God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against the flesh and blood… Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace… taking the shield of faith… and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. (Ephesians 6:11–17)

Or, more succinctly, ‘No man that warreth for God entangleth himself with the affairs of this world’ (II Timothy 2:4) and ‘For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds’ (II Corinthians 10:3–4).

It is a measure of the pragmatism, sophistication (some might say sophistry) and sheer intellectual ingenuity of St Paul’s successors over the following millennium in expounding the doctrine of the Gospels that there was an ideology of Christian holy war at all.

WAR, THE BIBLE AND CLASSICAL THEORY

The most ringing modern verdict on the crusades has become justifiably famous. At the end of what has been described as the last great medieval chronicle, his three-volume History of the Crusades (1951–4), Steven Runciman delivered his judgement: ‘the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost’.⁵ Yet intolerance of the enemies of God has a long history in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For much of the last two millennia there have been scholars and religious propagandists, often a majority, who would have taken issue with Sir Steven just as there have always been those who would have agreed with him. What may appear today to many Christians and perhaps most non-Christians as an irreconcilable paradox between holy war and the doctrines of peace and forgiveness proclaimed in the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount and many other Gospel passages has not always been so obvious or recognized. This was certainly the case in educated circles around Urban II at the end of the eleventh century.

As it had developed by the beginning of its second millennium in western Christendom, Christianity was only indirectly a scriptural faith. The foundation texts of the Old and New Testaments were mediated even to the educated through the prism of commentaries by the so-called Church Fathers, theologians such as Origen of Alexandria, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory I who, from the third to the sixth centuries, undertook the often tricky task of translating some inappropriate, obscure, incomplete, contradictory or idealistic apophthegms into an intelligible and satisfying system of thought and action within the context of the institutions of an active religion, a temporal church and the daily lives of believers. The Beatitudes had to be reconciled with human civilization, specifically the Graeco-Roman world, or, to put it crudely, ways found around the Sermon on the Mount. Being extravagantly well versed in the highest traditions of classical learning, the Church Fathers did this rather well. Beside these majestic exercises of the intellect, which extended even to manipulating the wording of some inconvenient biblical texts, Scripture attracted apocryphal additions and spawned a massive literature of imitative hagiography often supported by legends surrounding relics of biblical characters or events. The experience of the church over the centuries provided its own corpus of law, tradition, history, legend and saints that reflected neither the idealism nor experience of the first century AD.