In the Beginning There Was the Holy War. Why?

Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World
by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong, bestselling author of A History of God, skillfully narrates this history of the Crusades with a view toward their profound and continuing influence.

In 1095 Pope Urban II summoned Christian warriors to take up the cross and reconquer the Holy Land. Thus began the holy wars that would focus the power of Europe against a common enemy and become the stuff of romantic legend. In reality the Crusades were a series of rabidly savage conflicts in the name of piety. And, as Armstrong demonstrates in this fascinating book, their legacy of religious violence continues today in the Middle East, where the age-old conflict of Christians, Jews, and Muslims persists.

Chapter 1

On November 25, 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade. For Western Europe it was a crucial and formative event and it is having repercussions today in the Middle East. Addressing a vast crowd of priests, knights and poor people, Urban called for a holy war against Islam. The Seljuk Turks, he explained, a barbarian race from Central Asia who had recently become Muslims, had swept into Anatolia in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and had seized these lands from the Christian empire of Byzantium. The Pope urged the knights of Europe to stop fighting each other and to make common cause against these enemies of God. The Turks, he cried, are "an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation, forsooth, which has neither directed its heart nor entrusted its spirit to God." Killing these godless monsters was a holy act: it was a Christian duty to "exterminate this vile race from our lands." Once they had purged Asia Minor of this Muslim filth, the knights would engage in a still more holy task. They would march to the holy city of Jerusalem and liberate it from the infidel. It was shameful that the tomb of Christ should be in the hands of Islam.

There was an extraordinary response to Urban's appeal. Popular preachers like Peter the Hermit spread the news of the Crusade and in the spring of 1096 five armies of about 60,000 soldiers accompanied by a horde of noncombatant pilgrims with their wives and families set off to the East. They were followed in the autumn by five more armies of about 100,000 men and a crowd of priests and pilgrims. The numbers were astounding for this time. As the first armies approached the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, it seemed to the appalled but fascinated Princess Anna Comnena as though "the whole West, and as much of the land as lies beyond the Adriatic Sea to the Pillars of Hercules [Gibraltar] - all this, changing its seat, was bursting forth into Asia in a solid mass, with all its belongings." To the sophisticated Byzantines it looked like a great barbarian invasion, similar to those which had destroyed the Roman Empire in Europe. The West was invading the East for the first time in the modern period, filled with the aggressive righteousness of a holy war, a righteousness that would characterize its future dealings with the Orient. This Crusade was the first cooperative act of the new Europe as she crawled out of the Dark Ages. It appealed to all classes of society: to popes, kings, aristocrats, priests, soldiers and peasants. People sold all they had to equip themselves for this long and dangerous expedition, and for the most part they were not inspired by lust for material gain. They were gripped by a religious passion. They sewed crosses on their clothes and marched to the land where Jesus had died to save the world. It was a devotional pilgrimage at the same time as it was a war of extermination.

Clearly crusading answered a deep need in the Christians of Europe. Yet today most of us would unhesitantly condemn the Crusades as wicked and unchristian. After all, Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. He was a pacifist and had more in common with Gandhi, perhaps, than with Pope Urban. Yet I would argue that the holy war is a deeply Christian act. Like Judaism and Islam, Christianity had an inherent leaning toward violence, despite the pacifism of Jesus. All three religions are historically and theologically related and all worship the same god. All three traditions are dedicated in some way to love and benevolence and yet all three have developed a pattern of holy war and violence that is remarkably similar and which seems to surface from some deep compulsion that is inherent in this tradition of monotheism, the worship of only one God. The pattern is as regular as a Jungian archetype. For over a thousand years European Christians tried to hold out against this violent tendency and to keep Christianity a religion of love and peace, yet when Pope Urban called the Crusade they responded with a sigh of relief and reproduced the pattern of holy war with an uncanny accuracy. It is as though they felt that at last they were doing what came naturally. In order to understand the Crusades, therefore, as well as the holy wars of today, we need to examine this pattern of violence and try to discover why each of the three religions felt that they needed a holy war.

In about 1850 B.C.E. a man called Abram left his home in Ur of the Chaldees and journeyed to the land of Canaan, the modern Israel. He had been summoned to emigrate by a Divine Being who revealed that he had decided to be the special God of Abram and his offspring. Abram should change his name to Abraham as a sign of his new status, and should make a covenant agreement with God, who in return would bless him and his descendants. The children of Abraham would become a great people and God promised that he would give them the land of Canaan. This event, as it was told centuries later in the Bible, changed the world. It is not only the Jews, Abraham's physical descendents, who see this as the beginning of their history - Christians and Muslims also regard themselves as children of Abraham, as we shall see later in this chapter. Christians and Muslims have persecuted or fought holy wars against Jews at different times in their history, but both claim the Jewish past as their own and see themselves as the recipients of the promises God made to the Jews.

This revelation to Abraham was a revolution in the history of religion. Gradually the Jews came to realize that their God was not just one god among many. He was the only God and all other "gods" were just human inventions. This was an extraordinary idea in the pagan world, where people worshiped many gods and had developed some religions of great power and beauty. The Jews themselves were often unable to believe that there was only one God and often lapsed naturally and easily into paganism, but eventually monotheism, the worship of only one God, was firmly established in Judaism, and later in Christianity and Islam, the two religions that derived from Judaism. These three religions are all deeply related, yet at different times they have fought each other in savage holy wars. The seed of much future strife is found in the original revelation to Abraham. Almost the first words that God spoke when he revealed himself to Abram were: "To your descendants I will give this land" (Genesis 12:7). To make this promise good Abraham's descendants had to fight the first of many savage holy wars for this land, which many Jews today still see as essential to the integrity of Judaism. After all, God spent more time promising Abraham that he would give this land to his descendants than making any further theological revelations about himself. The Holy Land will be key factor in our story.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe that God has revealed himself intervening directly in human affairs in events that become a history of salvation. One of the most crucial of these events was the Exodus, the mythical story of the Jews' liberation from slavery. The Israelites, Abraham's descendants, had emigrated to Egypt in about 1700 B.C.E. Their position there deteriorated so much that by 1250 they were mere slaves. Then God intervened. He told his prophet Moses that he had to act and save his people; he must force Pharaoh to let the Israelites go free and then lead them home to the Promised Land of Canaan. Moses was very reluctant to do this, because it seemed a hopeless task, but God promised to help him. He terrorized the Egyptians by sending cruel plagues, and when Pharaoh remained obdurate in his refusal to free the Hebrew slaves, God sent the most terrible plague of all.

Copyright © 2001 by Karen Armstrong.

About the Author

Karen Armstrong's first book, the bestselling Through the Narrow Gate, described her seven years as a nun in a Roman Catholic order. She has since published numerous bestselling books, including A History of God, Islam: A Short History, Buddha, The Spiral Staircase and most recently The Great Transformation. She is a freelance writer and she lives in London.