This article has been imported from our web archive. As a result, it may contain formatting errors, broken links or images, or other inconsistencies from the original publication.
Beware selective history
By Michael Coren
March 30, 2011
Michael Coren
History can be used as a weapon, and modern Catholics know this better than most. Not all of us have the time or the will to defend the faith, but we’re duty-bound to at least be able to put up a partial defence when yet another condemnation is thrown at the Church. The attacks based on history are monotonously regular: Galileo, Inquisition, Holocaust and Crusades. The last one is particularly poignant today, because every time a horror is committed in the name of Islam, relativists give us, “Yes, but what about the Crusades?”
Okay, what about the Crusades? They were almost entirely defensive in nature, an attempt to gain back Christian lands that had been conquered by Islamic armies, often with the utmost brutality. Palestine, Syria and Egypt were at one point almost entirely Christian. By the eighth century Muslim armies had conquered North Africa and most of Spain and were determined to move into other Christian territory.
Roman Catholic Spain was invaded by Islamic soldiers and occupied; it was only armed resistance by the Christian knights and people of the region that led to the country being liberated.
Okay, what about the Crusades? They were almost entirely defensive in nature, an attempt to gain back Christian lands that had been conquered by Islamic armies, often with the utmost brutality. Palestine, Syria and Egypt were at one point almost entirely Christian. By the eighth century Muslim armies had conquered North Africa and most of Spain and were determined to move into other Christian territory.
Roman Catholic Spain was invaded by Islamic soldiers and occupied; it was only armed resistance by the Christian knights and people of the region that led to the country being liberated.
In the 11th century the Seljuk Turks declared war on Asia Minor, modern Turkey, an area that had then been Christian for almost a thousand years. This was a prolonged and deliberate world war, started by a loose coalition of Islamic nations and directed against the Byzantine Empire.
In 1095 Pope Urban II called for Europe to take back these Christian lands. What followed was a number of attempts over more than a century to retrieve large chunks of the Middle East for Christianity. The last Crusaders were defeated by 1291.
When Islamic armies initially invaded they did allow Christianity and Judaism to be practised but no new churches were to be built, the public display of Christian symbols was banned and Christians had to pay tolls to enter churches and holy sites. Non-Muslims were second-class citizens and massacres and horrors, though not official state policy, were common.
The Seljuk Turks were particularly oppressive. They killed unarmed pilgrims, forbade Christian services and destroyed churches. Islam’s intention was to move further west and take all of Europe. In the late 15th and early 16th century Muslim troops forced Rome to be evacuated and also besieged Vienna.
Once in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria the Crusaders’ battles were conducted like any other military confrontation of the era. When Jerusalem was taken in 1099 no quarter was given, as was the standard of the time, and innocent people were slaughtered. Just as when cities fell all over the world, and very similar to what occurred when Muslims took Christian strongholds.
Unless we place these events in their correct historical context we merely play politics and exploit history. It may be emotionally comfortable for secular zealots and Muslim fundamentalists alike to assume the Crusaders to have been robotic killers but it is a rape of truth. Anachronism only supports ignorance.
Once under Christian control, Jerusalem and the greater Christian kingdom always had a Muslim majority and Muslims were allowed to practise their faith. Nor were there any major attempts to convert them to Christianity. The region returned to Muslim rule and eventually to the Ottoman Turks, who united large parts of the Islamic world and were the most thorough imperialists of the Middle East.
Today the Christians of what was once the hub of Christianity are declining in number and are often persecuted. In Egypt the Christian community is marginalized and frightened and in Israel and Palestine there is confusion and ambivalence, with towns such as Nazareth and Bethlehem hemorrhaging young Christian men and women. Extremists blame Israel for this, realists know better.
The Crusades should not have happened. Nor should the Islamic wars of conquest that did so much harm to Christians and which provoked and produced the Crusades. A crucial difference, surely, is that Christian leaders and even Pope John Paul II have apologized for the wrongs done so many years ago, whilst numerous Muslims and atheists are still distorting the facts and abusing the results for their own agendas.
Michael Coren