Books: Give Us Crosses!

A HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES, VOL. II (23 pp.)—Steven Runciman— Cambridge University Press ($7.50).

In the cool stone halls of the castle of Kerak, the barons of the realm feasted at damask-laid tables, and toasted their ladies to the music of Oriental minstrels, A wedding was being celebrated, the marriage of the child princess of Jerusalem to a young knight. Outside, the siege engines of a Moslem army hurled huge stones against the walls, and periodically, the guests left the banquet hall to fight for their lives on Kerak’s battlements. Only the tower in which the bridal pair was staying was not touched by the enemy fire, on orders of the chivalrous Moslem commander, Saladin.

This may read like a pastiche of Sir Walter Scott and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but it was a real, and not an unusual incident in the lives of Europe’s 12th century Crusaders in Palestine.* They were movers of history. Their expeditions wrenched Western Europe from its provincialism and led directly to the Age of Discovery and the Renaisance. But they were medieval men, with a characteristic courage, piety and arrogance which their descendants never ]equaled and have seldom been able to understand. Nowadays, when the West is once again fighting a struggle for its faith and its culture, the Crusaders’ history seems a bit more relevant. Fortunately, it has found a good teller.

Steven Runciman, 49, is a British scholar who wrote his first history essays at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the guidance of the dean of English-language historians, G. M. Trevelyan. He has spent the rest of his life teaching and studying the history of the Middle Ages in Eastern Europe and the Near East. He has traveled widely in the lands he studies, and he can get around linguistically in Greek, Arabic, Syriac and the Slavonic languages. But, like Trevelyan, he believes that history needs good writing as well as sound scholarship. His History of the Crusades, of which two out of three volumes have now appeared, is the clearest and best treatment of the period yet to appear in English.

The demand to expel the Moslems from the Holy Land throbbed in the conscience of Christian Europe through the 12th century, and for many years thereafter. Few places in the West escaped the eloquence of the Crusader preachers. Writes Historian Runciman, describing a sermon of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous of them: “Very soon his audience was under his spell. Men began to cry for Crosses—’Crosses, give us Crosses!’ It was not long before all the [cloth] that had been prepared to sew into Crosses was exhausted; and Saint Bernard flung off his own outer garments to be cut up. At sunset he and his helpers were still stitching, as more and more of the faithful pledged themselves to go on the Crusade.”

For those who survived the trip to Palestine—and thousands died on the way—religious fervor soon had to compromise with political realities. The headlong charge of the First Crusade (described in Vol. I of the History) had established a weak chain of Crusader states in Syria and Palestine—the strongest, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in the south. They were all military states, constantly at war. But they were thinly garrisoned. The average Crusader was essentially a military tourist, and no more than 2,000 armed knights, most of them French, were ever permanently stationed in the Holy Land.

Tangled Convictions. The wars they fought were not a simple struggle of Christian v. Moslem. Disunity prevailed in both camps. A campaign was as often as not a Donnybrook of tangled arms and convictions, with Christians and Moslems on one side fighting Christians and Moslems on the other.

Moslem disunity saved the Crusading states from destruction for the greater part of a century. But disunity among the Christians in the end proved more serious. The Christian conquerors from the West found large colonies of co-religionists in the Holy Land, of the Orthodox, Syrian and Armenian rites. Each variety of Christian regarded the others as heretical and untrustworthy, and acted accordingly. These theological differences, multiplied by the Crusaders’ greed and frequent acts of cruelty, cost them the active sympathy of many native Christians. The great failure of the Crusades, however, was the lack of unity between the Western Europeans and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), whose army, until late in the 12th century, was still the strongest and best disciplined in the world. Working with the Byzantines, the Crusaders might have pushed the Moslems back into Asia. The Western Europeans were never strong enough to do the job by themselves.

Comfortable Burnooses. While the occupation lasted, living was relatively comfortable. The Franks in Outremer—which the Crusading territory was called —adopted luxuries of the East, e.g., linen bedsheets, running water, which were unknown in their cold castles in Flanders and Normandy. They levied tolls on Arab traders, enjoyed Arab music, ate Arab food, and dressed themselves in turbans and burnooses when off-duty. But the climate was unhealthy for northerners, and men who survived the battlefield often succumbed to strange tropical diseases. Most Crusaders died young.

New Crusaders from Europe could never understand the old hands’ tolerance of Oriental life and customs. Moslems got equal justice with Christians in the law courts of Outremer, and the practice of their religion was generally respected. When a Crusader recruit insulted a local Moslem ruler, who was visiting the castle of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem, one of the knights apologized to the sheik, pointing out that the man had just arrived from Europe and knew no better.

In the end, it was largely the recently arrived knights from Europe who ruined the Kingdom of Jerusalem. They used force where diplomacy would have been better, and they never brought enough men with them to make force decisive. While the proud barons quarreled, the Moslems were at last growing united. By 1176 the Emir Saladin made himself master of Egypt and Syria, and turned the full force of his armies against the Crusaders. Europe was far away, and Byzantium was now powerless to help.

In 1187, at the Battle of Hattin, the end came. There Guy, King of Jerusalem, foolishly led his last great army against the Moslems in a disastrous frontal attack, the victim of councilors whose pride would not let them retreat. The Arabic-speaking Count Raymond of Tripoli, when he saw the surrounding Moslem army, shouted, “Ah, Lord God, the war is over; we are dead men; the kingdom is finished.” He was right. Shortly afterward, Jerusalem itself was taken. Although other Crusaders would win victories over the Moslems, they would never march into Christendom’s capital again.

* This one ended happily. The siege was lifted, after a bold resistance, on Dec. 4, 1183.