The Crusades Didn't Come Out of Nowhere

Almost everyone has a one-sentence version of the Crusades in their head. It goes something like this: a bunch of greedy, bigoted European Christians woke up one morning around the year 1100 and decided to go invade peaceful Muslim lands for gold and glory.

That version is not history. It is a cartoon, and like most cartoons it is missing the first four hundred years of the story.

I have spent two posts giving you those four hundred years. Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, all conquered from a Christian world that had held them for centuries. That was not ancient background by 1095. That was the ongoing situation. For four and a half centuries the map of the faith had been shrinking, region after region, and it had not stopped.

So when we get to the Crusades, the honest question is not "why would Christians suddenly do this." The honest question is "why did it take them so long."

And the answer to that has a date, and the date is 1071.

Up to that point, one great Christian region had held: Anatolia. That is modern Turkey, the whole peninsula between the old heartlands and Europe. It had been Christian for a thousand years. It was the beating heart of the Byzantine Empire, the ground where much of the New Testament was written and where the great councils met. It fed the empire its soldiers and its grain. As long as Anatolia held, the eastern church had a spine.

In 1071, at a place called Manzikert, a new people broke that spine. Not the Arabs of the old conquests, but the Seljuk Turks, recent and fierce converts to Islam pushing in from the east. They shattered the Byzantine army and captured the emperor himself. And in the twenty years that followed, they poured into Anatolia and took most of it, right up to the water across from Constantinople. The Christian heartland that had held for a millennium was overrun inside a single generation, and the capital of eastern Christianity could see the enemy campfires from its own walls.

That is the thing that actually set off the Crusades. Not greed out of a clear sky. A fresh catastrophe on top of four centuries of loss.

Because here is what happened next. The Byzantine emperor, a man named Alexios, did the reasonable thing a desperate ruler does. He sent to the West and asked for help. He was Christian, they were Christian, and his empire was bleeding out. His envoys brought the appeal to a church council in Italy early in 1095. Later that year, at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II took it up and enlarged it, standing before the crowd and calling Western Christians to go east and help their brothers and take back what had been taken, above all the city of Jerusalem. Alexios had asked mainly for soldiers. What Urban launched was something far bigger.

So the First Crusade was, in its own moment, a response. A late one, a chaotic one, but a response, to a direct plea from the eastern church after four hundred years of retreat and one recent disaster. That is not a defense of everything the crusaders did. It is just the context you were never given. 1095 did not come out of nowhere. It came out of a documented, century-stacked loss that the modern retelling quietly deletes so the story can have simple villains.

Now, I promised you honesty, and honesty cuts both ways. So let me turn the knife around, because a Christian who only swaps one cartoon for another has not grown up, he has just changed teams.

The Crusades were not a clean holy war, and I will not pretend they were.

The motives were a tangled mess. Yes, there was genuine desire to help fellow Christians and free the holy places. There was also land hunger, and glory, and the promise of forgiveness attached to the sword in a way the New Testament never attached it. Before the First Crusade even reached the east, mobs of crusaders turned on the Jewish communities of the Rhineland and slaughtered them, an atrocity with no defense in heaven or on earth. When Jerusalem fell in 1099, the crusaders massacred the people of the city. And a little over a century later, one of these holy expeditions was turned aside and used to sack Constantinople itself, the very Christian city the whole thing had started out to save. Christians butchering Christians, under the banner of the cross.

If you take away from these posts that the Crusaders were the good guys, you have not read carefully. There were no simple good guys. There was a real grievance, four hundred years of it, answered with a real army that then did real evil along with whatever good it did. Both of those are true at once, and a serious person has to hold them at once.

That is the whole point I want you to walk away with, and it is bigger than the Crusades.

"The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him."

Proverbs 18:17, NASB 1995

Whoever tells you the story first sounds right, until you hear the rest of it. The one-sentence Crusade story sounds right, until you learn about the four centuries before 1095. And the "we were just defending ourselves" story sounds right too, until you learn about the Rhineland and Jerusalem and Constantinople. The examined version is messier than either slogan, and the examined version is the true one.

We are living in a time that loves the slogan and hates the examination. People will hand you a clean, furious version of the past, cut to make one side the monster, and they will be angry if you ask for the other four hundred years. Do not be that easy to lead. A Christian, of all people, should be the hardest man in the room to hand a cartoon to, because a Christian is supposed to love the truth more than he loves his team.

And there is one more thing, the deepest one. Scripture does not cover the Crusades. It could not, they were a thousand years after the last page. But Scripture tells you exactly how to judge them, because it tells you what the church's weapons actually are, and a sword swung to force a city to the cross is not on the list. The saddest thread running through all four hundred years of this story, on every side, is men reaching for the blade to do what only the Spirit of God can do. It did not save the old churches, and it did not cleanse the new conquerors, and it did not sanctify the crusaders. It never does.

Read the history. Read it honestly, both sides, all four centuries. Then read your Bible, and notice how little it looks like any of it. That gap, between how the kingdoms of men advance and how the kingdom of God advances, is the most important thing this whole sad story has to teach.

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Source note. The Battle of Manzikert (1071), the Seljuk Turkish conquest of most of Byzantine Anatolia in the following years, the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos's appeal to the West, and Pope Urban II's call at the Council of Clermont in 1095 are standard, well-documented history. So are the atrocities named here: the Rhineland massacres of Jews in 1096, the massacre at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, and the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The argument is not that the Crusades were justified, but that they came four centuries into a documented loss of Christian territory, a context usually left out.