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Chronicles
News & Views
17 May 2005
The Kingdom of Self-Hate
by Srdja Trifkovic
Kingdom of Heaven is spectacular, silly, historically inaccurate,
unwittingly funny, badly scripted, and pretentious. So far, so
conventional, you may say: just another Hollywood big-budget yarn a la
DeMille and Troy. What makes Ridley Scott's epic about the Crusades
different is a political message more insidious than the standard
leftist-revisionist pap we've been fed by Tinseltown for decades. That
message is that, in a conflict between Christians and Muslims, the
former attack, the latter react. The true hero of the movie is
Saladin, a wise warrior-king sans peur et sans reproche; its villains,
the coarse and bloodthirsty Knights Templar.
The soap-opera storyline (go and see it for details) has the potential
for great movie-making. What we get instead is Orlando Bloom rallying
the defenders of Jerusalem with an oration in which he asserts that
the holy city belongs to all three faiths equally. Saladin's captured
sister is killed by Christians (a historical falsehood), but upon
entering Jerusalem he nevertheless respectfully picks up a fallen
cross (another fantasy). On such form, it is unsurprising that the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee praised the film as a
"balanced" portrayal of the Crusades. Even the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a pro-terrorist front group based
in Washington D.C., liked the movie. A spokesman for CAIR who remains
unindicted as of this writing (unlike several of his colleagues) has
said that "Muslims are shown as dignified and proud people whose lives
are based on ethics and morality." A French actress whose contribution
to the epic consists of flashing her sensual eyes in a dozen ways,
boasted that the film will make all Muslims "extremely proud and
happy, because they are seen as noble, chivalrous characters . . .
[T]he Arab people behaved in a more noble way than the Christian
people. Saladin was such a great character. He was the hero of his
time."
Kingdom of Heaven does not tell you that the Crusades were defensive
in nature, a reaction to the Muslim conquest, pillage, and enslavement
of two thirds of Christendom. It does not even hint at the fact that,
a few generations earlier, Christianity had covered, outside Europe,
the ancient Roman province of Asia, extending across the Caucasus to
the Caspian Sea, Syria with the Holy Land, and a wide belt of North
Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, most of the early
medieval Christians lived not in Europe but in Asia Minor and Africa,
which gave us countless fathers and martyrs. Unleashed on this world
as the militant faith of a nomadic war band, Islam turned its boundary
with the outside world into a perpetual war zone. The early attack on
Christendom almost captured Constantinople when that city was still
the most important center of the Christian world. But the Muslims also
conquered Spain, and, had they not been stopped at Tours, the Koran—in
Gibbon's memorable phrase—might have been "taught in the schools of
Oxford" to a circumcised people.
The Crusades were but a temporary setback to Islamic expansion. But
they have provided the source of endless arguments within the Western
academia that sought to establish some moral equivalence between
Muslims and Christians at first, and eventually to use the Crusades as
a tool to elevate the former to victimhood and condemn the latter as
aggressors. This is a spectacular role-reversal to which Kingdom of
Heaven makes an enthusiastic contribution. Historically, the
aggressors were Muslims, coarse fighting men, accustomed to living by
pillage and the exploitation of settled populations. Heaping loot and
jizya (Koranically ordained poll tax from conquered non-Muslims) was
the only means of making a living known to them. Theirs was an
"expansionism denuded of any concrete objective, brutal, and born of a
necessity in its past" (Ibn Warraq).
Islam provided a powerful ideological justification for such
expansionism. The view of modern Islamic activists, that "Islam must
rule the world and until Islam does rule the world we will continue to
sacrifice our lives" is in perfect tune with traditional Islam. "O
Prophet! Rouse the Believers to the fight," the Koran orders, and
promises that 20 Muslims, "patient and persevering," would vanquish
200 unbelievers; if a hundred, they will vanquish a thousand (Koran,
8:65). Allah further orders the faithful to fight the unbelievers, and
be firm with them: "And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn
them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and
oppression are worse than slaughter" (Koran, 2:191). The end of the
fight is possible only when "there prevail justice and faith in Allah"
(Koran, 2:193). Muhammad assured his flock that Allah guarantees to
all jihadi warriors instant paradise in case of martyrdom, or "reward
or booty he has earned": "Jihad is the best method of earning, both
spiritual and temporal. If victory is won, there is enormous booty and
conquest of a country, which cannot be equaled to any other source of
earning. If there is defeat or death, there is everlasting Paradise
and a great spiritual benefit."
Far from being wars of aggression, the Crusades were a belated
military response of Christian Europe to over three centuries of
Muslim aggression against Christian lands, the systemic mistreatment
of the indigenous Christian population of those lands, and harassment
of Christian pilgrims. The modern myth, so comprehensively propagated
by the Kingdom of Heaven, has been promoted by Islamic propagandists
for centuries and supported by their Western allies and apologists for
decades. It claims that the peaceful Muslims, allegedly native to the
Holy Land, were forced to take up arms in defense against
European-Christian aggression. This myth takes A.D. 1095 as its
starting point, but it ignores the preceding centuries, starting with
the early caliphs, when Muslim armies swept through the Byzantine
Empire, conquering about two thirds of the Christian world of that
time.
The Muslim record of the preceding century was grim. In 1009, Hakem,
the Fatimite Caliph of Egypt, ordered the destruction of the Holy
Sepulchre and all the Christian establishments in Jerusalem. For years
thereafter, Christians were persecuted even more cruelly than in the
early period of Muslim rule. In 1065, thousands of Christian pilgrims
who had crossed Europe under the leadership of Günther, Bishop of
Bamberg, while on their way through Palestine, had to seek shelter in
a ruined fortress where they defended themselves against Muslim
attackers, in violation of earlier pledges that they would enjoy safe
access to the holy sites. The rise of the Seljuk Turks compromised
even the tenuous safety of Christian pilgrims. They conquered Armenia
and Asia Minor, where their descendants still live. In 1070 they took
Jerusalem, and in 1071 Diogenes, the Greek emperor, was defeated and
made captive at Mantzikert. Syria was the next to become the prey of
the Turks. Antioch succumbed in 1084, and by 1092 not one of the great
metropolitan sees of Asia remained in the possession of the
Christians.
In spite of the Great Schism of 1054, the Byzantine emperors deemed
the renewed threat from the east serious enough to seek help from
Rome. The battle of Manzikert was the indirect cause of the Crusades,
heralding Byzantium's loss of control in Asia Minor. In 1073, letters
were exchanged between Emperor Michael VII and Pope Gregory VII, who
planned to send an army of 50,000 men to repulse the Turks. Gregory's
successor, Urban II, took up those plans and convened a council at
Clermont-Ferrand. A great number of knights and men of all conditions
came and encamped on the plain of Chantoin, outside the city. On
November 27, 1095, the Pope himself addressed the assembled
multitudes, exhorting them to go forth and rescue the Holy Sepulchre.
Amid cries of Deus hoc vult!—God wills it!—all pledged themselves by
vow to depart for the Holy Land and received the cross of red cloth to
be worn on the shoulder. The Pope sent letters to various courts, and
the movement made rapid headway throughout Europe. The first
detachments to leave Europe were poorly led, however, undisciplined,
under-funded, destitute of equipment, prone to plunder of Christian
lands they were crossing, and they ultimately met with disaster:
One of these bands, headed by Folkmar, a German cleric, was
slaughtered by the Hungarians. Peter the Hermit, however, and the
German knight, Walter the Pennyless (Gautier Sans Avoir), finally
reached Constantinople with their disorganized troops. To save the
city from plunder, Alexius Comnenus ordered them to be conveyed across
the Bosphorus (August 1096); in Asia Minor they turned to pillage and
were nearly all slain by the Turks. Meanwhile, the regular crusade was
being organized in the West and, according to a well-conceived plan,
the four principal armies were to meet at Constantinople.
Peter the Hermit was the most effective of preachers, and the lines of
battle were clearly drawn: It was us against them, Christendom against
the "Evil Empire of Mahound." The driving impulse was not that of
conquest and aggression, but of recovery and defense, and liberation
of the Christians who still in many places constituted the majority of
the population. The Crusades were not Christendom's answer to Caliph
Umar, they were a reaction to what he and his successors had done to
Christians.
By May 1097, the armies were assembled, but many misunderstandings
between the Greeks and the Latin Christians soon emerged. After an
early victory over the Turks at the battle of Dorylæum on July 1,
1097, the Crusaders advanced through Asia Minor, constantly harassed
by Muslims, suffering from heat, and sinking under the weight of their
armor. They rested and recuperated among the Armenians of the Taurus
region, made their way into Syria, and on October 20, 1097, laid siege
to the fortified city of Antioch. On the night of June 2, 1098, they
took the city by storm, but subsequent plague and famine decimated
their ranks.
Rest, replenishment of men and supplies, and recuperation of worn-out
survivors continued through the winter. It was not until April 1099
that the Crusader army marched on to Jerusalem, and on June 7 besieged
the city. The attack began July 14, 1099 and the next day the
Crusaders entered Jerusalem from all sides and slew its inhabitants.
The soldiers of the Church Militant on this occasion proved that they
could not only outfight but also out-massacre their Mohammedan foes.
Further victories soon followed: In 1112, with the aid of Norwegians
and the support of Genoese, Pisan, and Venetian fleets, Crusaders
began the conquest of the ports of Syria, which was completed in 1124
by the capture of Tyre. Ascalon alone kept an Egyptian Muslim garrison
until its fall in 1153.
The Crusades were initially successful because Islam was by no means a
monolithic body-politic. The caliphate's authority was purely
notional: Egypt was under the rule of the Fatimids, a Shi'ite sect,
while the Sunni Turks from central Asia were gaining the upper hand in
Shi'ite Persia, as well as Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. By the
beginning of the "Glorious Twelfth," the Christian states—the Kingdom
of Jerusalem, the Countship of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch,
and the Countship of Edessa—controlled an unbroken but tenuously held
belt of territory roughly corresponding to the Fertile Crescent
between the Euphrates and the Sinai. It was long and thin: the
preoccupation with the holy places and ports precluded any serious
attempt to develop strategic depth, or to create a viable local
economic and demographic base for the new Christian states.
The necessity of defending these fragile Outremer domains, coupled
with the lack of reliable local recruits, resulted in the creation of
the religious orders of knighthood: the Hospitallers and the Templars.
They attracted the younger sons of feudal houses and acquired both in
Palestine and in Europe considerable property. Their bravery and
discipline—allegedly but unprovenly cemented by certain unspeakable
practices within the Templar brotherhood—could not compensate for the
Crusader states' lack of cohesion and discipline, however. The help
they received from the West was too scattered and intermittent. The
Principality of Edessa was the first to succumb to the Muslim
counteroffensive on Christmas Day 1144, and Damascus fell in 1154.
In 1169, an energetic and able prince of Kurdish blood and Sunni
religious allegiance, Salah-ed-Dîn (Saladin), succeeded his uncle as
the Grand Vizier of Egypt and in 1171 helped overthrow the Shi'ite
Fatimid dynasty. This seemed of intra-Muslim significance at first,
but the tide was about to be turned against the Christians. The Muslim
response to the early success of the Crusades was a call for jihad,
but until Saladin's rise their internal divisions precluded and
delayed concerted action. Appealing to the religious fervor of
Egyptian and Syrian Muslims in subsequent years, Saladin was able to
take possession of Damascus and to conquer all of Mesopotamia except
Mosul, threatening the Kingdom of Jerusalem from all sides. On July 4,
1187, his army defeated the Christians on the shores of Lake Tiberias,
and he entered Jerusalem on September 17. The fortified ports of Tyre,
Antioch, and Tripoli were the only remaining Christian strongholds.
The news of Jerusalem's fall caused consternation in Europe, and
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa led the next Christian assault in
1189—the Third Crusade, the most brutal of all—at the head of an army
of 100,000. He was drowned while trying to cross a river in Asia Minor
on horseback, however, and many German princes returned home. Others,
under the emperor's son, Frederick of Swabia, reached Antioch and
proceeded to Acre, where finally all the crusading troops assembled.
The siege of the city had already lasted two years when Philip August,
King of France, and Richard the Lionheart, King of England, arrived on
the scene, and Acre surrendered on July 13, 1191. Soon, however, the
old quarrel between the French and English kings broke out again, and
the former left Palestine. Richard was now leader of the Crusade, but
he failed to take Jerusalem and "compensated himself for these
reverses by brilliant but useless exploits which made his name
legendary among the Mohammedans."
After Saladin's death, his possessions were divided among his lesser
successors, who lost Jerusalem again to the Crusaders in 1229, but the
Christians' strength and unity was waning. By 1244 the city fell again
to the Muslims, this time continuously until 1918. The deathblow to
the Crusaders was given by al-Malik al-Zahir Baybars, a Mamluke who
previously had stopped the Mongols. He destroyed the venerated Church
of Nativity in Nazareth. Caesarea capitulated under the condition that
its 2,000 knights would be spared, but once inside the city, the
Muslims murdered them all anyway. When Antioch fell to the Muslims,
16,000 Christians were put to the sword, and 100,000 are recorded to
have been sold as slaves.
It is possible to make a great movie out of this bloody history;
Kingdom of Heaven makes the task mandatory, in fact, and it is to be
hoped that Mel Gibson will see some potential here. While the Crusades
lasted the warriors on both sides had developed a degree of grudging
respect for each other. They believed, and by the tenets of their
religions they were justified in believing, that they were doing God's
work. They fought each other, but there were long periods of truce
when they traded, met, talked, and learned from each other. The
Crusaders discarded their heavy armor and adopted the flowing robes
better suited to the local climate, while Saladin's warriors grasped
and willingly accepted something of the knightly code and mystique
that had been quite alien to the early followers of the Prophet.
Saladin was a brave and capable soldier. Richard the Lionheart was the
noblest knight of his time. Saladin repeatedly expressed admiration
for the piety of Christian pilgrims, and, a generation or so later,
Joinville refers approvingly to Saladin's interesting observation that
a bad Muslim could never make a good Christian. The lords of Outremer
were often far lesser men than those two. Some had found it convenient
to strike all kinds of unseemly bargains with their foes, and allied
themselves with Muslim rulers against both Constantinople and new
groups of Crusaders who were threatening to upset the balance of
power. By the early 13th century the Crusades had acquired the
character of Western Europe's first colonial adventure; in the Fourth
Crusade the soldiers who besieged and sacked first Zara, then the
Orthodox Constantinople, should have had some difficulty in
maintaining the fiction of a religious enterprise.
One can be critical of the Crusades, but primarily because of the
great damage they have inflicted on the Christian East. As for the
slaughters, what the Crusaders did to the Muslim inhabitants of
Jerusalem in 1099 was as bad as what the Muslims had done to countless
Christian cities before and after that time. From the distance of
almost a millennium, it is time to see the Crusades as Christendom's
reaction to Muslim aggression, a reconquest of something taken by
force from its rightful owners. By the end of the 13th century, the
last Crusader remnants in Palestine and Syria were wiped out. That was
the end of the real Crusades but it was by no means the end of jihad.
That same jihad that had conquered and reconquered the Holy Land
continues in earnest today. With his Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott
has joined the ranks of its abettors.
Copyright 2005, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
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