“God wills this!”- The First Crusades
The First Crusade was the religious war initiated by the Christian states of Europe to recapture Jerusalem and other holy sites from Muslim control. Pope Urban II seized this opportunity to preach a holy war, calling upon European knights and peasants to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule. In One City: Three Faiths, the pope and the crusaders see these acts as "an armed pilgrimage" (Armstrong 280). However, when looking deeper into their acts, this is anything but a simple pilgrimage. The First Crusades should be described as actual acts of horror, blinded by the simple words of the pope- "God will be it!"
When researching the First Crusades beyond the book, articles about the horrible acts kept coming up. One article I found, The Crusades: Attempting to Understand the Dark Side of Religion, described how "the crusaders who stormed Jerusalem and slaughtered indiscriminately had just concluded a three-year campaign that took many of them through unthinkable suffering and hardship" (Robertson). For a 'holy' war, acts of slaughtering and killing do not make much sense.
Both the article and the book dive deeper into the Crusaders' acts and how their killing was unjust. In the book, Armstrong describes how "the lure of Christian Jerusalem thus helped to make anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe" (Armstrong 282). Later in the article, it describes how, even after capturing Jerusalem, the acts of horror did not stop. The Crusaders "lost control; the physical and emotional release from achieving their goal utterly unhinged them" (Robertson).
To me, the craziest and saddest thing about the Crusades is the false justification of 'holy' war. The crusaders, who were supposed to be Christ's followers, did not act in the way the Christian faith teaches. In Matthew 22: 34-40, Jesus describes how the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all the soul, with the second being "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Then, in Exodus 20:13, the bible explicitly states, "Thou shalt not kill." These are two specific quotes that all Christians follow and live by. That is why the idea of a 'holy war' makes no sense to me. For the pope to say that "God will be it!" when talking about entering Muslim territory to take back Jerusalem and slaughter thousands of people is very interesting and incorrect to me. So much horror, genocide, and hatred all stemming from these actions of the people who also claim to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. 1st Ballantine Books ed. New York, Ballantine Books, 1997.
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