THE TRUE STORY OF THE FIRST CRUSADE
BY PETER FRANKOPAN
The International Herald Tribune
February 22, 2012 Wednesday
France
The real story of the First Crusade is much more complicated, and
much more earthly, than most people recognize.
FULL TEXT No sooner had the knights of the First Crusade captured
Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks in 1099 than writers began to
swoon over their achievements. Inspired by a call by Pope Urban II
at Clermont, France, four years earlier to rescue the Holy Land,
these first historians wrote, the crusaders and their conquest of
the eastern Mediterranean coast proved that God had smiled on Western
Europe and the authority of Rome.
That story, and the papal authority it underlined, shaped the next 500
years of European history. Even today, the idea at the center of the
crusades, that religion has long been at the heart of the East-West
divide, drives foreign policy from Washington to Islamabad. But the
real story is much more complicated, and much more earthly.
The subject of the crusades, in particular the first, has received
enormous attention from scholars over the centuries, to the point
that one leading historian wrote in a recent book review that there
was nothing original left to say.
Yet for all that work, distortions remain. The armchair historian
could be forgiven for thinking, for example, that Jerusalem fell
to the Muslims soon before the First Crusade set out to supposedly
rescue it. In fact, Jerusalem fell some 450 years earlier.
Perhaps the central question behind the First Crusade has never really
been asked: What happened at the end of the 11th century that made more
than 60,000 men head east? If the pope was powerful enough to be able
to unleash a huge force of knights, why had he never done so before?
The answer lies far from Western Europe, where the origins of the
crusade are always set. In fact, the First Crusade was an eastern
project, devised and inspired not by Pope Urban II but by Alexios I
of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire.
The Byzantine Empire came under territorial pressure in the second
half of the 11th century, particularly at the hands of the Turks,
who had swept across Central Asia and made themselves masters of the
Middle East. Moving like “wolves devouring their prey,” in the words
of one contemporary commentator, the Turks supposedly brought chaos
to the Byzantine heartland in Asia Minor.
But claims of Turkish penetration and control of the Byzantine east
were much exaggerated. Material from long-forgotten and ignored Greek,
Arabic, Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew sources shows that things were
not as bad as some authors made out; if anything, relations between
Christian Byzantines and Muslim Turks were surprisingly cordial and
even collaborative.
That changed dramatically, however, at the start of the 1090s. A
catastrophic chain of events brought the empire to its knees:
Emboldened by the death of the sultan of Baghdad, a cluster of local
Turkish warlords seized control of some of Byzantium’s most precious
and sensitive territories, putting the capital itself at risk. With
pressure mounting, Alexios’s closest intimates turned on him. In a
showdown, the emperor forced a gathering of his opponents; it was
touch and go as to whether he would leave the meeting alive. Against
the odds, he bought himself one last roll of the dice.
He issued pleas for help across Western Europe, including one to Pope
Urban II, which brought with it the offer to unite the Catholic and
Orthodox churches once and for all.
What followed was less a war to protect the Holy Land than a defense
of the Byzantine Empire, taking back cities like Nicaea and Antioch,
places whose Christian significance was, at best, tangential. And,
rather than being under the command of the pope, the knights were
controlled by Alexios, to whom they swore solemn oaths over precious
Christian relics as they passed through Constantinople. They also
promised to hand over all the cities, towns and territories they
conquered.
But Alexios eventually lost control. The crusaders refused to give
over what they had conquered, which by the end included much of the
eastern Mediterranean region. The resulting crusader states lasted
for another 200 years.
As a result, a new story was needed. Alexios and Byzantium were ripped
from the heart of the narrative, while Pope Urban II was moved to
center stage. In short, the western knights’ glorious deeds provided
a cover story that only now has been revealed. Their bravery, heroism
and piety, fodder for countless medieval romances, really were too
good to be true.