The Case FOR the Crusades

I’ve begun re-reading Rodney Stark’s Gods Battalions. It is such a refreshing read, correcting so much of the lazy scholarship which has historically marked the modern day presentation of The Crusades including that of the most notable scholars such as Carl Erdmann. These lies have been repeated by such notables as former President Obama, who at the 2015 Prayer Breakfast equated violence in modern Muslim terrorism with violence in the Christian Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries – the problem being that the Crusades followed Muslim attacks on Christian lands for well over three centuries, hardly the case with today’s largely unprovoked Muslim attacks.

Again, “the Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The Crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims.” (Stark p. 248)

Illustration of the Battle of Yarmuk by an anonymous Catalonian illustrator (c. 1310–1325)

Far from being unprovoked, the Crusades only began after more than 300 years of non-stop Muslim aggressive rapes, pillaging, and plundering against the Christian world – places and battles such as Yarmuk, Qadisiyyah, Alexandria, Nahavand, or Constantinople; essentially unprovoked Muslim attacks on the Byzantines and Persians that utterly destroyed the latter, the Muslim invasions of Sicily, Sardinia, and Southern Italy, Guadalete and Aquitaine, part of the Muslim Arab and Berber invasions of Spain and France, etc. It was following all of this and more that finally moved the Byzantine Emperor to write the Pope, asking for military aid.

 

A few years earlier, the Caliph of Egypt("the mad caliph") destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, along with many other Christian churches and sacred sites throughout the Holy Land. Muslims murdered and enslaved Christian pilgrims. Weighing the known historical evidence, Stark concludes, “In any event, mass murders of Christian monks and pilgrim were common … These events challenge the claims about Muslim religious tolerance” (Stark pp. 84–85). The Pope and his preachers alluded to these numerous incidents, exhorting Christian knights to defend their fellow Christians.

Did the Crusaders go east to get rich? Hardly—going on a crusade was an expensive undertaking, requiring an expense of roughly 4-5 years wages for each individual knight. “Nor were the Crusades organized and led by surplus sons,” writes Stark, “but by the heads of great families who were fully aware that the costs of crusading would far exceed the very modest material rewards that could be expected; most went at immense personal cost, some of them knowingly bankrupting themselves to go” (Stark p. 8).

This is a book I most notably recommend for those whose understanding of the Crusades have been poisoned by the current stream of intellectual deception in public institutions of “Higher Learning.”

And for others, it’s just an exciting historical read for those who enjoy history.

*Quotes are taken from Rodney Stark’s God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

**Excerpts taken from a review of God’s Battalions by Lee Duigon at https://chalcedon.edu