Secular Motives in the Crusades
As Read in William of Tyre’s “History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea”
Jan 20, 2009
It will come as no surprise to modern readers that the players in the Crusades had motivations other than spiritual ones. However, modern readers may to be too quick to declare ‘hypocrisy’ and go no further. William’s chronicle presents some elucidations on what those motives might be.
The Pope’s Crusade
News had reached medieval Western Europe that the Turkish Muslims dominating the Holy Land were supposedly committing abuses against Christian pilgrims.
This news was the apparent ideological flashpoint of the First Crusade to retake Jerusalem and the other cities sacred to the Abrahamic faiths. The triggering force at the West’s end was the papacy: William says the Pope “was extremely anxious as to how he might counteract…the sins that were springing up and involving the whole earth” (pg 88). The political purport of the this anxiety was epitomized by the Pope's dispute with the Holy Roman Emperor over where the authority of the church ended and the monarch began.
When word of the persecutions reached the Pope, he preached to commoner and noble alike to reclaim the Holy Land for Christianity. This pulled the feudal pyramid out from under the kings of Europe: suddenly the Pope had rallied all echelons of society to a banner and a cause other than that of the kings under whom the people lived. This way the Pope asserted dominance over temporal authorities.
The Crusades and Byzantium
Around Holy Land there was no strict Christian-versus-Muslim dichotomy. Christianity was itself divided between the ‘Latin’ Church, run from Rome, and the ‘Greek’ Byzantine Church based in Constantinople. William writes scornfully of the Greeks, rather than Latins, ruling Byzantium, who he calls petty and uncivilized and “jealous of the name of Rome, its senior, with her prerogative of dignity” (pg 127). Apparently the feeling was mutual.
The Byzantine Emperor deliberately made attempts to hinder the crusaders, not because of their religion, but because, as William put it, “he detested the whole Latin race” (pg 146). The Byzantines may have wanted Christianity returned to the Holy Land, but as many of its cities had previously belonged to the Byzantine Empire, they likely had no wish to see them be retaken by any Christian force that was not itself Byzantine.
Politics in the Holy Land
During the conflicts in the Holy Land itself, the crusader army, according to William, struck a “treaty of friendship” with the Egyptians (pg 224). This was not an army with mindless antipathy to Islam, nor had the Muslims of Egypt fanatical loathing for Christians; William notes that the Egyptians had long standing disputes with the Turks, and the enemy of their enemy was their friend.
Finally, the crusaders, upon successful capture of the cities of the Holy Land and organizing the new kingdom, began to squabble. For example, William related how the victors at Tarsus waged a war of words over whose banner should fly most prominently over the city, with those aspiring to that honour threatening to abandon the city to recapture if they were not obeyed.
Conclusion
Whatever the spiritual motivations the crusaders may have had, an attentive reading of William of Tyre’s composition gives us many windows by which we may understand them as more than ideologues or fanatics; Christian or Muslim, Roman or Byzantine, they were all human beings, with very worldly motivations.
Sources
William, Archbishop of Tyre. A History of Deeds Beyond the Sea. Editor: Austin P. Evans. Translator: Emily Atwater Babcock and A.C. Krey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.
