Transcript

How does the historical truth of the medieval Crusades compare to the modern myths and legends that surround them?

Join us today as we discuss that question with our guest, Dr. Paul Crawford, Professor of Medieval History at California University of Pennsylvania.

I'm Michael Hernon, Vice President of Advancement at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and you're watching Franciscan University Presents.

Stay with us!

Welcome to Franciscan University Presents.

Today, we'll be talking about the Crusades.

I'm your host, Michael Hernon, Vice President of Advancement here at Franciscan University, joined here in our studios with our regular panelists, Dr. Regis Martin, Professor of Systematic Theology here at Franciscan University, and Dr. Scott Hahn, who holds the Father Michael Scanlon Chair in Biblical Theology and the New Evangelization.

Our special guest is Dr. Paul Crawford.

You have an undergraduate degree from Peru State University, an MA, and a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Wisconsin, and you're currently a Professor of History at California University in Pennsylvania.

Your specialty is the Crusades and the military religious orders, such as the Knights Templar and others, and you have published a number of works on these subjects.

So, we're so glad you're with us here today.

It's a pleasure to be here.

All right, so we're talking about the Crusades, and there's a lot that goes with that.

But first, let's start.

When we say the Crusades, what are we really referring to?

Kind of just define Crusades for us.

Well, I think what most people are talking about when they think about the Crusades are the eight major expeditions to the Holy Land from Western Europe, beginning in 1095 in the 11th century and running up through the end of the 13th century, to 1270. That's not the only set of expeditions that qualify as Crusades.

The English historian Jonathan Riley-Smith has defined a crusade as basically an expedition in defense of Christianity, called by the Pope and with strong penitential overtones.

That covers expeditions to the Holy Land, to Spain, to the Baltic, to Southern France—so much wider than what we might commonly think.

Very much wider, and the time frame was much larger, really.

The time frame for the Crusades should be thought of as running from the 11th century into the 17th.

Wow!

I would say that the last crusade probably was in 1683 with the relief of the Siege of Vienna.

So, let's start with why they were waged.

If they had a penitential component to them, there was obviously a military intervention called for by the Pope.

I think those were the reasons.

Why were the Crusades waged?

There's another English historian who has given a very nice, short, concise answer to that: the Crusades were the long-term result of the rise of Islam because they are defensive expeditions in response to Islamic invasion.

So, a reaction to a provocation.

Very much so, but they've been given a very bad historical wrap.

Yes, unfortunately.

Why is that?

There are complex reasons for that.

A lot of it, I think, goes back to Western self-hatred, really—a rejection of what the Christian West stood for and therefore a rejection of the Christian West's right to defend itself.

Perhaps some of your professors at Wisconsin upheld that view.

I would say that it's complicated, though, by the fact that the Reformation really represents a lot of demarcation.

Because up until the Reformation in the 1500s, there really was a broad consensus among Christians that what was happening was entirely justifiable on moral grounds, through the natural law and on biblical grounds, precisely because they were defensive wars.

At one point, Islam had basically taken two-thirds of Christendom.

That's right.

It was a slow reaction, but it was an understandable action.

I think Luther, because the Pope called for it, targeted that and said that this was really to extend the tyranny of the papacy.

That's when the questioning began.

And then, of course, the Enlightenment represents an even greater disruption.

Yes, very much so.

And so today, we've got from Luther in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, all the way through to modern scholars, really casting aspersions and settling a lot of misinformation.

But, you know, if you zero in on the middle of the 1500s as a kind of flashpoint, or maybe the 1400s, the great primatial sees of Christendom have all been co-opted by Islam, except for Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and then Constantinople.

Only Rome stands, and you would think that the impulse to rally around Rome would be almost irresistible.

Well, there was an impulse to do that, and even after the Reformation, there was a kind of echo of that impulse.

In 1571, after the Battle of Lepanto, which was won by an allied fleet of Venetians, papal forces, and Spanish forces, I think the church bells in England, then Protestant England, were rung in celebration after Lepanto.

But then that was all in Spanish, and even Luther changed his mind when Austria was being threatened.

Yes, at that point, it's no longer Rome, and it's not the Pope; it's getting closer.

Good old German Austria was the great champion of Luther in that particular naval battle, the champion of the Catholic side, right?

Secured a Christendom for the West.

It should be said that during the Middle Ages, there were people who objected to the Crusades, not so much because they didn't think Christendom should be defended, but because they thought it was the wrong approach—a tactic.

Yeah, it was the wrong tactic.

The great Catalan thinker Ramon Llull, for example, wavered back and forth between arguing in favor of Crusades sometimes and in favor of mission activities at other times.

In the end of his life, he was 81, I think, and he went himself to North Africa as a missionary, saying this is what we should do to combat Islam.

What happened was he got his skull stabbed by stones.

There's an interesting parallel when you consider the Dominicans.

They were founded in order precisely to win back the Albigensians in Southern France, but that particular Crusade came to a crashing halt when these wonderful friars walked into these Albigensian villages to preach and to pray and, by example and exhortation, win them back to Rome.

They were simply ignored.

They were ignored, and therefore force had to be used.

The secular arm had to step in.

The Albigensian Crusade is an interesting case study for crusading.

The Church gets criticized for having used force against the Albigensians, against the Cathars, but in fact, there was a canonical reason why they needed to do it and do it quickly.

According to canon law, at least at the time, and I think now still, you're not considered a heretic if you are not the person who instigated the defective beliefs.

The people who had instigated those beliefs that generation was about to die off, so the Church was about to be in a position where it couldn't do anything about it if it didn't act quickly.

You just made a point that I want to go back to for a moment because there is a sense in which Christians who are sympathetic to the goals of the Crusades nevertheless can call into question the strategic value, you know, even presenting from the morality.

Because I think that what shocked me the most in preparing for this show was just how clear and strong the case for the Crusades is.

But practically, from a prudential standpoint, only the first Crusade in the 11th century was a limited success.

Most of the other ones that are typically called Crusades—and even that language is anachronistic because the term wasn't even used by the Christians until really, I think, the 19th century.

It was used in the High Middle Ages, but not in the first century, probably not in the First Crusade.

Well, 11th and 12th—no, it wasn't. Yeah, it became a term of oppression.

Missions, you know, what St. Francis of Assisi is doing in seeking to evangelize and seeking after martyrdom as well, you know, I think is a real exemplary alternative.

It was, but it wasn't very effective.

That's right.

That's right.

And he also preached the Crusades himself in the Franciscans.

But I mean, this crusading spirit, I think, is exemplified in a diversity of ways.

Francis represents one way.

I think taking up arms on behalf of Christendom constitutes another equally legitimate.

Yes, and the thing that's at the core of both of those impulses is Jesus' words: Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Francis and Ramon Llull were doing it in one way when Francis went to talk to the Sultan on the Fifth Crusade.

The Crusaders were doing it in another way, and they very much conceived of themselves as doing that.

This is an important point: they saw the Crusades as an act of love on behalf of other Christians.

You make that point that it was an act of love, but help the modern mind and our sensibilities, and also those who understand what the Church is teaching in just war and so forth.

We say that there was a strong case for the Crusades, but this is the Pope calling for what some would call a religious war.

Walk me through how this fits within Catholic teaching on just war.

It's rather easy, actually.

Just war theory, of course, is the theory that says that there are some wars that are not only just, but it would be unjust not to fight them.

It draws on a tradition going back to Augustine and St. Ambrose.

And St. Ambrose said something very interesting that has always stuck with me ever since I read it, and I'm going to paraphrase it, of course.

He said, if you see someone doing a wrong deed, you see someone using force on someone else, someone acting unjustly to someone else, and you have the means to stop it, and you don't, you're morally guilty of that act that has been carried out by the perpetrator.

That includes force.

If you have the ability to stop an unjust act by force and you fail to do it, you're morally guilty of it.

I think that the Catechism of the Catholic Church says something much the same.

There's a beautiful line in Romano Guardini where he says, I think quite prophetically, that at the end of the day, the sin of Cain and the sin of Pilate are morally indistinguishable.

I mean, to kill your brother—that's murder—but not to intervene on behalf of your brother is equally murderous.

Let me shift this, though, because it's not just an individual responsibility to intervene when you see another individual perpetrating some kind of violence.

I think even more so when you have been entrusted with the responsibility of, say, caring for and protecting your family.

As a father of six and now a grandfather of nine, I have the sense, you know, certainly the shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, but he doesn't lay the sheep down in their lives.

You know, and even better than laying down your life would be laying down the lives of the wolves who are attacking the sheep.

To not do so would be a serious dereliction of duty.

I remember hearing people say when I was in Istanbul, Constantinople, about the conquest, and we had a Muslim guy who explained how merciful the dhimma was—that is, the enslavement of Christians.

It's the payment of a tax, and you're allowed to worship privately.

You can't display anything publicly; you can't share the faith publicly, but you can do it all privately.

And then the tax is raised to the point where Christian families simply can't afford it.

And he said, well, provisions were made, though, and out stepped these two, a couple from Malta, who said the provisions were the firstborn son.

It was shades of Egypt; you forfeited your firstborn son if you couldn't pay the tax.

And they didn't just take a few; they took a lot, and they trained them as Muslim military.

That's the foundation of the Janissaries in Turkey.

And this Muslim guy did not view that as somehow reprehensible?

Well, once the Maltese couple stepped forward and spoke up, he was mum because they were rehearsing the history of the attack on Malta and how the first wave of Muslim militants were the children of the Christians who had been forfeited instead of the tax to be the warriors.

I think that's a crucial point.

So we have the Pope and the Church at the time calling out of an obligation—an obligation to step in—and they did it out of love.

But distinguish a little bit deeper.

Some people cast aspersions on the Christian activity versus, kind of, differentiate the Muslim jihad versus what we would have in a Christian response.

Once again, it's pretty easy to do.

Muslim jihad is a religious obligation for Muslims to extend the area that Muslim law is observed, the Dar al-Islam.

In Islamic terms, it doesn't have to be done by violence, but it certainly can be and very often is.

So jihad is something that is aggressive and expansionistic.

The Christian idea of crusading is exactly the opposite.

It's defensive.

Crusades were never ever supposed to conquer land that had never been Christian.

It is designed to protect Christians who are either under attack or under the kind of dhimma, the kind of servitude that you're talking about, Scott.

It's a completely different kind of thing.

It's a defensive, reactive kind of activity that is, as we've been talking about, designed as an act of love to protect those who need to be protected.

So, kind of really the exact opposite.

The two are very often equated as being the same kind of thing, but they're night and day, really.

And I think that's the crucial thing.

When the Crusades are brought up, it's like, Oh, well, they all were in it equally, and they both have blood on their hands.

It's a very, very different historical case, and that's what you're both making in your writing and your teaching—really showing that.

Stay with us on Franciscan University Presents as we go into some of the myths behind the Crusades.

When I teach my classes on the medieval world and the history of Islam, and I talk about the Crusades, I make sure to mention to my students the positive fruits of the Crusades.

One of which is the expansion of Europe economically.

In particular, there was a huge economic upswing in the High Middle Ages, and there was also this evangelical awakening in the High Middle Ages with the interest in the Holy Land.

There was more interest in reading and living the Gospel, living the apostolic lifestyle, and many more people were much more interested in the imitation of Christ and living life in the imitation of Christ.

So, you see new religious orders founded and even lay apostolic movements founded in the High Middle Ages.

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Welcome back to Franciscan University Presents.

Today, we're talking about the Crusades.

This is something that people do get hit at as Catholics oftentimes.

It's seen in popular films like The Kingdom of Heaven, which contain a lot of historical inaccuracies.

Even a former president, you know, Bill Clinton, talked about some things that were historically inaccurate.

I was going to say problematic, but I think they're really inaccurate.

You know, the quote that we hear—we've already dealt with kind of the myth: Were the Crusades an aggression of the Catholic Church?

And we've already seen that that really is debunked because the reality is it was a defensive maneuver, and it was the Muslims who first attacked.

So, when the Crusades captured Jerusalem in 1099, did the blood really run ankle-deep in the streets, which is an exact quote?

Was it an accurate tale of the massacres perpetrated by Christians?

Because, again, a former president even used that exact quote.

Yes, it did.

The short answer is no.

There's a longer answer.

The short answer is due to physics; it would take far too many people to make it run as deep as President Clinton said it did.

He was drawing on a Crusade chronicle to make that statement, Fulcher of Chartres, but he was using it very clumsily.

You can't take ancient and medieval documents at face value.

You have to know the context that they're writing in, and you have to know the purpose of what they're saying.

Fulcher was writing something that was very significantly an advertising tract, a PR tract, and a little bit of a boastful statement, pulling in and drawing on Old Testament imagery—very consciously drawing on Old Testament imagery of victories that the Israelites had won over their foes and saying, We're doing the same kind of thing.

But no, the blood did not run to the horse's bridles or knees or whatever.

This is all drawn from the Book of Revelation as well; it's from the Old Testament.

But the whole point is to show that the struggle, the conflict, is between evil and good.

Yes, it's not meant to be taken factually or mathematically.

That's right.

And it's very problematic, even if you concede the point that Clinton is making, and it's polemically self-serving.

Something survives, namely the fact that abuses and atrocities have always been committed.

But the principle of abusus non tollit usum (abuse does not negate use) should govern the situation that vindicates it.

The abuse doesn't abolish the use.

We committed countless atrocities during World War II to rid the world of that scourge called Nazism, but nobody invalidates that crusade in Europe, which is how Eisenhower described it.

That's a very good parallel.

But there's something else that needs to be mentioned in terms of that massacre, and that is the laws of war that applied universally to everyone in the ancient and medieval world and really up into the modern world.

When a city is besieged, if it surrenders, then it can make terms, and the lives and, to a certain degree, perhaps the property of the people in the city are spared.

If a city decides to resist and take its chances, then if it falls to storm, everything—the people, the belongings in the city—belongs to the conqueror.

Now, that may be very unpleasant, and I certainly would not want to be present at such an event on either the conquering or the defeated side, but that is the law.

This was the common law.

The Muslims observed it fastidiously, ruthlessly.

When you look at how the Muslims conquered Christian lands for centuries, building up until 1099 when Jerusalem falls, you see a horrendous record that is completely whitewashed and forgotten.

And I think more to the point is this: I think we project our own self-contempt in acting as though this was all, you know, proto-colonialization—that this was our attempt, you know, as the First World to kind of colonize the Third World.

But as you've pointed out, and as Professor Tom Madden has pointed out, Islam was the First World.

The Muslim civilization was the superpower, really, up until about the 16th century.

Europe, through the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, was more like a Third World, and they were the ones who were being colonized by force, you know, with Asia Minor falling as it did in the 11th century and so on.

Yes, and we don't have nearly enough time to list all the Muslim massacres of Christian cities, but just to list two or three: Christmas Eve 1144 in Edessa, the Muslims broke into the first Crusader state and massacred all—they targeted specifically all the Frankish Christians.

It was really an act of ethnic cleansing or genocide; they killed them all.

Two years later, when the Armenian Christians there asked for the Crusaders to come back and save them from the Muslims and rule them, the Muslims came back again and killed all the Armenian Christians.

In 1268, the Muslims took Antioch, the capital of that northern Crusader state, and massacred so many of the Christians there that most of the noble families of Antioch simply disappear from the historical record—they're all dead.

In 1453, the fall of Constantinople saw enormous massacres and rapes of nuns.

I mean, this is all part of the laws of war.

If you're going to criticize what happened in 1099 in Jerusalem, you need to look at the larger record.

You also have to look at Dresden in 1944, the firebombing of the city that did more devastation to a civilian population than Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together for days and nights.

You know, with the calm detachment of a B-24 bomber or whatever, and I am not pro-Nazi in any sense, but when you look at the abuses and when you recognize the fact that this is more than morally questionable—this is reprehensible, morally reprehensible—and the details that you marshal, I think with great scholarly rigor and scruple, you have to see those against the backdrop of a world that is simply vanishing—a Christian world.

It disappears.

I mean, two-thirds of Christendom is gone, vaporized in the space of what, a century or two?

Most of the Mediterranean world is vacated, and the Muslims simply take over; they swallow it whole.

Why wouldn't there be a Crusade to try to win this back?

Well, sometimes people say, Well, it took a long time for the Crusaders to respond.

It took 450 or so years; it took that long for a Crusade to be declared.

But it did not take that long for Christians to counterattack.

Christians have been counterattacking in other ways.

The Byzantines, the Eastern Christians, have been counterattacking repeatedly.

In the 10th century, Byzantine armies got as far into the Holy Land as Nazareth.

Their logistic lines got overextended, and they couldn't make it any further and had to withdraw, but they were trying.

The Italians and the Southern French were trying.

The Spanish were beginning their Reconquista in the Spanish peninsula.

So there are plenty of other earlier examples of Christian forces counterattacking.

It's breathtaking when you contrast, for example, the world of Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries—all of North Africa is Christian.

A thousand years later, none of it is.

What happened?

Well, within one or two centuries, when you look at what Muhammad did in a short life, he was a teacher, but he was a warrior first and foremost—and a very effective one.

And Muslims are not quiet about that; they're very proud and grateful for his legacy.

So when you compare Jesus and Muhammad and the two religions they founded, when Christians simply kill in the name of Christ, they're often betraying their founder.

But when Muslims follow Muhammad in conquering the Dar al-Jihad, that part of the world that has not submitted to the Dar al-Islam, this is something of imitative behavior, and it's something that is virtuous in their understanding.

As uncomfortable as that makes us feel, it's time to grow up and look at them from their own perspective.

This also helped me understand why, really, until the 19th century, Muslims did not think that the Crusaders were these vandals.

They respected Christian warfare as an attempt to kind of match; these were honest adversaries.

Even in the course of the Crusades, the Muslims preferred honest, wholehearted Christian adversaries.

On the Sixth Crusade, the German Emperor Frederick II went to negotiate, not fight, and went out of his way to badmouth Christians to his Muslim hosts.

His Muslim hosts were offended and basically said to him, Why don't you be a good Christian and play your own side?

Fight!

Stop being a traitor.

And again, we want to say that this is not to deny the evils that were happening at the time of the Crusades.

You know, there were views at times by the Crusaders—Pope Urban II condemned that, as did Bernard of Clairvaux.

That's right.

That was not an integral part of the Crusade.

No, in fact, it was a violation of the spirit.

There were plenty of violations of the spirit and of the rules for the Crusades, but that, as you said, doesn't invalidate the principle.

And just to go to another myth here, just in our limited amount of time, I mean, it's often brought up—you know, we just talked about some of the atrocities that are often thrown around that are really missing context and are historically inaccurate.

Was there a motivation, as a lot of people talk about, as a motivation of greed and wealth and trying to capture all of this?

Put that in some historical context.

No, that's a myth.

I could answer that question simply by saying no.

Let me tell you an interesting story that I just discovered the other day from the 13th century.

There was a French nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy, who was a jerk, to put it technically.

He found some young men trespassing on his property, and he executed them just for trespassing.

Basically, the case went to Louis IX, King Louis of France, who was a Crusader king.

Louis tried him, found him guilty, and among other things, sentenced him to three years of crusading, which he had redeemed by paying 12,000 livres, which is a huge amount of money.

I'm telling you that story to show you that by the middle of the 13th century, crusading was viewed as so difficult, so dangerous, and so expensive that it was along the lines of a fine.

So instead of a penitentiary sentence being slapped on him, this was a penitential sentence, which happened very many times to a lot of people.

So people weren't rushing off to make their money in the Crusades; it became a means of atonement.

One of the reasons that people think it was an opportunity to make your fortune is, again, going back to Fulcher of Chartres' chronicle.

The same one that said that Jerusalem's streets ran so deeply with blood also said, Come east and become rich and get a large amount of land to rule.

That's an advertising brochure, and it's probably not much more accurate than the ones you get for condos in Florida.

Yeah, or Join the army and see the world, pretty much.

And they often had to fund it.

In reading all of your articles, there are a number of references to them having to fund it, and upwards of six years' worth of taxes for one of the kingdoms to just fund the Crusade.

On the Seventh Crusade for Louis IX, it's very hard to translate medieval money into modern money, but roughly speaking, for a knight to go on crusade, it would have cost him about the equivalent of $250,000 today.

So they had to do things like this; it was voluntary.

Their lives were at stake.

In the First Crusade, many of them—most—did not return, and the losses are staggering.

The losses are very high; I think you're looking at a 75% casualty rate.

That's pretty high; that's an unbelievable figure.

Well, can you explain?

This is a puzzle that I need to have you figure out for us: the widespread caricature, which strikes me as pretty wicked, because the points you make are transparently obvious.

Why haven't others cottoned on to it, particularly scholars?

You came out of the University of Wisconsin, which is sort of a hotbed of liberal scholarship.

How did you survive that?

And the students you teach now, what do they make of these claims?

Well, the answer to your first question is grazie.

Crusade historians actually have done a rather good job of dispelling the myths.

What we haven't done a good job of is crossing the divide from Crusade history to the public.

We've been trying.

I talked to one of my friends about this a few years ago and said, How long is it going to take us to get the record straightened out?

And he said, Probably never.

What we need is a Sir Stephen Runciman on our side because, I mean, that author in the early '50s basically just swept the world like a literary tsunami.

I mean, everybody was reading him.

And when I sat down and read him, I knew these were lies, but man, can he write!

But they're very well told—beautiful and very compelling.

This Oxbridge English series needs to be rewritten; it needs to be redone by somebody who understands the historical record of the Crusades and can encapsulate that in the same kind of language, the glamour of the lack of history.

Well, he understands how to tell stories and to tell stories very well.

But it's easy to do because the Crusades are full of exciting and beautiful stories.

The anti-Christian approach that you find in Voltaire and then raised by Gibbon and Sir Walter Scott was a minority report.

Now it's beyond a majority report; it's in the water supply and in the air we breathe.

When I went to the Holy Land, it's the only thing you hear from Christians.

As well, there was a group of Protestants in 1999 that went on an apology walk, a reconciliation walk, and apologized for the Crusades to every Muslim, which must have struck the local Christians in the area as a little odd—something grotesque about that.

In a very short few moments here, can you speak to the myth surrounding indulgences being offered for killing Muslims?

Was that accurate?

No, that's your short answer.

There’s no indulgence being given for killing Muslims because that is definitely something, again, perpetuated as part of myth and legend.

Bernard of Clairvaux said in his In Praise of the New Knighthood that it was a good and virtuous act to kill Muslims, is what he meant, if you had to do it.

But it would be better, he said—and he was very careful to say this—it would be better if we didn't have to do it.

We only do this when we have to do it.

Yeah, distinctions like that don't make the headlines.

No, they don't. But it's not even a minor distinction; he was very clear about it.

You hope.

You hope.

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Dr. Crawford, we've been talking about the Crusades, and I really appreciate you unpacking some of the myths.

You mentioned something as we kind of closed out about this apology walk, and I and others may have thought Pope John Paul actually apologized for the Crusades.

Could you help set the record straight?

Sure, he didn't. I like your very short answers.

Well, there are short ones and there are unpacked ones.

He did not apologize for the Crusades; he apologized for things that Catholics might have done that were wrong in the course of the Crusades, which is a very different proposition.

And it wasn't hypothetical; he didn't say might have done.

He acknowledged that there were things that were wrong.

The Crusades themselves were not the thing that he apologized for.

No, they were not.

No, he did not and really could not, because the Crusades were designed and supported and promulgated by centuries and centuries of his predecessors as an activity of the Church stemming really from the Magisterium.

So you really cannot, as a Catholic, say that the Crusades were unjustified.

You can say that this or that action in the Crusades was unjustified, and that's fine, and I can pick some out and tell you about them, although there are probably fewer than most people think.

But you cannot say that crusading as an activity is unjustified; the Church has already spoken on that.

And also a disproportionate ratio of Muslim violence to Christians.

Yes, indeed.

When I was in the Holy Land repeatedly, but earlier this year, it's one of those things where I go with my wife, and I have to brace myself because invariably she will speak up in defense of the Byzantines and of the Crusaders, and I just watch and wait for the blowback because from our own fellow Catholic pilgrims, there's this backlash: This was evil.

This was diabolical; this was satanic.

And then we have to kind of sift and sort and indicate that no, this has got to be something that we revisit because, as a matter of historical fact, there are a lot of misunderstandings.

Yes, there are.

I think that's crucial.

That's why we're here, is that there is so much fact and fiction.

I think in reconstructing an accurate historical record, it helps to invoke this theme of love, of charity, which is, I think, at the heart of the crusading enterprise.

It's animated by love; it's a defense of Christendom, which is not a juridical theory—it's an act of love.

You want to give to the other that which you most esteem: Jesus Christ.

And if he’s already assimilated himself to Christ, then he needs to be protected and preserved.

If Muslims are bent on subjugating him to an alien creed, then good men ought to intervene to protect him.

Yes, and you said something important and interesting there—that is, we need to go back and look at what they thought of what they were doing.

That's right.

And you need to do it carefully because it's easy to take a modern mentality back to medieval sources and say, Oh, I know what they’re talking about, as in the case with Fulcher of Chartres, who said the blood ran this deep, so he must have meant it.

No, he didn't mean it.

Historians need to be careful and respectful, and they need to approach primary sources—the sources of the time—with humility and listen to what those people are saying about themselves.

Why did they do it?

What did they think they were doing?

Why did they think they had to do it?

If you read Crusade history sources with that level of humility and that ability to listen to what they have to say, you will come up with a very different idea about what the Crusades were than what you find in U.S. News and Time.

I would love for you to just unpack that a little bit: what was in the mind of the average person in medieval Christendom, if you will, in light of the Crusades?

What did they think?

I mean, not the PR version, if you will, but what was really in the mind of those?

How did they view the Crusades?

Well, first of all, once again, to keep repeating this, they viewed it as an act of love.

They also viewed it very significantly—and we forget this in the modern world—but they very significantly viewed it as an act of penance.

Crusading and penance, as in penance after confession, was a very significant element of the Crusades.

It was unpleasant, it was expensive, it was dangerous, and it was likely to result in your death.

It was an extension of pilgrimage, per se, as being an act of penance.

This is an armed pilgrimage that is even more dangerous and difficult than an ordinary pilgrimage, and it's a way to expiate the temporal penalties for your sins.

It's a huge sacrifice.

When you consider Chaucer's account of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, those pilgrims knew they'd come back.

Yes, but if you go to Jerusalem to liberate the holy places, the likelihood is you'll never come back.

On the First Crusade, it may have been as many as three-fourths of the participants who didn't come back.

You know, there's a disconnect here that I think can be overcome, at least in part, by an analogy.

Because, you know, I think many of us have read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, and you can see through the eyes of men just like my dad what it was like to fight and sacrifice and to go overseas, either in the Pacific theater or the European theater, and how many lives were lost, but how much more than just life was lost.

I mean, it was a tremendous sort of secular penance.

You can look at it cynically after the fact and say, No, it was just an attempt to kind of spread things American.

You know, we celebrate Veterans Day; we celebrate Memorial Day, and rightly so, because we recognize the virtue of patriotism and the sacrifices.

But when you fight world wars to make the world safer for democracy and economic freedom, that's one thing.

But if you're going to fight to make the world safe for religious freedom and the Christian faith, for the Christian families that have been conquered and captured and enslaved and forcibly converted, it seems to me that is not a lower priority; it's a higher priority.

And that is a good definition of what the Crusades are about.

In your elaboration of this myth—a four-part myth—one of the charges that is typically made is that these guys were governed by cynicism; they didn't believe the prophet.

It was all claptrap.

They were driven by a lust for conquest and money and a kind of weird piety, but all of that is balderdash.

They were driven by this desire to liberate something sacred, something precious, and they were prepared to make a supreme sacrifice of self—their own blood.

I'm working on a biography of a Crusade leader, Renaud of Châtillon, who was murdered by Saladin after the Battle of Hattin in 1187. His grandfather, I believe it was, was the Lord of Danzig and the Count of Chalon in northern France.

The County of Chalon was a significant principality—a county, rather.

His grandfather sold that county in order to raise the money to go on Crusades.

He pretty much permanently alienated it from the family, which is something that medieval nobles didn't like to do, but he did it in order to get the money to go on.

It was a second part of the first part.

You know, Aristotle teaches that property is really an extension of the self.

To divest yourself of your property—that's an enormous depletion.

Yes, and they did it habitually and commonly.

You had to do that to go on Crusade, and everybody knew it.

So when we commit this blackguardism about our ancestors, that's a kind of historical libel.

We slander the dead; we dishonor them.

We don't take seriously the motives that they pretty plainly set out for anybody who is serious about being able to practice his or her faith freely and openly.

To the extent that you want to be able to do it, for anyone who has that orientation, to be negative about the Crusades is an act of ingratitude, I'm afraid.

It's our family history.

It is our family history.

It's part of our lineage; it's part of our understanding, whether or not we have direct descendants who were in the Crusades or not.

It's part of our corporate history.

And we need to understand that, and we need to make sure we defend against fact from fiction.

But you've alluded a little to this, and we've talked about how this broke down.

We have this clear understanding of what should be understood, but historians haven't approached it, and popularists haven't approached it with the humility you called for.

That's probably where it started breaking down in our current understanding.

The cultural understanding today was really broken down.

Is that an accurate way to say that?

Whether it be from the Reformation or other popular works, where did this idea—this true understanding, historically accurate understanding—really start breaking down?

When did that fall apart, really?

Well, as Scott mentioned earlier, the Reformation is a significant moment when it breaks down.

Luther, I think at one point, said—or is said to have said—he'd rather have the Turk than the Pope.

I'm not sure he meant it, but he said some extreme things, which some Byzantines said too.

And Byzantines also said it sometimes, yes.

So it's partly from the Reformation, partly from the part of some—not all—Byzantines' distaste for the Pope.

It comes from the Enlightenment; certainly, Voltaire told a lot of lies, I'm afraid, about the Crusades and about other aspects of Christianity.

What time frame is that?

This is the 18th century.

Voltaire is in the earlier 18th century, and he preferred Islam as a government religion to Christianity.

He was quite clear about it.

But you also get it at the end of the 19th century.

In the 19th century, there were Europeans who were pro-imperialism, and they tended to glorify the Crusades, seeing them as imperialistic activities.

They were wrong; they weren't imperialistic, but they were positive about them because of their misunderstanding.

Any European who was anti-imperialistic was negative about the Crusades, again from a mistaken idea.

And then when you get Marxism and people like Lenin, who were so anti-imperialistic, they looked at the 19th century's understanding of crusading as imperialistic and rejected it.

But it's, again, from a misunderstanding of what crusading is about.

It's never imperialistic.

The figure of Voltaire I think is fascinating because he represents a kind of symbol.

Yes, he's a cynic—really very much so.

I mean, it's the confiscation of the spiritual riches of Christianity by men who no longer believe in Christianity, so they feed off what they regard as a corpse.

And yet it's life-giving, and I resent that.

Somebody needs to go back and exhume Voltaire and try him for these crimes and recognize what an emblematic figure he is because his name is now legion.

There are so many intellectual parasites who advance their own agendas based upon the capital—the little individual capital—on the left of the prison.

I want to also mention that, you know, we had the luxury of having a lunch out at Bob Evans.

Yes, a very pleasant one.

Yeah, and I look forward to more of those.

But you pointed out to me back then the works of, you know, and more recently, The Crusades: Christianity and Islam, a British historian, as well as an American historian, Thomas F. Madden, as well as the works of Dr. Paul Crawford.

These sorts of things are accessible; they're understandable.

There are scholars who write a lot of scholarly articles that you have to be an academic to really appreciate, but they're also breaking it down so that ordinary people who are highly motivated can get this and give it to other people as well.

When I became a Catholic, you know, Mary, the Pope, purgatory, the saints—all of the usual issues, suspects, you know?

But I mean, the Crusades—that's the one thing that Protestants and Catholics agreed on: these were reprehensible, horrible things.

You know, this is like a citadel off in the distance, you know, ruins.

You know, I don't even need to go there.

And when I went there, I'm like, Oh my goodness, yet one more has to fall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Too many put those up as obstacles.

What's the impact of this, do you think?

I mean, this is taking you maybe out of your expertise, but looking forward today at our appreciation—we have presidents who are quoting some inaccurate things.

What does that really mean in our relations and our understanding going forward?

You know, I mean, there seems to be so much with our understanding of Islam, so much with the turmoil in the Middle East.

I mean, I think there's just so much there that this really influences us.

I think it has to do with our ability and willingness to defend ourselves and to defend our faith.

If we don't rediscover that, those who are not willing to defend themselves and their faith and their way of life are going to be run over by people who believe more strongly than they do.

The Islamic world, to do them credit, is generally not deficient in that respect.

But the crucial piece in the puzzle is that you're willing to defend what you regard as defensible.

More and more people don't see Christianity as defensible.

You're also willing to desire that which we don't have, and that is the modicum of a Christian social order.

I mean, it's one of those things where even solid Christians I know don't desire a Christian social order; they want simply the right to kind of privatize it for themselves—okay, my family and my parish—but you know, just give us a sort of Indian reservation, as it were.

It seems to me that something much greater is needed, and that is the social vision that our faith is inherently corporate.

It's public—public and corporate.

Yeah, I think of Jeremiah the prophet.

One Old Testament scholar said that what bothered Jeremiah so much was not that his fellow Jews were in exile, but that they didn't know it—that they were so Babylonianized that they weren't even aware that there was a city, Jerusalem, and a temple in ruins.

Yes, and this is a problem with the demi-status over centuries that can crush communities into a sort of Stockholm syndrome.

So they were always oppressed, and they felt comfortable—or at least were uncomfortable—objecting to it.

I think that's true for many demi-communities today.

They don't dare object to it and have learned not to dare, and they don't want people coming in to object to it either because that's going to make it really bad for us.

Stay with us for the last segment on Franciscan University Presents.

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We've been talking to Dr. Paul Crawford, professor and author, about the Crusades.

This is our final segment.

Regis, could you start off our kind of summations?

Oh gosh, there are a great many things that I'd like to say, and not the least of them is a gesture of gratitude and thanksgiving to you for having come.

You exhibit a learned enthusiasm which I find infectious.

I'd love to have been one of your students.

Of course, I'd be much older than you, but I would find your material highly contagious.

I'm struck by that word gratitude because in the break before this final session, you mentioned—and it's haunted me—this image of going home to God and being sort of accosted by your ancestors who want to know, What did you do to advance the cause of Christendom?

And if your hands are empty, maybe you didn't do anything.

But at least in the classroom, you can give witness to the truth, and the truth, in the end, I think will vindicate you before the councils of eternal judgment.

Another point: Chesterton speaks of the democracy of the dead, that we ought to give votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors.

Our ancestors in the faith—we owe them something, some deference.

And I think by telling the truth about what they did, that I think is the tribute we pay to their memory, and we keep it alive.

One particular memory I have, which came to mind in the course of preparing for this show, was something my great friend and mentor, Fritz Wilhelmsen, did.

He was an assistant professor at the University of Santa Clara in California in the mid-1950s when the Budapest Uprising took place.

He spoke to the student body and galvanized about 1,400 of them to sign on as crusaders to go to Hungary to help their brothers lift this yoke of Soviet tyranny.

Of course, he was refused by the State Department.

We don't need you, and the Eisenhower administration wasn't going to do a damn thing to help Hungary.

But for Fritz, that was a kind of flashpoint.

It indicated that America was not really interested in liberating these captive peoples, and that's very different from the attitude that motivated our Christian forebears.

They were determined to do something, and by God, they succeeded in some modest yet measurable way to make life more hospitable to Christians in the places where, after all, their faith had been founded.

Thank you, Regis.

Scott?

I'm reminded of the homilist who gets up to give a homily on ignorance and apathy, and he says the two biggest problems in the parish are what?

And the fellow in the front row leans over and says, I don't know, and I don't care.

I would add a third one, and that is ingratitude.

I do think the ingratitude is great.

I hope and pray that the ignorance is far greater, and I suspect that it is.

But debunking this myth, I think, has really become something big—not just for me, but for all people who are on the side of truth.

And not just historical truth, but contemporary circumstances.

Historical truth is important in itself to clarify the record and to get it right, and to go back and to recognize these are wars of defense, that these are just wars, these are justifiable wars.

Abuses were committed and all of that, but not quite like what we did at Dresden and other things too.

And yet we celebrate our veterans rightly.

At the same time, we acknowledge some excesses.

But Samuel Huntington speaks of the bloody borders of Islam and how the vast majority of all of the major conflicts that still go on are in Islamic countries.

And it's not a coincidence; it's a fact of history, and it's a moral reality that we have to face.

When we do the historical work, I think we pull back the ivy, and we suddenly are looking at what is this?

It's the front door into a Christian Catholic way of understanding social order and Western history, and it's not coming too soon.

This rediscovery, I think, is going to reawaken in us a desire to go back and get history right, but also to get the present and the future right as well.

We need to recognize that there is a time and a place to fight, and there's a time and a place for gratitude as well.

Your work—and I know Mike is going to mention this—is available on Faith and Reason.

That article on the four myths is indispensable reading.

But what you've recommended in the works of Jonathan Riley-Smith, especially this book The Crusades: Christianity and Islam, I gave it to my 19-year-old, and he devoured it.

My kids are all reading it, so thank you.

Keep up the great work, and let's just share the load.

Thank you, Scott.

Paul?

Well, I think that we've covered most of the major points already.

It's important to think of the Crusades as defensive activities.

They are not offensive; they were never supposed to be offensive.

They were never supposed to be about conversion.

They were the first great Western counterattack against Islam.

They weren't the first counterattack against Islam; as we mentioned earlier in the show, the Byzantines had fought back, the Italians had fought back, the Spanish had fought back.

But these were the first great Western counterattacks against Islamic aggression and the first one that was centrally directed by the Pope.

For anyone who believes that human beings of whatever faith or ethnic background or whatever have a right to defend themselves against aggression—if that's what you believe, and most people do when pressed—then I don't see how you can condemn the principle of the Crusades.

You can condemn this or that thing that happened in the course of them, but you can't condemn the principle because they were an act of self-defense and an act of love, as we've also said, on behalf of the Crusaders for those that they were trying to defend.

The Crusades—we mentioned something earlier in the show that we didn't get time to follow up on—there was really only one truly successful Crusade, and that was the first one.

The Third Crusade was also partially successful; the rest of them are pretty much failures.

As a venture considered as a whole, given its own aims of recovering the Holy Land and protecting Eastern Christians, the Crusades really have to be considered a failure because, in the end, Catholic Christians lost the Holy Land and were driven out of the territories that they had tried to defend.

But they also need to be considered a success in the sense that by creating a counterattack, by driving Islam back for a little while, they managed to buy Western Europe—Christian Catholic Europe—time to grow up.

So that by the time the Crusades had pretty definitively failed by the 15th century, Western Europe was strong enough to defend itself and to preserve its own Christian way of life.

Temporary success, but they did give Western Europe time to survive.

And I think, Regis, you brought up something that is very important that we were talking about during the break.

As modern people, we need to look back at our ancestors and look at what they did.

Look at the fact that they gave up their careers, their treasure, and in very many cases, their lives.

We need to recognize that as Catholic Christians, we believe that we will meet these people someday.

Very many of these people died for their faith, which makes them automatically martyrs, which makes them saints, if I understand my theology correctly.

So if we are fortunate enough to get to heaven ourselves, we will meet them someday, and they will tell us what they did and ask us what we have done in their defense.

I hope that we all have a good answer to give to that question.

Thank you.

We've been talking to Dr. Paul Crawford.

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