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The Crusades And The Progress Of Islam
The [rogress of Islam into southeast Europe was generally slow. By contrast, the Muslim advance into the Iberian peninsula was swift but its retreat slow and hard-fought. Islam arrived in the spring of 711 , with an army, initially, of some 7,000 men. They marched inland without a great deal of opposition until, on 19 July, they were confronted by the Christian king, Roderick of Andalusia, on the River Guadalete. Roderick’s claim to his throne was disputed, some of his enemies had already sought support among the Muslims. Two wings of Roderick’s army deserted him, and he was heavily defeated, probably dying in the conflict. Muslim forces moved inexorably northwards and into what is now France, which was also weakened by dynastic divisions. Narbonne fell in 719, and in 732 a raiding party sacked Bordeaux and was advancing on Tours when it was defeated by the Frankish ruler Charles Martel. Narbonne was recaptured in 751: thenceforward Muslim territory in Western Europe was confined to the Iberian peninsula.
The Reconquest Of The Iberian Peninsula
The reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula took seven centuries. According to tradition it began at Covadonga in the mountains of Asturias where Pelayo, a member of King Roderick’s bodyguard, had taken refuge. A party of Arab troops sent to capture him was defeated, perhaps in 718 – the date is uncertain and the entire story comes only from the early tenth century. It is certain, however, that a Christian enclave developed in Asturias, which gradually extended its borders south. At the same time Charlemagne, King of the Franks (768 – 814) was pushing into eastern Spain – not always successfully, as the romance the Song of Roland and the battle of Roncesvalles (778) bear witness. Charlemagne’s empire broke up after his death, and the Frankish conquests in Spain became petty kingdoms of their own.
In the reconquest perhaps the most decisive battle was not the last, the capture of Granada, entered by Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife Isabella of Castile on 6 January 1492, but Alfonso VIII of Castile’s victory at Las Navas de Tolosa on 16 July 1212. In the campaign which led up to the battle Alfonso had been supported by the Pope, who regarded it as a crusade and called upon all Christian monarchs to cease squabbling until this crusade was over. The Castilian king was indeed joined by some French knights, though the battle itself was fought mainly by Castilian and Aragonese forces. After Las Navas de Tolosa, though the Muslim retreat was slow, it was sure and by 1252 no independent Muslim kingdom was left: Murcia, Niebla and Granada were all at least nominally under Christian suzerainty.
The First Three Crusades, 1095-1192
In contrast, the effort of Christian knights to capture Palestine, seized by Muslims in the eighth century, met with no permanent success. The crusading ideal was born partly out of piety, the desire to go on pilgrimage, and partly out of a need to support the Byzantine Emperor against the onset of the Turkish invasion. Turks had replaced Arabs in control of the Holy Places, and their rule over Christian communities in Palestine was possibly harsher than that of their predecessors. Against this background in 1095, at the end of the Council held at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II urged knights to stop fighting each other and fight Turks instead. He asked them to support Christians oppressed by Turks, and promised the remission of all sins – the origins of the ‘crusading indulgence’ – should they set out for Jerusalem with the right dispositions.
The First Crusade was relatively successful: Jerusalem fell in 1099. By that time the crusaders had already set up independent states: the Principality of Antioch, which lasted from 1098 to 1268, and the County of Edessa (1098 – 1144). Godfrey of Bouillon took charge of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099 – 1187 and 1229 – 1244). Other parts of Asia Minor taken by the Christian armies were handed back to the Byzantine emperor.
In 1144, however, Edessa was recaptured by the Turks, and a new crusade was launched, though it had little success. It was the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187 that occasioned the Third Crusade. En route to Jerusalem the English King Richard I occupied Cyprus, and established the Kingdom of Cyprus: this crusader state survived until 1489, though beyond that the crusaders achieved very little.
The Later Crusades
In 1198 Pope Innocent III appealed for another crusade, the Fourth. Venice contracted to ship the army to Egypt but when only a third of the expected numbers arrived in 1202 and the payment could not be raised, they helped the Venetians capture the town of Zara, on the Adriatic coast, from the King of Hungary in return for their passage. They also promised to help restore Alexius IV and his recently deposed father Isaac Angelus to the Byzantine throne. After an assault on Constantinople in 1203, Alexius himself was overthrown in early 1204. The penurious crusaders then sacked the city, many of its valuables – including relics – finding their way to the West. A Latin Empire was established at Constantinople, which lasted until 1261.
Among the later crusades was the crusade of Emperor Frederick II in 1228 – 1229. In the following year he negotiated a treaty with the Egyptians for the restoration of parts of Palestine, including Jerusalem, to Christian control, in which it remained until 1244. Despite his tenacious commitment to the crusading spirit, the first crusade of King Louis IX of France (1248 – 1250) ended with a humiliating defeat at Damietta in Egypt. He died of disease during a second crusade (1270) against Emir Muhammad I of Tunis.
Though there were other crusades (including a disastrous ‘children’s crusade’ in 1212) in the thirteenth century, they achieved very little apart from hardening Muslim attitudes against Christians.
The Crusades and Their Aftermath
Many complex factors went into the call of Pope Urban II for a crusade against the Muslims, who since 638 had occupied Jerusalem. For more than four centuries Christians had been allowed to practice their religion freely in that city. In 1076, however, Jerusalem was taken by the Seljuk Turks, who were said to have desecrated the holy places of Christianity and treated the Christian population with brutality. Pilgrims returning from Jerusalem brought sad news of their fellow Christians there. Although the notion of avenging these wrongs and regaining the holy city for Christianity had been seeping into western consciousness for some time, it was not until the preaching of such monks as Peter the Hermit of Amiens that popular opinion began to rise in support of such an effort. Encouraged by an appeal for assistance from the emperor Alexis I in Constantinople, Pope Urban II promised his help and sent out the call for the first crusade.
At the Council of Clermont in 1095 the Pope was greeted with great enthusiasm when he called for an international crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the infidels. Europe at that time was generally ignorant of the lands of the east, whether Christian or Muslim, and was intolerant and xenophobic. Narrowness of mind met with religious zeal for the liberation of the Holy Land, driving the Franks to a near frenzy of enthusiasm and excitement. Virtually for the first time since the early spread of Islam, except for some movement against Muslim-held territories in the Iberian peninsula, Christians were in a position of reacting offensively and not just defensively to Islam. It was a heady venture, combining centuries of pent-up resentment against the Saracens with the hope for spiritual regeneration both of the individuals who dedicated themselves to the venture and for a morally lax Christendom itself. It was supported eagerly by the medieval papacy and by the feudal knights and commoners alike. Many of the crusading efforts were grossly misguided, however, and like the ill-fated “Children’s Crusade” in which numbers of youth were sold into slave markets, they ended in disaster. But in the beginning, however, at least in the eyes of the west, there were crucial victories and the temporary attainment of the prize of Jerusalem.
The first significant group of crusaders to arrive in Palestine, consisting primarily of knights and others from France and Italy, set out in 1096. They moved through the lands of the Byzantines, who despite the emperor’s plea for help greeted them with extremely mixed feelings and offered support and aid out of self-interest rather than enthusiastic approval. In March of 1098 the crusaders captured Antioch in Syria, and by July 1099 they were finally able to claim Jerusalem. The victory, unfortunately, was accompanied by a vicious and cruel slaughter of Jews and Muslims in the city, chronicled by both Christian and Muslim writers. Many Muslim writers referred to the arrival of the Christians not as a crusade but as a Frankish invasion, and they described the carnage of the Christian massacre of Muslims, including many religious leaders and Sufi mystics, as the acts of savage and cruel western barbarians. The sack of Jerusalem is often said to be the effective beginning of many centuries of an active mutual hostility between east and west that was rarely known in earlier days.
During the tenth century the Byzantines, taking advantage of political disorder in the Muslim lands, had declared war against Islam and gained back much of northern Syria with the hope of recovering Jerusalem. When the Fatimid caliphate was established in 983, however, the tide began to turn and much of the territory taken by the Byzantines was returned to Muslim hands. The violent attack from the west in the form of the crusading armies took the world of Islam by surprise. In a general state of political disunity, it was to be almost half a century before the Muslims gathered their forces to move against the Christian invaders in a call for jihad or holy war. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, a monarchy established under the leadership of Baldwin of Edessa, was established partly because of the prevailing disunity of the Muslim world under the Seljuks, the Fatimids, and the waning Abbasid caliphate. The Muslims attempted to restrain the invaders, but the crusaders were able to spread and consolidate their power in the principalities of Edessa and Antioch and finally the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This conquered territory was referred to in the west as “Outremer” (over the sea). The principality succeeded well for some time, but when the Turks moved into Edessa in 1144, an appeal was made for a second crusade. An army consisting of the rulers of Germany and France set out in 1147, but after an unsuccessful attempt to capture Damascus they were forced to return home.
By this time the Muslim Turks were gaining in strength, while the Christians were starting to lose ground. Crusader zeal was giving way to luxury and waste and territorial squabbling on the part of the Christian rulers. The death of Amalric I, king of Jerusalem, to whom no successor seemed worthy, came at the time of the rise to power of the Ayyubid general Saladin. In 1187 the Christian hold on the Holy Land was effectively ended when Saladin defeated them at Hattin, although they continued for some time to maintain a small portion of the area. The Muslim leader moved swiftly to gain control of most of the other territories held by Christians, and finally he regained Jerusalem for Islam nearly a century after the first Christian invasion. Records of the time indicate that Saladin’s treatment of the Christian population was humane and reasonable, in notable contrast to the way in which Christians had earlier dealt with Muslims and Jews upon their arrival in Jerusalem. Although he returned the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Greek Orthodox custody, a number of churches were turned into mosques, and Jerusalem clearly was again a Muslim city.
The loss of the holy city prompted a third crusade from the west in 1189. Accompanied by much dissension within and slaughter without, these crusaders gained little except for Christian possession of coastal towns in Palestine and free access to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims. Further struggles represented in the fourth, fifth, and final sixth crusades continued until the Mamluks, who had taken over control of Egypt from the weakened Ayyubids, finally drove the crusading Christians from all of Palestine. Throughout the two centuries of active conflict, members of the eastern church, Byzantines and Arab Christians, were caught in a terrible middle position. Although part of the crusader rhetoric in the west had to do with freeing the eastern Christians from the yoke of Islam, actual encounters with the Byzantines led to increased political and cultural hostility between the co-religionists. When the Franks moving through eastern Christian lands from Hungary through Greece to Syria and Palestine were not met with aid and support, they had no compunctions about looting and plundering. Christian Arabs were never any more sympathetic with, or loyal to, the Frankish kingdom in Palestine than they had been to the Byzantines. All parties to the years of conflict — Romans and Byzantines, eastern and western Christians, Christians and Muslims —too often thought of each other as barbarians and frequently had those prejudices confirmed in the reality of hostile interaction.
Baldwin, king of the Latin Kingdom, was known for his humane administration, and for many Muslims life under the Franks was no worse and perhaps better than they had known previously. The earliest of the crusaders, who then became the long-standing inhabitants of the Latin Kingdom, were generally more tolerant of the native population than the newer arrivals and tried to maintain more supportive relationships. Those more recently arrived were intent on expanding Christian territory and thus on seeing the Muslims as the Saracen enemy. Often the new arrivals forced their co-religionists who had become “native” to revoke existing treaties made with the Muslims in order to aid their aims of expansion.
Nevertheless, as in Spain, the two communities of Christians and Muslims attempted to cooperate and coexist, although they constituted two separate societies with their own laws and administration. Battles were pitched, but those who were not engaged in fighting continued to live normal lives. Muslims and Christians traded with each other, rented properties from each other, and generally carried out their commercial activities uninterrupted. Christians controlled the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, but they allowed Muslims to sail their ships with the appropriate passes. Piracy and pillaging continued as ever, of course, with all parties participating to some degree in looting and taking prisoners to sell on the slave markets.
During the two centuries in which the Christians occupied Palestine, there was a constant pattern of shifting alliances. Muslim rulers were played off against each other, and Franks were sometimes in treaty with one, sometimes with another. This gradually changed as the disarray in which the first crusaders found the Muslims was replaced by a more united front. Many prisoners from among both Muslims and Christians were taken, and elaborate negotiations often were made for their release. Trading in prisoners was an active industry, with many never returned to their original homes. Women prisoners in particular were victimized, often being taken into domestic service upon release, taken as wives or concubines, or sold into slavery.In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a crusade to liberate the Holy Land, especially the city of Jerusalem, from the Muslims. One of the leaders of the First Crusade was Godfrey of Bouillon (ca. 1060–1100), who was elected first ruler of Jerusalem. He became the hero of two French Chansons de Geste dealing with the Crusades.
This fourteenth-century illustration shows Muslims defending their city against the Christian invaders.
Crusades
In 1168–69 the Zangid prince Nur al-Din ordered woodworkers in Aleppo to make a splendid minbar for the al-Aqsa mosque at Jerusalem in anticipation of his reconquest of the city from the Crusaders. His successor, the Ayyubid ruler Salah al-Din, installed the minbar in the mosque after his conquest of the city in 1187. The minbar, one of the finest examples of medieval woodwork, was destroyed by arson in 1969.
With the religious warfare initiated by the Papacy in 1095 and pursued actively for the next two centuries, the Crusades sought to confront the rise of Islam by restoring Christian control over Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher. Crusading also encompassed Papal authorizations for campaigns designed to extirpate heresy and paganism in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century as well as southern France and Italy. Historians are, however, divided between “traditionalists,” who designate as Crusades primarily the campaigns in the Holy Land and the East, and “pluralists,” who place special stress on religious crusades throughout Europe. We will deal with Crusader campaigns in the Holy Land.
The term “Crusade” is derived (through a Romance language or languages) from the Latin word crux (cross), a symbol prominently displayed on the military regalia of Crusaders. Many Muslim chroniclers of the medieval era preferred “Frankish invasions,” a term that used the Arabic word al-ifranj, designating specifically the French but often applied generally to Westerners.
Muslims and others in the Middle East regard the Crusades as invasions by Europeans motivated by greed and by scorn for Islam, establishing a paradigm for the perception of future Western incursions into the Muslim world. European colonialism and the modern “war on terror” are seen by many as extensions of the original Crusader impulse.
Historical Prelude
In 638, the Muslim armies of the caliph ʿUmar secured a series of victories that led the Patriarch Sophronius to surrender the keys of Jerusalem. Though a variety of Christian sects and communities survived under Muslim rule in subsequent centuries, the leadership of Eastern Byzantine Christendom based in Constantinople requested assistance from Rome in the eleventh century to defend against the Seljuk Turks, who were accused of disrupting the travels of medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land. Prominent Western historians such as Hans Eberhard Mayer question whether the Seljuks attacked pilgrims, but there were incidents in which other Muslim groups harmed unarmed Christian travelers en route to Jerusalem. More significantly, in the late eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks had wrested most of Asia Minor away from the Byzantine Empire.
Even without Seljuk expansion and provocation, western Christians were growing more assertive in the international arena and had overcome several long-standing obstacles to civilizational resurgence, including attacks by Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, and Maghreb Muslims from the south. Growing population, agricultural output, trade, and movements of people, including the expansion of saintly pilgrimage routes, may also have contributed to Europe ’s renewed confidence.
In 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called for a combination of warrior commitment and pilgrim piety that would restore the Holy Land to Christian rule. The Pope had five initial aims:
- Curtailing the internal warfare that had wracked parts of Europe by
directing military activities outside Christian communities; - Asserting Papal supremacy over secular kings who had recently challenged papal authority over such matters as lay investiture;
- Ending the disruption of pilgrimages;
- Healing the East-West schism, which had been made official in 1054, by assisting Constantinople to regain control of cities such as Antioch and perhaps bringing Eastern Orthodoxy back into the Roman fold;
- Continuing to reverse the expansion of Islam, following Iberian Muslim defeat in Toledo in 1085, which secured northern and central Spain for Christians, and the Norman defeat of Muslims in Sicily in 1091.
History Of The Crusades
Crusader campaigns are traditionally identified by historians by Roman numerical titles, Crusades I–V, or, in some accounts, Crusades I–IX. Though conceding that the numerical titles are too neat and despite many variations, most scholars will not dispense with this classification system. Historians frequently list the five Crusades numerically and then add the two crusades of King Louis IX and the final defeat of the Western invaders in 1291 known as “The Fall of Acre.”
The First Crusade, 1095–1099
Leaders of this Crusade promoted an ideal that combined saintly pilgrimage with chivalric warrior values, although it was marked by atrocities from the outset. Rogue bands of ill-equipped Crusaders, for example, sacked several cities of the German Rhineland and massacred thousands of Jews in 1096. Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz, Archbishop Hermann III in Cologne, and eventually the Papacy itself fiercely denounced the Crusader orgy of terror in the Rhineland.
Jews and Muslims fought together, though unsuccessfully, to repel invading Crusaders at Jerusalem. As Crusader forces poured into the breached fortresses of Jerusalem in 1099, Muslim women and children were hacked to death, and Jews perished in a synagogue fire set by exultant Christian warriors. By 1109, the Christians had established four Levantine Crusader states (also known by their collective French name, Outremer (overseas): the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Tripoli.
The Second Crusade, 1145–1149
Edessa was the first place to have been seized from Muslim control by the Crusaders, and it was the first to fall. In 1144, Imād al-Dīn Zangī, the Seljuk Turkish ruler of Mosul and conqueror of Aleppo, met Christian talk of holy war with a new spirit of Islamic unity and jihād. The Second Crusade was called by Pope Eugenius III and the Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux to reverse the gains of Zangī: its attack on Damascus failed.
Although murdered in 1146 by a disgruntled slave, Zangī had inspired a new tradition of counter-Crusaders led by his son Nūr al-Dīn and his Kurdish general Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, known in the West as Saladin. Saladin had unified Egypt and Syria, effectively surrounding the Crusader states. His forces took back Jerusalem in 1187, securing his legend as a hero and chivalric figure who honored treaties and treated even his enemies.
The Third Crusade, 1189–1192
Probably the most legendary of the Crusades because of the participation of three major European monarchs — Richard the Lionheart of England, Philip II Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire — the Third Crusade sought to reverse the triumph of Saladin.
This crusade delivered only modest gains, a treaty with Saladin allowing unarmed pilgrims access to Jerusalem and Crusader control over Cyprus. In the early phases, the septuagenarian Frederick Barbarossa drowned crossing a river in Anatolia. “Richard then decided against attacking the Muslim forces holding Jerusalem. He preferred to negotiate a treaty with Saladin, who retained control over Jerusalem but allowed access to Christian pilgrims. His forces did seize Cyprus, providing the Crusaders an operational base that might prove valuable in future wars.
The Fourth Crusade, 1201–1204
With the ascent to the Papacy in 1198 of Innocent III, who stood at the zenith of medieval Papal power, Europeans remained determined to reverse the victories of Saladin. The previous crusade had established the primacy of sea power in transporting Crusaders to the Levant, as overland travel had resulted in tremendous losses from disease and from attacks during the passage through Anatolia. As far back as the First Crusade, ill-provisioned Christian Crusaders wracked with starvation had resorted to cannibalism by pulling slain Turkish troops out of swamps near Maʿarrah, a ghoulish scenario that figured prominently in the chronicles of Raymond of Aguilers and later in Muslim oral traditions.
During the Fourth Crusade, the Byzantine emperor had agreed to pay substantial sums to Venice for supplying ships for fighting and transport. When the emperor failed to deliver the promised payments, Crusader armies received permission to sack the great city of Constantinople. This poisoned relations between the Christian East and West, with some of the city ’s inhabitants averring that they would prefer to live under the Turkish sultan than submit to Crusader rule. The rampant pillaging further tarnished the honor of the Crusaders in the view of Muslims.
The Fifth Crusade, 1217–1221, And The Crusade Of Frederick II, 1228–1229
Accusing the Venetians of having hijacked the Fourth Crusade, Innocent III sought to restore Papal control of the Crusading movement in 1213 with the bull Quia maior, a document that also stipulated the conflict with Islam as the movement ’s primary raison dʾêtre.
The Fifth Crusade tried to reorient Crusader strategy by attacking Egypt to gain access to Jerusalem. When the Egyptian ruler al-Kāmil Muḥammad al-Malik offered the city of Jerusalem to the Crusaders during 1219 in exchange for ending the siege of the Egyptian city of Damietta, the papal legate Pelagius refused, believing that his forces could achieve a greater victory. This bold refusal backfired when al-Kāmil in 1221 breached the levees of the Nile, flooding the Crusaders bound for Cairo. Al-Kāmil then reached an agreement in 1229 with the invading Frederick II, King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, allowing Christian rule over most of Jerusalem for the next ten years. Muslims opposed this concession to the invaders, and certain Crusaders railed against the provisions forbidding them from fortifying the city ’s walls. In 1244, Muslim forces took back control of Jerusalem.
The Crusades Of Louis IX, 1248–1254 And 1270
Louis IX brought the considerable resources of France to support his Crusaders but was unsuccessful in his attempt to subdue Egypt, and his forces eventually had to ransom him from his Muslim captors. During the 1250s, he reinforced fortifications in the Crusader-held towns of Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa, and Sidon; but his invasion of Tunis in 1270 failed, and he and many of his troops succumbed to disease.
In 1258, the Mongols rampaged through Baghdad, destroying a city that many regarded as the jewel of the Islamic world. The Mamluk general Ẓāhir Baybars halted the march of these nomadic invaders at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260.
The Fall Of Acre, 1291
Baybars and his successors obstructed the Mongols, a people once thought invincible. Baybars exhibited a ruthlessness shocking to many Muslims who had accepted a measure of coexistence with Christians and Jews. During 1268, he sacked Jaffa and then ran riot in Antioch, where thousands of women and children were put to the sword in what historian Thomas F. Madden considers the greatest atrocity of the Crusades.
In 1290, newly arrived Crusader troops in Acre killed several Muslim merchants. When the Christians declined to turn over to the Mamluk authorities the soldiers responsible for the murders, alleging that the merchants had provoked the attacks, the Egyptian sultan Qalāwūn assembled one of the Crusade era ’s largest armies to retake Acre. The military orders of Hospitalers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights made their last stand. Acre fell to the Mamluk forces — as did the rest of Louis IX ’s carefully constructed fortifications throughout the region — and the age of the Crusaders in the Holy Land was over.
Results Of The Crusades
In his three-volume history of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman asserts that among the most devastating results of crusading was its damage to Byzantine civilization, which was weakened and subjected to further Islamic penetration. Early twenty-first century historians have countered Runciman by observing that Islamic expansion may have been crucial to halting the Mongols who, if unchecked, could have delivered fatal damage to Byzantine and Latin Christian civilizations.
Meanwhile, the Europeans ’ introduction to the Mongols forced them to rethink their civilizational assumptions. The philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (d. 1219) observed that before the Mongols, Europeans believed that Islam represented perhaps a third or half of the world, and Christians close to the other half. With an empire stretching from Beijing to the borderlands of Bulgaria, the Mongols gave Europeans a sense of their shrinking status in the world. As has been documented by the medievalist R. W. Southern, Bacon suggested that Christians would have to become familiar with many more languages, cultures, and peoples in order to spread the Gospel. Others retorted with calls for redoubled holy war, a more resolute militarism, and fanaticism to subdue Christianity ’s teeming enemies.
The Crusades left a lasting impression on the Muslim world. The brutality of their campaigns, particularly in comparison with the noble reputation of Saladin, continues to color Muslim perceptions of the Christian West. Historians sympathetic to the Christian West on occasion rebuke Islamic scholars for their fiercer condemnation of Crusaders than of the bloodstained Mongols, who set fire to Baghdad, killed 90,000 inhabitants, and tossed the caliph in a sack to be trampled to death by teams of horses. But key Mongols converted to Islam and expressed horror at their cousins ’ destruction of Baghdad as a seat of learning. Crusaders generally felt no remorse, and it was only in the late twentieth century that Pope John Paul II issued an apology to Muslims and Jews for the desecration of their holy sites and killing of whole communities.
The Muslim world often views Europe ’s later colonial conquests as a continuation of the Crusader impulses, beginning with the conquistadores in the New World, many of whom had been profoundly influenced by the reconquista in Spain. Ranging from Columbus — whose frequent calls for a return to Jerusalem revealed the inspiration of his life ’s work — to Emperor Charles V, who launched a victorious crusading-style assault on Tunis in 1535, the Crusader filiation is sometimes further extended to the British, French, Italian, Russian, and Dutch colonialists of subsequent centuries.
Certain Muslims see Israel, established as a state in 1948, as a modern-day Outremer and part of the crusading heritage, and some Muslim radicals believe that the Crusades and contemporary conflicts are part of an endless continuum of fighting. Finding ideological potency in visions of inevitable confrontation, many extremists, both Islamic and Western, seem reluctant to part with the Crusades, thus keeping them an active, volatile component of contemporary political life.
The Crusades And The Progress Of Islam
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