The First Christian Holy Wars

by Richard L. Rubenstein (March 2011)

Charlemagne

The Origins of the First Crusade

Pope Urban II

For many reasons, some demographic, others political, and still others religious, the First Crusade was an event waiting to happen. All of the elements were in place when Pope Urban II summoned the Crusade at Clermont. Urban himself was a highly sophisticated French nobleman who had served as Grand Prior of the great monastery of Cluny before becoming cardinal-bishop of Ostia and then Pope. As Prior of Cluny, Urban had already understood the urgency with which men and women sought remission for their sins. As a statesman-diplomat, he also understood the minds and hearts of the military caste and turned to them for leadership in the field.[19]

In our days [God] has fought through Christian men in Asia against the Turks and in Europe against the Moors.[29]

Rival Faiths and Religious Insecurity

Sophisticated Christians did not appear to take very seriously the Jewish claims, which were seldom stated explicitly for reasons of safety, but neither did they entirely ignore them. The literature of ancient and medieval Christianity is replete with extreme defamations of Jews and Judaism that were clearly intended to explain why the Jews did not believe in the divinity of Christ. This vast literature hardly ever contains the suggestion that the Jews were honestly unable to believe in him. Instead, Jewish unbelief is ascribed to some ultimate evil, such as the accusation that they are in league with the Devil. Alternatively, they are described as being so hopelessly blind or vicious that they are incapable of believing what good Christians know of a certainty to be true.

Again using the language of social psychology, the Christian response to Jewish unbelief can best be understood as a form of dissonance reduction, which is one of the ways a group responds to disconfirming items of information that threaten beliefs or values regarded as indispensable to its very existence. As noted, no belief was more indispensable to medieval Christendom than that Christ is the Incarnate Deity who deigned to suffer and die on the Cross for the salvation of humanity. Jews and Muslims challenged that belief simply by fidelity to their respective traditions. Christian dissonance reduction is already evident in the Fourth Gospel where Jesus is depicted as condemning those Jews who do not believe in his mission:

Motives for Tolerance

Jews were by no means the only objects of Crusader hostility. Possessing more enthusiasm than rational planning, the poorly provisioned, first Crusader wave resorted to foraging and pillage along the way to the Holy Land. When the survivors of the first wave and the better-equipped second wave reached Constantinople, there was tension with the Byzantines. Crusader supplies were short, and the Byzantines were more interested in recovering conquered Greek lands in Asia Minor than in capturing Jerusalem. The Crusaders also expected that Emperor Alexius would assume overall command of the expedition he had asked the Pope to dispatch, but the Emperor excused himself claiming he was needed in Constantinople.

The Struggle for Jerusalem

Clearly, the author has mistaken either the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed long ago. In any event, the memory of this massacre endures. Muslims have never forgotten it. Moreover, historical memory plays a more important role in the Muslim Middle East than in the United States.

The Sack of Constantinople

The Albigensian Crusade

The Inquisition

The testimony of two witnesses was sufficient to initiate action against a presumed heretic. The accused often confessed to more than they were asked out of ignorance of what the Inquisitors knew. Those who refused to confess and implicate others were imprisoned and tortured under conditions calculated to force even the most recalcitrant to submit. Unrepentant heretics were condemned to death. One of the harshest instances of Inquisitor justice occurred at Moissac where 210 persons were found guilty of heresy and burned to death. The terror of the Inquisition became so great that threats alone usually sufficed to produce the desired results.

A somewhat similar pattern developed in Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries where tens of thousands led their own version of a religious double life as baptized Catholics and secret Jews. In both the Languedoc region and Spain, Latin Christianity successfully defended its cognitive monopoly where it really counted, in the public sphere.

Conclusion

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm>.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/685ozxcq.asp.

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