Times-Union Guest Column by FSCJ Professor

Times-Union Guest Column by FSCJ Professor

Guest column: Crusades were a reaction to Islamic militarism

President Barack Obama’s comments at a National Prayer Breakfast caused controversy when he compared medieval crusaders with modern ISIS militants.

The president warned Christians against getting on their “high horse” by pointing out that religious violence is not unique to Islam as during the crusades (among other things) Christians “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

In the days following his speech, Christian commentators and conservative pundits expressed outrage at the comparison, arguing either that it was a false equivalency or irrelevant since the crusades took place centuries ago.

CRUSADE HISTORIANS COMMENT
But beyond these critics, another group also expressed concerns with the president’s comments — crusade historians.

Thomas Madden, a historian at St. Louis University, stated, “I don’t think the president knows very much about the crusades. … He seems to be casting them as an example of a distortion of Christianity and trying to compare that to what he sees as a distortion of Islam in the actions of ISIS. … The initial goal of the Crusades was to give back lands to Christians that had been conquered, due to Muslim conquests.”

Similarly, Paul Crawford, a historian at California University of Pennsylvania, has commented, “The comparison is unjustified by the sources of medieval history. … There is no moral equivalence between the crusades and Islamic terrorism.”

Thomas Asbridge, a historian at the University of London, argued that to suggest a causal link between ISIS and the medieval crusades is “grounded in the manipulation and misrepresentation of historical evidence.”

WHAT SPURRED CRUSADES?
Regardless of such comments, I am certain that these leading crusade historians would agree with the president that terrible acts were sometimes committed in the name of Christ during the crusades.

I know of no serious historian of the Middle Ages who would claim otherwise. So then, what were they upset about?

There has been a significant, even dominant, view in crusades scholarship for decades that holds that the crusading movement began at least partly in response to Islamic violence directed toward medieval Christian societies.

Indeed, by the time of the calling of the First Crusade in 1095, Muslim armies had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world, including once Christian North Africa, Sicily, most of Spain and other areas.

MUSLIM ARMIES ON THE MARCH
Significantly, it was in large part because of a period of heightened threat to Christians in the East during the late 11th Century that the First Crusade was called, as Muslim armies had recently conquered much of once Christian Anatolia.

For more than 20 years, Byzantine emperors had been requesting (and sometimes pleading for) military aid from Western Christians until they finally received it in the form of the First Crusade as called by Pope Urban II in 1095.

As retired Cambridge University historian Jonathan Riley-Smith once noted, “The denigrators of the crusades stress their brutality and savagery, which cannot be denied; but they offer no explanation other than the stupidity, barbarism and intolerance of the crusaders, on whom it has become conventional to lay most blame. Yet the original justification for crusading was Muslim aggression...”

This brings us back to Obama’s comments. I found them problematic for reasons cited by Riley-Smith.

The president told critics of modern Islamic violence to get off their “high horse” by citing the crusades as an example of similar Christian violence. Paradoxically the crusades were largely the product of medieval Islamic violence.

While I appreciate the president’s noble intention of giving some degree of solace to the many Muslims who reject the barbarism of Islamist militants yet nevertheless find their faith under attack for actions they would never embrace, modern analogies that equate the Medieval crusaders with modern terrorists unfortunately do little to aid in our understanding of the challenges we face.

Andrew Holt is professor of history at Florida State College at Jacksonville.