The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]

CHAPTER VII. CONSEQUENCES OF THE CRUSADES

[1096-1291 A.D.]

No religious wars have ever been so long, so sanguinary, and so destructive as the Crusades. Countless hosts of holy warriors fell the victims of their own vindictive enthusiasm and military ardour. Fierceness and intolerance were the strongest features in the character of the dark ages, and it is, perhaps, not so much in the conduct, as in the object, of the Crusades, that anything distinct and peculiar can be marked. It was not for the conversion of people, nor the propagation of opinions, but for the redemption of the sepulchre of Christ, and the destruction of the enemies of God, that the crimson standard was unfurled. The western world did not cast itself into Asia from any view of expediency, or in consequence of any abstract theoretical principle of a right of hostility; men did not arm themselves from any conviction that the co-existence of Christendom and Islamism was compatible with the doctrines of the Koran, or that the countries of the West would be precipitated into the gulf of destruction, if Asia Minor were not torn from the Seljuk Turks, and restored to the emperor of Constantinople. But the flame of war spread from one end of Europe to the other, for the deliverance of the Holy Land from a state which was called pollution; and the floodgates of fanaticism were unlocked for the savage and iniquitous purpose of extermination. But popular madness would not listen to the calls of generous policy and lofty ambition. The wish for the redemption of the Holy Land was the feeling which influenced both Godfrey de Bouillon and St. Louis, the first and last great champions of the cross; it was that wild desire which moved Europe for two centuries, and without it the Crusades would never have been undertaken.

The question of the justice of the holy wars is one of easy solution. The crusaders were not called upon by heaven to carry on hostilities against the Mussulmans. Palestine did not, of right, belong to the Christians in consequence of any gift of God; and it was evident, from the fact of the destruction of the second temple, that there was no longer any peculiar sanctity in the ground of Jerusalem. There is no command in the Scriptures for Christians to build the walls of the Holy City, and no promise of an earthly Canaan as the reward of virtue. If the Christians had been animated by the conviction that war with all the world was the vital principle of the Mohammedan religion, then also a right of hostility would have been raised.

As Lord Bacon said in his War with Spain: “Forasmuch as it is a fundamental law in the Turkish empire, that they may, without any other provocation, make war upon Christendom for the propagation of their law; so that there lieth upon Christians a perpetual fear of war, hanging over their heads, from them; and therefore, they may at all times, as they think good, be upon the preventive.” But before they could have been justified on this last-mentioned argument, proof was necessary that the danger was imminent, and that time and circumstances had not reduced the principle to a mere dry, inoperative letter of the law. In the first hundred and fifty years of Mohammedan history, the Mussulmans made continued and successful attacks on the Christians; and the invasion of France by the Spanish and African Moors, seemed to endanger Christendom as a world independent of and not tributary to the Saracens. In all that long period the people of the West might have instituted crusades on principles of self-defence. But as they had acquiesced for ages in the existence of Islam, they could not afterwards draw the sword, except for the purpose of preventing or repelling new aggressions. No dangers hung over Christendom at the time when the Crusades commenced.