A History of the Crusades-Vol 3 (62 page)

The Latin Empire of Constantinople,
conceived in sin, was a puny child for whose welfare the West eagerly
sacrificed the needs of its children in the Holy Land. The Popes themselves
were far more anxious to keep the unwilling Greeks under their ecclesiastical
rule than to rescue Jerusalem. When the Byzantines recovered their capital
Western pontiff’s and politicians alike worked hard to restore Western control.
The Crusade had become a movement not for the protection of Christendom but for
the establishment of the authority of the Roman Church.

The Ruin of Byzantium

The determination of the Westerners to
conquer and colonize the lands of Byzantium was disastrous for the interests of
Outremer. It was more disastrous still for European civilization.
Constantinople was still the centre of the civilized Christian world. In the
pages of Villehardouin we see reflected the impression that it made on the
knights that had come from France and Italy to conquer it. They could not
believe that so superb a city could exist on earth; it was of all cities the
sovereign. Like most barbarian invaders, the men of the Fourth Crusade did not
intend to destroy what they found. They meant to share in it and dominate it.
But their greed and their clumsiness led them to indulge in irreparable
destruction. Only the Venetians, with their higher level of culture, knew what
it would be most profitable to save. Italy, indeed, reaped some benefit from
the decline and fall of Byzantium. The Frankish settlers in Byzantine lands,
though they brought a superficial and romantic vitality to the hills and
valleys of Greece, were unfitted to understand the long Greek tradition of
culture. But the Italians, whose connections with Greece had never been broken
for long, were better able to appreciate the value of what they took; and when
the decline of Byzantium meant the dispersal of its scholars, they found a
welcome in Italy. The spread of humanism in Italy was an indirect result of the
Fourth Crusade.

The Italian Renaissance is a matter of
pride for mankind. But it would have been better could it have been achieved
without the ruin of Eastern Christendom. Byzantine culture survived the shock
of the Fourth Crusade. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries
Byzantine art and thought flowered in splendid profusion. But the political
basis of the Empire was insecure. Indeed, since 1204 it was no longer an Empire
but one state amongst many others as strong or stronger. Faced with the
hostility of the West and the rivalry of its Balkan neighbours, it could no
longer guard Christendom against the Turks. It was the Crusaders themselves who
wilfully broke down the defence of Christendom and thus allowed the infidel to
cross the Straits and penetrate into the heart of Europe. The true martyrs of
the Crusade were not the gallant knights who fell fighting at the Horns of
Hattin or before the towers of Acre, but the innocent Christians of the
Balkans, as well as of Anatolia and Syria, who were handed over to persecution
and slavery.

To the Crusaders themselves their failures
were inexplicable. They were fighting for the cause of the Almighty; and if
faith and logic were correct, that cause should have triumphed. In the first
flush of success they entitled their chronicles the
Gesta Dei per Francos,
God’s
work done by the hand of the Franks. But after the First Crusade there followed
a long train of disasters; and even the victories of the Third Crusade were
incomplete and unsure. There were evil forces about which thwarted God’s work.
At first the blame could be laid on Byzantium, on the schismatic Emperor and
his ungodly people who refused to recognize the divine mission of the
Crusaders. But after the Fourth Crusade that excuse could no longer be
maintained; yet things went steadily worse. Moralist preachers might claim that
God was angry with His warriors because of their sins. There was some truth in
this, but as complete explanation it collapsed when Saint Louis led his army
into one of the greatest disasters that the Crusaders ever underwent; for Saint
Louis was a man whom the medieval world believed to be without sin. In fact it
was not so much wickedness as stupidity that ruined the Holy Wars. Yet such is
human nature that a man will admit far more readily to being a sinner than a
fool. No one amongst the Crusaders would admit that their real crimes were a
wilful and narrow ignorance and an irresponsible lack of foresight.

The chief motive that impelled the
Christian armies eastward was faith. But the sincerity and simplicity of their
faith led them into pitfalls. It carried them through incredible hardships to
victory on the First Crusade, whose success seemed miraculous. The Crusaders
therefore expected that miracles would continue to save them when difficulties
arose. Their confidence made them foolhardy; and even to the end, at Nicopolis
as at Antioch, they were certain that they would receive divine support. Again,
their faith by its very simplicity made them intolerant. Their God was a
jealous God; they could never conceive it possible that the God of Islam might
be the same Power. The colonists settled in Outremer might reach a wider view;
but the soldiers from the West came to fight for the Christian God; and to them
anyone who showed tolerance to the infidel was a traitor. Even those that
worshipped the Christian God in a different ritual were suspect and deplored.

The Lack of a Leader

This genuine faith was often combined with
unashamed greed. Few Christians have ever thought it incongruous to combine God’s
work with the acquisition of material advantages. That the soldiers of God
should extract territory and wealth from the infidel was right. It was
justifiable to rob the heretic and the schismatic also. Worldly ambitions
helped to produce the gallant adventurousness on which much of the early
success of the movement was based. But greed and the lust for power are
dangerous masters. They breed impatience; for man’s life is short and he needs
quick results. They breed jealousy and disloyalty; for offices and possessions
are limited, and it is impossible to satisfy every claimant. There was a
constant feud between the Franks already established in the East and those that
came out to fight the infidel and to seek their fortune. Each saw the war from
a different point of view. In the turmoil of envy, distrust and intrigue, few
campaigns had much chance of success. Quarrels and inefficiency were enhanced
by ignorance. The colonists slowly adapted themselves to the ways and the
climate of the Levant; they began to learn how their enemies fought and how to
make friends with them. But the newly-come Crusader found himself in an utterly
unfamiliar world, and he was usually too proud to admit his limitations. He
disliked his cousins of Outremer and would not listen to them. So expedition
after expedition made the same mistakes and reached the same sorry end.

Powerful and intelligent leadership might
have saved the movement. But the feudal background from which the Crusaders
were drawn made it difficult for a leader to be accepted. The Crusades were the
Pope’s work; but Papal Legates were seldom good generals. There were many able
men amongst the Kings of Jerusalem; but they had little authority over their
own subjects and none over their visiting allies. The Military Orders, who
provided the finest and most experienced soldiers, were independent and jealous
of each other. National armies led by a King seemed at one time to offer a
better weapon; but though Richard of England, who was a soldier of genius, was
one of the few successful commanders amongst the Crusaders, the other royal
expeditions were without exception disastrous. It was difficult for any monarch
to go campaigning for long in lands so far from his own. Coeur-de-Lion’s and
Saint Louis’s sojourns in the East were made at the expense of the welfare of
England and France. The financial cost, in particular, was appallingly high.
The Italian cities could make the Crusades a profitable affair; and independent
nobles who hoped to found estates or marry heiresses in Outremer might find
their outlay returned. But to send the royal army overseas was a costly
undertaking with very little hope of material recompense. Special taxes must be
raised throughout the kingdom. It was not surprising that practical-minded
kings, such as Philip IV of France, preferred to raise the taxes and then stay
at home. The ideal leader, a great soldier and diplomat, with time and money to
spend in the East and a wide understanding of Eastern ways, was never to be
found. It was indeed less remarkable that the Crusading movement faded away in
failure than that it should ever have met with success, and that, with scarcely
one victory to its credit after its spectacular foundation, Outremer should
have lasted for two hundred years.

The triumphs of the Crusade were the
triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the
inexorable laws of history the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of
each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between
Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were
a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the
centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at
the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much
courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding.
High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a
blind and narrow self-righteousness; and 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.

APPENDIX
II

INTELLECTUAL
LIFE IN OUTREMER

In comparison with the intellectual life
of Sicily or of Spain, that of Outremer is disappointing. It might have been
expected that, as at Palermo, the contact between Franks and Orientals might
have stimulated intellectual activity; but in fact the society of Outremer,
which consisted almost entirely of soldiers and merchants, was not fitted to
create or maintain a high intellectual standard. Amongst the princes and the
nobility there were many men of culture. For example, we are told that King
Baldwin III and King Amalric I were both devoted to letters. Reynald of Sidon
was notorious for his interest in Islamic learning, while Humphrey IV of Toron had
a perfect knowledge of the Arabic language. And Outremer produced one of the
greatest of medieval historians in William of Tyre. But we know very little
about education in Outremer. As in the West there were undoubtedly schools
attached to the chief cathedrals; but it is significant that William of Tyre
went as a boy to France to be educated; and, apart from him, all the
ecclesiastics who played a prominent part in the history of Outremer were men
born and brought up in the West. Many of these prelates, such as the Patriarch
Aimery of Antioch, were interested in literature, or like James of Vitry,
bishop of Acre in the thirteenth century, in the scientific life going on
around him; and the various schemes for the later Crusades encouraged an active
interest in oriental geography. But on the whole Frankish culture in Outremer
remained an occidental importation, with very little contact with native
culture, except in the arts. Medicine was left entirely in native hands. The
princes seem always to have employed Syrian Christian doctors. When Amalric I
rejected his Syrian doctors’ advice and consulted a Frank, he died of it; and
the examples that Usama gives of Frankish doctoring show it to have been
remarkably crude. The Franks seem to have made no attempt, as in southern
Italy, to learn from native medicine; though a certain Stephen of Antioch seems
to have translated a medical treatise from the Arabic in 1227. There is no
record of any effort by the Franks, apart from a few nobles, to study local
philosophy or scientific knowledge.

The literary products of Frankish Outremer
fall under three headings. First, there are the chronicles and histories.
These, with the great exception of William of Tyre’s history, and the work of
some of his continuators, such as Ernoul, were written by men born in the West
and are in the tradition of Western chronicle-writing. Secondly, there is a
large crop of legal works. The colonists and their descendants were deeply
interested in legal and constitutional matters, and were anxious to have their
opinions and findings written down, to an extent unparalleled in the West. But
the law that they reproduce is purely Western, though it showed some necessary
adjustments. Finally, there was popular and romantic poetry. The colonists in
Outremer loved the romantic epics of the time. Several troubadours and
minnesingers, such as Rudel or Albert of Johansdorf, went on the Crusades.
Raymond, Prince of Antioch, was the son of the eminent troubadour poet, William
IX of Aquitaine. The stirring events of the Crusades were admirably suited to
enrich the themes of which the poets sang. Godfrey of Lorraine soon became a
legendary hero, whose adventures were incorporated into the cycle of the
Chevalier au Cygne; poems about his youth and ancestry were already in
circulation in the East when William of Tyre wrote his history. But these poems
were composed in the West. Similarly, the two versified accounts of the First
Crusade, the
Chanson d’Antioche
and the
Chanson de Jerusalem,
were
both almost certainly composed in the West, on information brought back by
returning Crusaders. The one epic which originated in Outremer is the
Chanson
des Chetifs,
a curious story of Crusaders made captive by ‘Corboran’
(Kerbogha) in which the stories of the First Crusade and the Crusades of 1101
have become inextricably mixed. This poem was composed by an author whose name
is unknown, at the express desire of Prince Raymond of Antioch. It was still
unfinished when Raymond died in 1149. The muddled inaccurate historical basis
of the story suggests that the author was a newcomer to the East. The Franks
found a romantic fascination in the fate of Christian captives in Moslem hands.
The theme of the
Chetifs
was one which therefore enjoyed great
popularity in Outremer as well as in Europe.