The Crusades in Context

The Arabs have memories just as spotty and biased as our own. Thus with western incursions into Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, they have talked about the Crusades—but in tonalities as if those by now ancient wars had been unprovoked aggressions. That period had never properly gelled in my mind. I thought I’d get myself a broader perspective on this subject.

To sum up my conclusions briefly, the Crusades turn out to have been a relatively brief and not very successful attempt by European kingdoms to counter the massive northward expansion of the Muslim culture. That culture’s penetration was largely successful in the East, less so in the West. In both cases it touched places my family intimately knows. In the west the Muslims conquered Spain where Monique had lived and studied; that thrust penetrated into France; it was stopped at Tours, where Michelle lived for a while. In the East, much later, it reached the edges of Vienna in Austria; thus it had covered all of the places where I had lived in Hungary as a child.

Let’s take a look at this expansion over time. When Emperor Diocletian retired in 305 AD, the Roman Empire had been split in two halves, one ruled from Rome the other from Byzantium. I show a map here from BibleStudy.org (link). The red line indicates the border between the Western and the Eastern (and future Byzantine) reaches of the Roman Empire. In effect this is also a picture of Christendom projected geographically.

Let me next trace the Muslim expansion in cartoon fashion now, beginning in 305. I have the outline from a kid’s site, MrDonn (that’s where one really learns things) (link). The map’s a little clumsy; the Black Sea is a little tilted. Muslim expansion began in the east just about 300 years later (in 630). The Byzantines lost their African holdings as well as the Levant. These thrusts reached well into Byzantine territories so that the Empire had to defeat the Muslims twice (674, 714) just to hold on to Constantinople. In the west the Arabs invaded Spain (then the Visigothic Christian Kingdoms) in 711. By 732 they had penetrated into France, but they were stopped, and rolled back, in the Battle of Tours. I show the situation in 750 AD.

By 1097, two years after the First Crusade (1095-1099) began, Byzantium had lost all of Turkey in the East. My cartoon, as it were, shows the situation before, the next one the situation after the period of the Crusades. Within a year of this beginning, the Crusader States had been established in the Levant and Spain’s reconquest had then begun. The last of the cartoons shows the situation as of 1204, with gains made by Christendom shown in yellow. The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) had recovered parts of Western Turkey (the Empire of Nicaea). My own impression is that both the gains in Turkey and in Spain were ordinary political ventures—reactions to the centuries-long Muslim push north. Only the slender gains in the Levant, the carving out of Crusader States, so-called, were intimately linked to recovering the geography where Christianity had had its founding. But it was a recovery. The Byzantines had once ruled that geography.

Levant? The word’s meaning is “orient,” where the sun rises in Middle French—thus regions east of Rome and Greece. It means the area now occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. The Crusader States were all established in the period 1098-1104. The longest-lasting of these was the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which ended in 1291 after 192 years of rule. Here is a graphic that shows the Crusader States in some detail:

During these centuries the Byzantine empire was also effectively dismembered by the establishments of independent kingdoms from the north (Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria), from the West (Venice, the holder of the Empire of Nicaea), and from the South (the Muslims). But these successor states eventually yielded their sovereignty to the Ottoman Empire, thus another powerful representative of the Muslim culture. Its expansion in stages is shown in the following graphic. Both the last and following maps are from Wikipedia Commons (here and here).

The Muslim culture still rules Turkey, regions south of there, and all the regions of North Africa. The process is still going on—witness attempts by the west not to convert the Muslims to Christianity but to persuade them to embrace representative democracy. All that changes is the same-old. And in 1947 we did manage to reestablish the Kingdom of Jerusalem again, if by another name. Yes. The process continues. And the maps will keep on changing. La Reconquista of Spain, by the way, took until 1300. And the break-up of the Ottoman had to await the end of World War I.

That Peculiar Relationship

As I reached maturity, my thinking about international relations was much influenced by George F. Kennan, a one-time ambassador to Moscow, a sober and rational diplomat, later a marginalized factor in government but an influential academic. He advocated a kind of self-evident doctrine of the spheres of influence. Nations have interests, and they defend these the more important they are to their survival. Defense of territories, their own or adjacent, and defense of resources (access to oil, grain, or the freedom of the seas) being primary interests. Kennan therefore frowned on the pursuit of so-called idealistic ventures like the promotion of freedom and democracy abroad. President Wilson was not one of his heroes. This view pleased me. It was realistic, rational, and marked by a kind of sane humility. Such a doctrine was at the core of George Washington’s foreign policies as well.

Later, over the years, I realized that this straight-forward doctrine based on national interest is deformed not only by idealistic crusades and dangerous temptations of empire (e.g., globalism); no; it is also deformed by a powerful cultural tendency present in international affairs based on collective memory, heritage, and so-called values. This element is what produces irrational, “special,” and “peculiar” relationships—like the relationship between the United States and Israel.

Its roots ultimately go back to the clash between Christianity and Islam, the Crusades. I don’t for a minute blame the Muslims for harking back to it. That peculiar relationship with Israel is a secularized modern version of a clash of cultures that continues still—but disguised by new phrases like…well, like freedom and democracy.

Israel began by waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine; the earlier waves took place under the still prevailing Ottoman empire. Pogroms and persecution in Europe drove Jews to Palestine—and under an umbrella that was at least mildly accepting of all “People of the Book.” The Ottomans were still in charge when Theodor Herzl published his book, The State of the Jews, in 1896. The British occupied Palestine aided by battalions of Zionist volunteers during World War I. In 1917 came the Balfour declaration—projecting, without calling it a state, what Herzl had imagined:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

In such a declaration, I would suggest, the Muslim majority residing in Palestine was viewed roughly in the same way by the British as the American Indians were viewed by the immigrants who had “discovered” America. Under the British Mandate (1920), officially a grant of power by the League of Nations, violent clashes developed between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine. A minority (the Jews had 11% of the population in 1922) of largely European background—but, itself marginalized in Europe—was aiming to consolidate its power over a population that seemed not to register on any international scale to have any weight at all. Later, after World War II, and another rather massive upheaval of antisemitism in Europe, Truman’s support of Israeli statehood, crucial in the U.N., imposed a state on a region the people of which had not been consulted to vote in any plebiscite. So much for freedom and democracy.

The “special” relationship—thus between England and America—helped produce the “peculiar” relationship between America and Israel. I detect nothing resembling “national interest” here. Israel is neither strategically nor tactically important; and most of it, alas, is desert. But what there is, and plenty of it, is a cultural feeling and centuries of lingering enmity. Israel therefore is a modern, secular footprint inside the borders of the Muslim world, a beachhead, as it were, reminiscent of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in crusader days, which lasted from 1099 to 1291. Our being there lacks rhyme and reason, at least as George Kennan might have seen the matter. But then we aren’t rational, are we? So the chaos will keep churning on, the strange dance will continue. We are the big and successful boy of Britain, grown up and mighty. And we have this nasty but willful problem child we tolerate and fund, to the tune of $3 billion a year—much as Saddam Hussein once tolerated and forgave his nasty son Uday.