The First Holy War
During the Crusades, East and West first met--on the battlefield
The First Crusade, in which wide swaths of the Holy Land were seized by Latin Christians, is the only one that can be considered a European victory. Crusades thereafter were either catastrophes or barely successful attempts to preserve European strongholds in the Middle East known as the "Latin kingdoms." But the Third Crusade is the best remembered, perhaps because of the personalities involved. Like Richard the Lion-Hearted, the handsome and temperamental king of England: Though known today as a paragon of chivalry, Richard was a merciless adversary. The son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and England, he was already a veteran warrior and strategist when he arrived in the Holy Land in 1191 at the age of 33. He took a different view of war from Saladin's. After one battle, he had the captured men--16,000 of them, according to William of Tyre's occasionally inflated account--beheaded within full view of their own armies. For 16 months, Saladin and Richard battled across the parched plains of the Holy Land. Finally, ill and leading an exhausted army, Richard negotiated a truce with Saladin and headed home. He never returned.
Colonial West. But Richard did come back in the popular imagination--if in a different guise. Marching into a Jerusalem captured from the Turks in 1917, a British general, Sir Edmund Allenby, proudly declared "today the wars of the Crusaders are completed," and the British press celebrated his victory with cartoons of Richard the Lion-Hearted looking down at Jerusalem above the caption "At last my dream come true." The colonial powers glorified the Crusaders as their ideological forebears.
At the same time, Western expansion into the Middle East embittered Arabs. "For [Muslims], imperialism is a dirty word, and they turned the Western memory of the Crusades on its head and demonized it," says Jonathan Riley-Smith, a historian at the University of Cambridge in Britain and author of The Crusades: A Short History. Angry Muslim nationalists adopted the Crusades as a convenient metaphor. It still works. "Since the late 19th century, Western imperialism and Zionism were portrayed as a modern crusade," says Hebrew University historian Benjamin Kedar. "This is why the topic is so timely in Arab political discourse."
Undoubtedly, George W. Bush had a different sense of the term in mind after September 11 when he told the nation "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." But Bush's statement resounded like thunder in the Muslim world. "It was precisely the worst word he could have used--it allowed bin Laden and others to conceptualize the nature of the struggle into resisting Christian and Jewish invaders and point out the hostility of the West to the Muslim world," Ahmed says. "Crusader lore is only part of this rage, but it's a significant part."
This rage is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning just over a century ago, when memories of the Crusades were revived as a historical analogy to colonialism. Before Europe's colonial expansion into the Middle East, Muslim chroniclers paid little attention to the Crusades. "In actual historical reality, the Crusades were far more important for the West than for the Muslim world," says John Voll, associate director of the Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
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