The Crusades and the Modern World

The Crusading movement was launched by the papacy and its fate remained intertwined with that of the Roman pontiffs. As their role in European politics changed, so too did the movement’s. As Western Europe moved toward the modern world, secular rulers became more independent, and focused more on internal policies.  

The scandal of the Avignon papacy and the Great Western Schism in the fourteenth century severely weakened the papacy, which the Protestant Revolution then completely undermined in the sixteenth. As the pope’s ability to influence Western secular rulers declined, so too did the Crusading movement. Warfare became the province of secular rulers who marshaled their forces solely for personal and national aims rather than for the good of Christ, the Church, and Christendom. Although there were moments of unity during the fight against the Ottoman Turks, the overall response was limited. All in Christendom reveled in the glory of victory, but few endeavored to sacrifice to achieve it.  

The Crusades did not end because modern man saw the folly of the campaigns, as Enlightenment thinkers and modern critics suppose. Indeed, the Crusades remained extremely popular. Both rulers and subjects continued to like the idea of the Crusades, but over time their desire to plan, spend resources, and actually take the cross gave way to other priorities. Ultimately, “the Crusade did not disappear from European culture because it was discredited but because the religious and social value systems that had sustained it were abandoned.”

Myths about the Crusades began during the sixteenth century, as Protestant revolutionaries attacked what they viewed as papal campaigns designed to increase the wealth of the Church. The creation of myths about the Crusades continued throughout the time of the Enlightenment until the present day, when the most prevalent myth concerns the Crusades and Islam. Arab nationalists and Islamic terrorists use the Crusades as propaganda to produce recruits for jihad against the West; Western intellectuals use it to attack the Church. Both groups profit by fostering the falsehood that the Crusades are the source of the modern-day tension between Islam and the West. 

Those who embrace this myth believe that the Crusades have long been remembered in the Islamic world. Akbar Ahmed, chair of the Ibn Khaldun Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., summed up this claim when he commented, “The Crusades created a historical memory which is with us today—the memory of a long European onslaught.” Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and self-described “freelance monotheist,” asserts that the Crusades are “one of the direct causes of the conflict in the Middle East today.”

The historical reality is far removed from the picture painted by Ahmed, Armstrong, and their supporters. The Crusades were largely ignored as an important part of Islamic history soon after the fall of Acre in 1291 and were then forgotten in the Islamic world until the late nineteenth century, only receiving prominent attention in the twentieth. 

The Arabic word for the Crusades, harb al-salib, was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1899 the first Arabic history of the Crusades was written by the Egyptian Ali al-Hariri. It was a time when the Ottomans were forced to recognize the independence of most of their former Eastern European territory. Seeking to find a rationale for the disintegration of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire, al-Hairi, in his book, placed blame not on the internal failings of the sultans and their policies, but rather on the historical “boogeyman” of the Crusades.

It is easy to understand why for hundreds of years Muslims did not remember the Crusades, since they represented a small and insignificant portion of Islamic history. The Holy City of Jerusalem was only in Christian hands for eighty-eight years (from 1099-1187), and the Crusader States survived for less than two centuries. The goal of the Crusades—the permanent liberation of Jerusalem and recovery of ancient Christian territory—was not successful, and therefore Islamic historians neglected the Crusades.  

The modern Islamic attitude toward the Crusades began in the twentieth century as a reconstructed memory of these events and was presented to Muslim communities that had been impacted by European colonialism. Ironically, then, it was the European colonial powers— especially the “nineteenth-century French vision of the Crusades as proto-colonizing expeditions”—that laid the foundation for the modern Muslim interpretation of the movement. Through Western colonization, Enlightenment intellectuals from the very nations that once took the cross birthed the modern Arab re-remembering of the Crusades. 

Arab nationalists thus used the Crusades as a scapegoat for the ills in the twentieth-century Islamic world. The Crusades were presented as the first European colonial efforts, and modern Middle-Eastern poverty, corruption, and violence were blamed on these initial European “invasions.” The modern state of Israel was likened to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, a foreign presence in the midst of Islam. Cultural traditions rooted in this false narrative of the Crusades were reinforced through education in Muslim schools, as “generations of Arab school children have been taught that the Crusades were a clear case of good versus evil,” and the myth that “rapacious and zealous Crusaders swept into a peaceful and sophisticated Muslim world leaving carnage and destruction in their wake” was reinforced.

The Crusades didn't fade away because they were discredited, yet centuries of historical revisionism have convinced many people otherwise. Get your copy of The Glory of the Crusades by Steve Weidenkopf today!