beyond preconceived notions and build a society based on tolerance.
”He did not die as a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Taoist, or disciple of any one religion. He died a Mongol. After carefully observing each of the religions known to him and after long conversations with both genuine and fake holy men, he did not condemn any of these faiths, yet neither did he find comfort in any of them.”
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