Crusades

The Impact of the Crusades

by Thomas Madden

Ed. note: the following summary of the crusades is taken from Thomas Madden's excellent
Concise History of the Crusades, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Ltd., 1999,
pp. 213-215, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the author and the publisher. The
entire book is a fine and up-to-date survey of crusading, suitable for students and the general
reader alike.

For medieval men and women, the crusade was an act of piety, charity, and love; but it was
also a means of defending their world, their culture, and their way of life. It is not surprising,
then, that the crusades lost their appeal when Christians no longer identified themselves first
and foremost as members of one body of Christ. By the sixteenth century, Europe was
dividing itself along political rather than religious lines. In that new world, the crusade had no
place.

It is easy for moderns to dismiss the crusades as morally repugnant, cynically evil, or as
Runciman summed them up, "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of
God." Yet such judgements tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based
on uniquely modern (and, therefore, western) values. If from the safety of our desk we are
quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick
to condemn us. Our infinitely more destructive wars waged for the sake of political and social
ideologies would, in his opinion, be lamentable wastes of human life. In both societies, the
medieval and the modern, men fight for what is most dear to them. That is a fact of human
nature that is not so changeable.

It is common today to brand the crusades a failure even at attaining their original goals.
Jerusalem was conquered, it is often asserted, but the crusader kingdom was short-lived. It
may seem so from our own day, but it is not so. Jerusalem remained in crusader hands for 88

years, and the kingdom lasted in Palestine for 192 years. ��� only distracted Muslim

powers; they also formed a buffer between the Arabs and Turks and the vulnerable Byzantine
Empire. It is true that the Fourth Crusade did immeasurable damage to the city of
Constantinople, but it was Byzantium's subsequent weakness that made it permanent. It
cannot be said (although it is often said) that the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 was
responsible for the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantium survived 192 years after it regained
its capital. It is in those years that the seeds of the empire's downfall can be found. Despite the
many tragedies, the crusades may well have added years to the life span of the Byzantine
Empire.

For good or ill, the crusading movement did have long-term effects. In the judgement of the
Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon, the crusades sapped from western Europe wealth
and human lives that would have been better spent at home working hard and fostering
friendly relations with the Muslim world. Like all scholars of that era, Gibbon saw medieval
Christianity as a vile superstition, and those who fought for it as ignorant or deceived. It is

highly questionable, however, whether Europeans would have beaten their swords into
ploughshares merely because they lacked an external enemy. More likely they would simply
have continued to wage internal warfare with greater vigor. Given the steady Muslim
conquest of Christian lands over the centuries, it also seems unlikely that good relations could
have been forged between the two religions without first establishing firm and secure borders.

There can be little doubt that the crusades slowed the advance of Islam, although how much is
an open question. The presence of the crusader states in the Near East for almost two
centuries certainly destabilized Muslim power, and therefore hindered unification into a single
Islamic state. Even the crusades that failed or did not materialize forced Muslim powers to
divert resources from conquest to their own defense. At the very least, then, the crusades
bought western Europe some time. Judging by the number of occasions it narrowly escaped
Turkish invasion in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, Europe had need of
that time.

In a less direct sense, the crusades did play a part in the eventual neutralization of the Muslim
threat. In Spain, where traditional crusade chivalry lasted longer than anywhere else, veterans
of the reconquista and crusades in North Africa became the conquistadors of the New World.
Although the conquests of Mexico and Peru were not themselves crusades, crusading culture
played a crucial role in them. Popes, Spanish monarchs, and conquistadors naturally viewed
the people of the New World through the lens of four centuries of crusading. The
conquistadors were warriors of Christ in an infidel land. There, they carved out new Christian
states. Without hesitation, they raised their swords against the barbaric cruelties of Aztec
human sacrifice, which, they were convinced, were Satanic in origin. And they were desirous
of booty, which the New World had in abundance. These were all well-established
characteristics of the crusades.

Spanish galleons laden with New World gold and silver financed more than one Holy League
against the Turks. But more than that, the new wealth, coupled with a rise in industrial
technology, allowed Europe to purchase raw materials from the Ottomans and sell back to
them the finished goods at a bargain price. The resulting trade deficit, and the repeated failure
of the Ottoman Empire to embrace technological advances in anything other than military
applications, ultimately doomed the Turkish economy. Europe never did win a decisive war
against the Turks until World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was already a dilapidated
shell. Unable to compete with Europe's skyrocketing economy, the Ottoman Empire slowly
bled to death. In the end, the discovery and exploitation of the New World not only saved
western Europe, but propelled it to world hegemony. The Muslim threat was neutralized not
by the crusades to the East, but to the West.

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