The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge

Dope cover

Soundtrack for the book review: Veni Creator Spiritus was the Crusades’ anthem, which folks took to singing to pump up before battles and even as they were about to get slaughtered.

In 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II bent history and conjured up the Crusades.

“Whoever wishes to save his soul should not hesitate humbly to take up the way of the Lord, and if he lacks sufficient money, divine mercy will give him enough. Brethren, we ought to endure much suffering for the name of Christ — misery, poverty, nakedness, persecution, want, illness, hunger, thirst, and other (ills) of this kind, just as the Lord saith to His disciples: ‘Ye must suffer much in My name,’ and ‘Be not ashamed to confess Me before the faces of men; verily I will give you mouth and wisdom,’ and finally, ‘Great is your reward in Heaven.”’ And when this speech had already begun to be noised abroad, little by little, through all the regions and countries of Gaul, the Franks, upon hearing such reports, forthwith caused crosses to be sewed on their right shoulders, saying that they followed with one accord the footsteps of Christ, by which they had been redeemed from the hand of hell.

In an oddly weightless 784 pages, Asbridge walks through two hundred years of invasions, sieges and massacres that make up one of the more surreal episodes in world history. Unfortunately, aside from retelling the compelling tale from a wealth of textual sources, it’s a shame that Asbridge doesn’t have all that much to add.

The book is unsatisfying on a number of levels. It underwhelms as military history. Asbridge is strongest on the strategic level of war, convincingly analyzing the overarching motivations of the Popes, the various Christian nobility, and the Islamic rulers. He is decent on the operational level, explaining the various battlefield maneuvers to siege X instead of Y city.

However, he struggles on the tactical level and with some of history’s most dramatic set pieces. Asbridge relies too strictly on historical documents, not branching out more into other sources like the topography of battles, the weapons of war, theological history and common battlefield maneuvers. Perhaps his textual sources, unlike Greek and Roman ones, have lost the Thucydidean bent of trying to get at ground facts. But in the ‘Face of Battle’ Keegan was able to turn fighting from a similar era with presumably similar sources into extraordinary drama in his Agincourt chapter. Asbridge should have given a few battles and sieges a fuller treatment as opposed to making sure each one got its page and a half.

Worst of all, he doesn’t give a rich enough sense of the devotional aspect and motivation for the Crusades. The Christians were absolutely crazy to start this up. It was halfway across the world, giving the Islamic world dramatic advantages of interior lines. States back then didn’t have major incomes — some Kings devoted half of their annual expenses some years on funding these armies that did nothing to enrich their kingdoms. And even when suffering setback after setback, the Christians kept coming at it for two hundred years. Clearly the draw of Jerusalem and the chance to absolve sins was extraordinarily powerful. But it’s a shame that Asbridge doesn’t provide a deeper sense of the worldview motivated men and a surprising number of women to uproot and risk their lives on a quixotic religious war.

Most frustratingly, he even hints at these sorts of insights. For instance, he mentions that at one point when Richard the Lionheart left off a siege of Jerusalem for justifiable tactical reasons, he completely lost the asabiyah of his army who had waited years to stake their lives on entering the holy city. He also hints at how the rise of chivalry made Christian armies harder to command, as individual knights were more focused on gaining personal glory than following orders. But the two sentences he gives on the Children’s Crusade were a particular bummer.

Even Asbridge couldn’t blow the insanity of this period’s anecdotes and fun/horrific facts.

1st Crusade (1095–99)

• I wonder if any scholar has looked into whether Muslim Jihad ideology influenced the pope and other religious thinkers. There doesn’t seem to be any Christian precedent for military martyrdom or an idea of a holy war.
• A eunuch Byzantine general who wore a golden nose after his real one got sliced off
• During one massacre when the Turks were marauding through a camp, “the girls, who were delicate and very nobly born were hastening to get themselves dressed up, offering themselves to the Turks, so that at least, roused and appeased by the love of their beauty, the Turks might learn to pity their prisoners.”
• The importance in this world of relics and how finding the True Cross came to energize the troops. One mystic to prove that he had found the lance that pierced Jesus decided to submit to a trial by fire — he fasted for four days, but ended up dying from his wounds.
• After all the crusaders’ horses died on one campaign, plenty of nights were forced to ride on donkeys so lame that their feet dragged on the ground.
• The Crusaders started to cannibalize on one campaign. From a Frank source: “Our men suffered from excessive hunger. I shudder to say that many, terribly tormented by the madness of starvation, cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of Saracens lying there dead. These pieces they cooked and ate, savagely devouring the flesh while it was insufficiently roasted.” As Asbridge points out, these and other flagrant displays of Crusader cruelty helped compel some Arab cities to surrender more quickly. Some US generals have noted the same impact in Iraq post-Abu Ghraib.
• The Muslims and Christians kept coming up with better and better ways to insult and horrify each other during the long months of sieges. Muslims would carry wooden crosses up to their walls only to piss on them. The Franks once captured a spy and hurled him back into the city in a trebuchet while still alive — he was too heavy and crashed into the wall.
• Once the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, they flipped the Jizyah back onto Muslims and made them all pay a head tax.
• The Assassins’ name comes from everyone thinking they were addicted to hashish.
• The British library has a strikingly beautiful bible that one King of Jerusalem had commissioned for his wife in 1135 (grateful for living in 2017 to be able to within 15 seconds find super high resolution scans).

From the Melisandre Psalter

Second Crusade (1147–49)

• The fall of Odessa woke up Europe and sparked an even larger crusade than the first. As often happens in history — See Toqueville on “revolutions of rising expectations” — only after grave disappointment are people fully mobilized.
• ***When the Assassins wanted to prove their influence to Saladin to persuade him to leave their castle be, legend has it they did it in the dopest of ways. “He was visited by Sinan’s envoy. Once searched for weapons, this messenger was granted an audience with Saladin, but insisted upon conferring with him in private. The Sultan eventually agreed to dismiss all but two of his most skillful and trusted bodyguards, men he regarded as his own sons. The envoy then turned to the pair of guards and said, ‘If I ordered you to in the name of my master to kill this Sultan, would you do so?’ They answered ‘Yes’ and drew their swords, saying, ‘command us as you wish.’ Saladin was astounded and the messenger left, taking them with him. Thereafter Saladin inclined to make peace with Sinan.”
• Saladin has a Christian army dehydrating on the battlefield, and before engaging with them he lit scrubfires. He said that the fires were “a reminder of what God has prepared for them in the next world.”
• ***Saladin after winning the battle above called the two most important Christian generals into his camp. “With the pair seated beside him, Saladin turned to Guy [King of Jerusalem] , ‘who was dying from thirst and shaking with fear like a drunkard’, graciously proffering a golden chalice filled with iced julep. The King supped deeply upon this rejuvenating elixir, but when he passed the cut to Reynald, the sultan interjected, calmly affirming through an interpreter: ‘You did not have my permission to give him drink, and so that gift does not imply his safety at my hand.’ For, by Arab tradition, the act of offering a guest sustenance was tantamount to a promise of protection. According to a Muslim contemporary, Saladin now turned to Reyald, ‘berat[ing] him for his sins and…treacherous deeds’. When the Frank staunchly refused an offer to convert to Islam, the sultan ‘rose to face him and struck off his head…after he was killed and dragged away, [Guy] trembled with fear, but Saladin assured him that he would not suffer a similar fate.”

Gustave Dore

Third Crusade (1189–1192)

• “Any who are healthy, young, and rich cannot remain behind without suffering shame” said one song. For the third Crusade, all the cool kids signed up.
• Richard the Lionheart went out on Crusade with a sword named Excalibur, but eventually sold it to buy some ships.
• Saladin after winning a skirmish took all the Christian dead and floated them downstream into their camp.
• When the two armies were besieging each other at Acre, they had a tacit agreement that if you were leaving your trench to poop, no one would shoot arrows at you.
• One Muslim ship, after being driven back to the beach, was beheaded by “knife-wielding women. A crusader later noted that ‘the women’s physical weakness prolonged the death because it took them longer to decapitate their foes’.”
• To run the blockade of Acre, Muslim supply ships flew crosses, shaved their beards, and had pigs running around their deck.
• Richard the Lionheart promised the King of Cyprus that he wouldn’t put him in irons…so once he surrendered they made silver shackles for him.
• Whenever their was a borderline suicidal thing the commanders wanted them to do, like run up to a wall and remove a boulder, they offered their soldiers two or three gold coins and got loads of volunteers.
• After one battle, a crusader wrote “armfuls of arrows could be gathered like corn in the fields.”

Fifth Crusade

• Crusading by 1200 was more urbanized, leading to more monarchical power, a ‘good christian life’ transitioned from having to constantly seek penitence to interior spirituality over external piety. He argues that the chivalric ethos that came about in this time made individual knights harder to control, as they were more independent and focused on personal glory.
• The pope at the time, to help fund a new crusade, set up donation boxes and promised that contributing would help wash away sins. This was the germ for the growth of indulgences that were a major trigger for Martin Luther.
• St Francis snuck into a city the Crusaders were besieging in Egypt. He went under parley to the Egyptian lines, asking to see the sultan. The troops thought he was a crazy beggar and sort of amusing, so the sultan took an audience. Hoping to convert the city to Christianity in order to stave off further violence, he offered to do a trial by fire…which the sultan politely declined, sending him back to the Crusaders’ camp.

St. Francis trying to put in work

7th Crusade

• The crusaders did a nuts beach landing ala D-Day at Damietta in 1249.

Mamluks (who seem dope and I need to learn more about)

• The Mongols sent the Mamluks an emissary calling on them to surrender. They cut their bodies in half and hung them from Cairo’s gates.
• The Mamluks found a random guy who they decided was descended from the prophet in order to create another Caliph in order to legitimize their reign.
• Beibers comes out looking like the most competent (and cold-blooded) ruler of all the kings and sultans from the era, able to establish a lasting dynasty, stave off the Mongols, and kick out the Christians. He also created his own pony express in 1250. Their system comprised of a “one generation nobility” of slaves trained to be Mamluks, the leadership class of warriors, helped with stability. Their children weren’t allowed to rise to high ranks.

Conclusion

• Religious impulses to focus on Jerusalem. Sort of reminds me of Hitler imbuing Stalingrad with way too much purpose.
• This book came out in 2010, so pre-ISIS. It’s a particular shame he focuses so little on motivation as we really do have a sort of ‘crusading’ army today that I’d like to be able to compare more richly with ISIS.