Richard the Lionheart on his way to Jerusalem by James William Glass, 1850 (public domain image)

(13) CRUSADES

The Crusades – giving religious warfare a bad name for a millennium!

But seriously, the Crusades had everything – not surprisingly, as they took place at the crossroads (heh) of history, three continents and three major world faiths (with almost every variant of sect and some other faiths thrown in).

There’s the Crusades themselves, from which there are a number to choose. Eight or nine of them, counting the more formal crusades identified as such in the Middle East (by subsequent historians), but not counting all the pseudo-crusades or quasi-crusades in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as weird and generally disastrous spinoffs such as the People’s Crusade or the Children’s Crusade. If you throw in things like the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, Northern Crusades, crusades against heretics like the Albigensian or Cathar Crusade – “kill them all and let God sort them out” – and the crusading rhetoric of the Ottoman Wars, then you could easily just compile a Top 10 Crusades.

There’s the wider theme of religious warfare, beyond the crusades to other wars, exemplified by wars fought by, between or within monotheistic religions, such as the wars fought as part of the Protestant Reformation. That theme arguably also extends to wars of modern political ideology or moral causes, including religious or ideological terrorism. It’s not without reason Eisenhower called his memoirs of the Second World War “Crusade in Europe”.

And there’s the metaphorical use of crusade – as well as analogous forms of crusading movements – for ideological, moral or social movements, the paradigm of crusading as a metaphor for military or political campaigns fought for a belief or ideal.

Back to the more formal Crusades in the Middle East, on the European or ‘Western’ side, you have the Roman Empire coming together, in both its major western and eastern successors – the Catholic Church represented by the Pope in Rome answering the call for aid of the eastern Roman empire, which history disguises as the Byzantine Empire.

And answer the call they did, most famously with the knights of military orders – with my favorite the Templars or Knights Templar, which became rich and powerful, but ultimately ran afoul of the French monarchy and the Pope. Also worshipping Baphomet if you believe the medieval gossip.

Of course, the Crusaders were styled more as the Holy Roman Empire, or the founders of that empire, the Franks (despite the Franks increasingly being, you know, French) – and indeed Europeans in general continue to be called some derivative of the term Frank throughout Asia even today.

There were also Vikings, or rather their adventurous successors, the Normans, as well as those scheming Venetians, who ultimately succeeded in diverting the Fourth Crusade to attack their rival, the Byzantine Empire itself (whose claims to the Holy Land were conveniently forgotten by the Crusaders).

That was to prove one of the most short-sighted schemes of history, fatally wounding the empire that had long stood as the southern bulwark of Europe against Islamic invasion. Do you want Ottomans besieging Vienna? Because that’s how you get Ottomans besieging Vienna. Twice

And on the ‘Eastern’ side, you have a whole host of Islamic combatants, kicked off by the Seljuk Turks taking most of what is now known as Turkey from the Byzantine Empire (leading to that call for aid that started the whole Crusades), but most famously personified by Saladin (albeit he was of Kurdish ethnicity).

My favorite in the whole Crusades remains the Order of Assassins, who derived their name from the hashish with which their founder Hassan al-Sabbah doped them up and who in turn lent their name to our term for assassins.

Lacking the force for more conventional military campaigns, the Assassins focused on – you guessed it – targeted assassination as they infiltrated everyone, Muslim or Christian, until they were defeated by an enemy that came from too far away to have been infiltrated, the Mongols.

That’s right, the Mongols pop up in the Crusades, as they popped up virtually everywhere at that time. Even more interestingly, the Crusaders and Byzantines sought out the Mongols as allies against the Muslims.

This lent itself to the legend of Prester John, a mysterious Christian sovereign whose kingdom moved about Asia and Africa, much like the land of the Phantom – playing its part, as the Crusades did in general, in subsequent European maritime exploration and empire.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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