Later medieval and early-modern perceptions
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Europe still engaged in struggles against other Muslim enemies (most notably the Ottoman Turkish Empire), the medieval crusades attained a semi-mythic status. Certain, supposedly central, ‘heroes’ were lionised. Godfrey of Bouillon was included, alongside the likes of Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar, among the ‘Nine Worthies’–the most revered figures in human history. Richard the Lionheart was celebrated as a legendary warrior-king, while Saladin was actually widely praised for his chivalric demeanour and noble character. In Dante’s conception of the afterlife, depicted in his famous Divine Comedy (1321), Saladin appeared in the first level of Hell, the plane reserved for virtuous pagans.
However, with the coming of the Reformation after 1517 and later the birth of Enlightenment thinking, European theologians and scholars undertook a broad reassessment of Christian history. By the eighteenth century, the crusades had been consigned to a dark and distinctly undesirable medieval past. The British scholar Edward Gibbon, for example, asserted that these holy wars were an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’, born of religious faith. The French intellectual Voltaire, meanwhile, condemned the crusade movement as a whole, but reserved some admiration for particular individuals–with King Louis IX praised for his piety and Saladin described as ‘a good man, a hero and a philosopher’.7
By contrast, throughout the late medieval and early-modern periods of Mamluk and Ottoman rule, Near and Middle Eastern Islam exhibited very little interest in the crusades. Most Muslims seem to have regarded the war for the Holy Land as a largely irrelevant conflict, fought in a bygone age. True, the barbarous Franks had invaded the Levant and carried out acts of violence, but they had been roundly punished and defeated. Islam, quite naturally, had prevailed and the era of Frankish intrusion was brought to an unequivocal and triumphant end. When ‘heroic’ figures were drawn as exemplars from this period, they tended to differ from those selected in the West. Far less attention was paid to Saladin. Instead Nur al-Din’s piety was applauded, while Baybars became prominent in folklore from the fifteenth century onwards. Throughout these centuries there appears to have been no sense that crusader aggression had sparked a perpetual holy war, or that Frankish atrocities still somehow demanded retribution.8
To understand how the crusades emerged from the dusty corners of history, seemingly to become relevant to the modern world, the academic study and social, political and cultural recollection of these wars since 1800 must be traced in Islam and the West.
The crusades in western history and memory
By the early nineteenth century a broad consensus, informed by Enlightenment thinking, had emerged in the West. Medieval crusaders were scorned for their brutish and misguided barbarity, though occasionally lauded for their bravery. However, attitudes were soon to be tempered by a potent strand of romanticism for a more idealised vision of the Middle Ages. This trend was evoked in the wildly popular and hugely influential fiction penned by the British author Sir Walter Scott. His novel The Talisman (1825), set at the time of the Third Crusade, portrayed Saladin as the ‘noble savage’, gallant and wise, while presenting King Richard I as a rather tempestuous thug. Scott’s book, along with works including Ivanhoe (1819), and those by other authors, helped to engender a vision of the crusades as grand, daring adventures.9
Around the same time, some European scholars began to engage in historical parallelism–the desire to see the modern world reflected in the past–depicting the crusades and the creation of the crusader states in triumphalist terms as commendable exercises in proto-colonialism. This trend started the process of separating crusading (and the very word ‘crusade’) from its religious and devotional context, allowing the war for the Holy Land to be celebrated as an essentially secular endeavour. Writing in the early nineteenth century, the French historian François Michaud published a widely disseminated, three-volume account of these holy wars (along with four further volumes of sources), peppered with misleading statements and misrepresentations of history. Michaud applauded the ‘glory’ earned by the crusaders, noting that their objective was ‘the conquest and civilisation of Asia’. He also identified France as the movement’s spiritual and conceptual epicentre, stating that ‘France would one day become the model and centre of European civilisation. The holy wars contributed much to this happy development and one can perceive this from the First Crusade onwards.’ Michaud’s publications were both a product of, and further stimulus to, potent sentiments of French nationalism–a drive to formulate a national identity that saw the war for the Holy Land dragged into a fabricated reconstruction of ‘French’ history.10
Romanticised, nationalistic enthusiasm for the crusades was by no means the preserve of France. The newly created state of Belgium adopted Godfrey of Bouillon as its hero, while, across the Channel, Richard the Lionheart was embraced as an iconic English champion. Both men were immortalised in striking equestrian statues in the mid-nineteenth century. Godfrey’s image stands in Brussels’ Grand Place, while Richard sits astride his horse, sword raised, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Throughout the nineteenth century the tendrils of interest spread far and wide. Benjamin Disraeli, the future British prime minister, was fascinated by the crusades–travelling to the Near East in 1831, even before he was elected to Parliament; and later publishing a novel, Tancred: or The New Crusade, about a young nobleman with a crusading heritage. The American writer Mark Twain also toured the Holy Land, visiting the battlefield at Hattin, and was much impressed by the sight of a sword, once reputedly owned by Godfrey of Bouillon, which stirred ‘visions of romance [and the] memory of the holy wars’.
In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany went to extraordinary lengths to enact his crusading fantasies. Decked out in mock-medieval regalia during a visit to the Levant, he processed on horseback into Jerusalem and then journeyed to Damascus to pay his respects to Saladin, whom the kaiser regarded as ‘one of the most chivalrous rulers in history’. On 8 November he laid a wreath on the Ayyubid sultan’s rather dilapidated tomb and later paid for his mausoleum’s restoration.11
Of course, not all western study of the crusades in this period was coloured by fanciful notions of romanticism and nationalistic imperialism. Through these same years a strong trend towards a more precise, detached and empirical approach was gathering pace. But even in the 1930s, the French crusade historian René Grousset made comparisons between France’s involvement in the crusades and the return of French rule to Syria in the early twentieth century. And it was the more impassioned and intemperate accounts that exerted most influence over popular perceptions. The potency and potential perils of such facile modern parallelism became apparent in the context of the First World War. In the course of this conflagration, France was granted a mandate to govern ‘Greater Syria’ by the League of Nations–and French diplomats sought to reinforce claims to this territory by citing crusade history.
The British, meanwhile, were mandated to administer Palestine. Arriving in Jerusalem in December 1917, General Edmund Allenby was evidently conscious of the offence which might be caused within Islam by any tinge of crusading rhetoric or triumphalism (not least because there were Muslim troops serving in the British Army). In stark contrast to Kaiser Wilhelm, Allenby entered the Holy City on foot, and was said to have issued strict orders forbidding his troops from making references to the crusades. Unfortunately, his caution did not prevent sections of the British media from revelling in the event’s supposed medieval echoes. Indeed, the satirical English periodical Punch published a cartoon headed ‘The Last Crusade’, depicting Richard the Lionheart looking down on Jerusalem from a hill-top, with the caption: ‘My dream comes true!’ Later, an apocryphal, but nonetheless enduring, rumour spread that Allenby had himself proclaimed: ‘Today the wars of the crusades are ended.’