The cruel fight for the Holy Land

When Islam was dislodged from France and receded into Spain, Western Christendom began to think about lost lands at the other end of the Mediterranean. But the Crusades left a bitter legacy both in relations between the churches of the East and the West and between Islam and Christianity.

As Europe and the Church emerged from the Dark Ages at the close of the first millennium, the arguments and divisions of earlier centuries had taken hold, and Christianity was no longer united. Dissenters, including the Monophysites and Nestorians, had been condemned at earlier councils, and had been marginalised by the Church. In the face of the onward march of Islam, Christianity was further divided and weakened by the Great Schism of 1054, brought about by the West's introduction of the filioque to the Nicene Creed, and Eastern resistance to the intractable claims of Papal supremacy.

The relationship between Christianity and Islam since the Middle Ages is often seen in the West in terms of military conflict, particularly the Arab conquest of the Holy Land rather than the Crusades, and in the East in terms of the Arab contribution to Western culture, including architecture, mathematics and the preservation of Greek philosophy and medicine. But from a Western perspective, it is often forgotten that Islam managed initially to incorporate Christian communities successfully into Muslim society, while Christian Europe continues to fail in its attempts to accommodate Muslims within Christendom. However, today's antagonism does not reflect earlier relations between Christians and the Arabic-speaking world.

Prior to the rise of Islam, the settled Arabs of the Roman East were rapidly assimilated into the empire. By the third to fifth centuries, Christianity had become widely accepted among Arabs. Under the tutelage of the Arab client kings of Byzantium and imperial administrators, Arabic was elevated from a spoken language to a literary language, and a distinctly Arab Christian culture developed in the fifth and sixth centuries, with Arab bishops, Arab saints, and, perhaps, Arabic liturgy and religious poetry.

But in 637, five years after the death of Muhammad, the Patriarch Sophronius surrendered Jerusalem to Caliph Umar, and less than two years later died of a broken heart. In the city that was once the very heart of Christianity, the Dome of the Rock was built with the skills and crafts of Christian artisans, some from as far afield as Constantinople. Christians in the East soon learned, at a cost, how to live with their Muslim conquerors.

The early Christians considered Islam a Christian heresy, while Muslims saw Christianity as an heretical distortion corrected by Islam. The great theologian John of Damascus (circa 660-749), had been a childhood friend of the future Umayyad caliph, al-Yazid. He had a discerning knowledge of the Quran, and argued that Islam was a heresy formed through Muhammad's ill-assorted contact with Christians and Arians. Indeed, Islam addresses a number of debates current in Christianity at the time, including the unity of God, the nature of Jesus, the controversy over images and icons in worship, and the place and role of priesthood.

In the century coinciding with the Umayyad rule, no fewer than five Syrians and three Greeks - refugees fleeing from Islam - became Popes in Rome. But Islamic rule in the lands at the heart of the Bible story caused no fear in Western Christendom while those rulers were Arabs. The West was stunned by the ravages in Jerusalem by the Caliph al-Hakim in 1010, but the military response to the Islamic presence in the Holy Land came only after the Great Schism in 1054 and following the capture of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks in 1076.

The first Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 with the object of securing the safety of pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem. Antioch was captured in 1098, Jerusalem was taken in 1099 and Godfrey was crowned King of Jerusalem in 1100. During the next 20 years, scores of Latin states were established in Syria and Palestine, and the Crusaders' Latin Kingdom lasted until 1187.

The Second Crusade, provoked by the fall of Edessa in 1144 and proclaimed by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1147, ended in failure in 1187 with the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, who was neither an Arab nor a Turk but a Kurdish chieftain. The Third Crusade (1189-1192) failed to recapture Jerusalem, while the Fourth Crusade (12021204) was diverted to Constantinople with the approval of Pope Innocent in an effort to assert papal claims to universal primacy. Christians rather than Muslims had become the enemies of the Crusades, the New Rome was sacked and the Emperor and the Patriarch fled. But the Latin Empire eventually collapsed in 1261 after the French, Flemish, German, Venetian and Genoese Crusaders and conquerors fought each other.

During the fifth Crusade, Francis of Assisi had a famous encounter with Saladin's nephew at Damiettea, when he prayed for the Sultan and disavowed the sword. But the Crusades remained a Papal obsession, and Crusaders were granted indulgences and given the status of martyrs in the event of death in battle, penances at home were lifted, debts remitted and pardons pledged.

As the Crusades petered out and the papacy came to accept that the Holy Land was to remain in Muslim hands, canon lawyers for the first time began to discuss human rights and the protection of minorities. Nevertheless, the Crusades left a bitter and lasting legacy. There was the obscenity of the Children's Crusade in 1212, and the cruelty of the crusades against heretics, especially the Albigenses in southern France. In the east, the Crusades left a permanent trauma in the soul of Arab Christianity, who were treated better under the rule of Muslim Arabs and Turks than they were by Latin Crusaders, and who continue to suffer from the Western equation of Arab with Muslim.

When the Turks under Sultan Muhammad II captured Constantinople in 1453, almost four centuries after the Great Schism had divided the Orthodox East and the Latin West, the divisions among Christians appeared to have been sealed. Pius II died in 1464, having failed to organise a further Crusade. Western Christianity, having long abandoned early Christian pacifism, would take a long time to recover from the bloodshed it had inflicted and to develop theories of the just war and human rights. Bishop Kenneth Cragg says that Western Christianity, "in cherishing the sacrament of places . . . cruelly betrayed the sacrament of communities".

Today's most bitter legacy of the Crusades is that Christians and Muslims, who tried to understand each other with intellectual honesty at the time of John of Damascus, often remain enemies in many parts of the world, from the Philippines to Lebanon and Sudan.

Patrick Comerford is a writer on theology and church history and an Irish Times journalist. Contact: theology@ireland.com

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