The Crusades

As a small child, I learned that the crusades were journeys of christian knights to the holy land. Bravery, family, and victory ensued. Of course this isn't true, as I learned later in life. Here's a good article on the subject.

Bound for Jerusalem, the zealots of the First Crusade used some spectacularly grotesque tactics as they marched southward in 1098. After winning a victory at Aleppo in February of that year, a Crusader army took the severed heads of its victims and marched to Antioch, where it catapulted them over the city walls and onto the residents. In December, the Christian army fell upon the people of Ma'arra. Then it ate them. "In Ma'arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled," wrote the Frankish chronicler Radulph of Caen, cited in Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. (The Christian commanders acknowledged the cannibalism in a letter to the pope, who had ordered the Crusade, saying famine made them do it.)

One could say that this is a sign of a dead-end culture wheezing it's last few gasps of power before it expired. But instead something very different happened.

Though the Crusaders were on the ragtag side themselves, their zeal and barbarity enabled them to plow through Muslim states that were weak and constantly at war with one another. Maalouf, who is a Lebanese journalist and novelist, makes an interesting observation in the epilogue to his Crusades book. After 300 years, the Crusaders were ultimately defeated and their principalities destroyed; the Arab world seemed to have won a stunning victory. But then a strange thing happened: The culture of the barbaric Europeans went on to retrench and prosper. Arab culture, which had been at a scientific and artistic peak, slid into decline. Western civilization prospered, moreover, in part thanks to ideas it picked up in the East. The invaders learned Arabic, and through it inherited the learning of Greek civilization, which had not been preserved in Europe. "In medicine, astronomy, chemistry, geography, mathematics, and architecture, the Franj drew their knowledge from Arabic books, which they assimilated, imitated, and then surpassed," Maalouf writes. Centuries later, a handful of Asian states would do the same thing vis-à-vis Western civilization, becoming economic powers that would invent and produce cameras like mine. The Arabs quite naturally did not learn the invaders' languages. "Throughout the Crusades, the Arabs refused to open their own society to ideas from the West," Maalouf writes. "And this, in all likelihood, was the most disastrous effect of the aggression of which they were the victims."

The important thing here? I don't really know. I'm just thinking how embaressing it would be to have to explain to the Pope why you ate people. Just kidding. But it paints an interesting parallel with today - Zealots trying to destroy a civilization. Maybe hundreds of years of warfare can be averted by making sure those countries open up to western ideas, like democracy and the rule of law. Maybe...