Justifying Genocide: How Christians Justified the Crusades
"Taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders" by Emil Signol
(https://nobility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Jerusalem.jpg)
While reading the details of the Christian crusades of Jerusalem this week, I was particularly shocked at the sheer violence of the war. Specifically, Armstrong notes that the Crusaders massacred men and women alike, and that “the streets literally ran with blood” and “piles of heads, hands and feet,” (Armstrong 274). While I was aware of the crusades and their impact on the Muslim and Jewish communities within Jerusalem, I was unaware of their brutality. Obviously both the murder of these Jerusalemites, and the cruelty with which it was done, starkly contradicts traditional Christian values of tolerance and kindness. This led me to question, how were these supposedly devout Christians convinced to abandon their teachings in order to justify these atrocities?
To understand how so many European Christians would come together to massacre the Jewish and Muslim populations of Jerusalem and other neighboring cities, one must look to Pope Urban II. In the early 11th century, the Pope began preaching a message of a holy war of liberation in Anatolia and Jerusalem to all classes of Christians–clergy, knights and peasants alike. In his preaching, Urban “appealed to the peoples deep reverence for holy places,” claiming that Christians’ holy inheritance in Jerusalem had been stolen from them by Muslims (Billings). While the exact words of Urban’s speech are unknown, it is believed that this phrasing was able to convince his Christian audience that Muslims were not only religious aggressors bent on defacing their God, but that they were a vile and subhuman race that God wanted exterminated. As with most genocides, it was this dehumanization that allowed Christians to feel justified in their massacres.
While this religious call to arms was the driving force behind the crusades, there were some other, more secular factors that encouraged people to join in the Crusades as well. In 1096, the Peasant Crusade, led by famed Roman priest Peter the Hermit, had grown to an army of several thousand. Made up almost entirely of lower ranking farmers and peasants, the group was set on walking over 2,000 miles to help liberate Jerusalem themselves. While still under the guise of religious righteousness, the ability to leave behind disease, famine and bad harvests at home also played a large part in convincing people to join the “army”. With so much turmoil at home, joining the Crusades and pillaging and extorting Jewish communities for food and wealth seemed a much better alternative. In addition, the call to reclaim Jerusalem and kill Muslims was also seen as a form of penance for sin, leading to many criminals and known adulterers joining as well (Billings).
So while the Crusades were certainly fueled by a belief that God wanted Christians to reclaim religious sites and exterminate the “blasphemous Muslims”, there were also many worldly reasons that led to many less religiously motivated individuals to join in.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem : One City, Three Faiths. London, Harper Perennial, 2005.
Malcolm Billings. The Crusades: Classic Histories Series : The War Against Islam 1096-1798. The History Press, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,uid&db=nlebk&AN=1469126&site=eds-live.
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