FPRI on Crusaders: Published Summer, 1999
Jerry Pournelle
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Foreign
Policy Research Institute A Catalyst for Ideas
Night
Thoughts - August 1999
OF
CRUSADERS OLD AND NEW By Walter A. McDougall
Walter
A. McDougall is
editor of
Orbis, co-director
of FPRI's History
Academy, and
Alloy-Ansin Professor
of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is author of
Promised Land,
Crusader State: America's Encounter with the World
Since 1776
(Houghton Mifflin,
1997).
This
essay is adapted from a
speech before the Philadelphia Society on
April 24, 1999 and is printed here in advance of publication
in Orbis, Summer
1999, a journal published for FPRI by JAI Press.
OF CRUSADERS OLD AND NEW
By Walter A. McDougall
I
have been asked
to speak today about "the Crusader State in the
twenty-first century,"
which is to say,
something that may not exist in an
era that has not yet begun. I can blame only
myself for this
assignment, since
I had the temerity to publish
a book about American foreign policy
called Promised Land,
Crusader State, and
to end it with
speculations about whether
our diplomatic
traditions ought to shape the
U.S. role in the world in the decades to come. But I
am not going to
talk about the book, lest I give you an excuse
not to read it.
All you need to
know now is my argument to
the effect
that Wilsonianism,
collective security, promotion
of democracy,
human rights,
and development, assertive
multilateralism, enlargement, and so forth
are twentieth-century novelties, and
far from
expressing American
exceptionalism, they represent
a repudiation of it. From 1776 to
the 1890s, U.S.
foreign policy clung
to four
traditions-Liberty
at home,
Unilateralism abroad, an
American System
of States,
and Expansion across
the continent-designed
to prevent
the outside world from
perturbing the growth of
America as a Promised
Land. And so far from asserting an American mission to reform the
world, this old testament of foreign relations specifically
precluded "going
abroad in search of
monsters to destroy."
In
1898 a new testament of
American foreign policy began to be written
when, for the
first time, the
U.S. mounted a white charger and
rode off on a crusade to slay the Spanish dragon and save the Cuban
damsel in distress. The colonial acquisitions that
followed were justified
by an ethic
of global uplift, as
imperialists argued
that America had not been raised
up to greatness
only to hide her lamp under a bushel, but that America now
had the means and
mission to end violence, export
democracy, and promote prosperity
in the less fortunate
nations under her
care. Woodrow Wilson was an avid imperialist, and in World
War I he universalized the new
American mission in
the belief that only
the U.S. had the grace and power to pacify a world rent by
revolution and war,
and create
a new world order.
Accordingly, Americans invented
four new traditions
over the course of the
twentieth century,
representing various
strategies for the fulfillment of that
noble quest:
Progressive Imperialism,
Wilsonianism, Containment,
and Global
Meliorism, or the promotion of democracy, growth, and social reform
world-wide.
Various
mugwumps, nationalists, isolationists, and realists periodically
warned that
crusading zeal
might breed
arrogance and
hubris in
American policy,
and that
a permanent mobilization of American power would erode
liberty and civic virtue
at home. In the event,
the U.S. did great good in
the wicked
twentieth century,
thanks to
its willingness to spend blood and treasure to slay
imperialism, fascism, and communism.
But the U.S. also did much that was bad or just ugly, and did harm
itself in the process.
The
question before us after the Cold
War, therefore, is
whether the time has
come to take a rest from crusading, as Jonathan Clarke
has advised, and become a
normal nation
again, as Jeane
Kirkpatrick has
said. Or
whether this
unipolar moment
makes America
all the
more the
"indispensable nation,"
and placed on
her still greater
responsibilities to design,
impose, and
police some
new world order? I will not
recite all the eloquent
arguments made by
advocates of
an American
"benevolent global
hegemony," such as
Bill Kristol, Bob Kagan, Senator McCain, Joshua Muravchik,
Warren Christopher, Madeleine
Albright, and Tony Lake.
Nor will I recite the
eloquent rebuttals to their vision
advanced by
Clarke and
Kirkpatrick, Owen
Harries, Robert Kaplan,
Michael Mandelbaum, Fareed Zakaria, Samuel
Huntington, Charles
Maynes, Charles
Krauthammer, James Kurth, or even myself.
I
mean instead to
do something wildly
tangential to the debate
over America's future role in the world, but for that reason wildly
original. I want to ask what it means to be a Crusader State,
whether the U.S. is indeed one, and what the history of
the original Crusades can
contribute to
our current debate. I
mean to discuss,
not the
twenty-first century, but the twelfth and thirteenth.
Last
year we
celebrated, or lamented,
the hundredth
The
eleventh century-the first of the new millennium-was the best and
worst of times in Western Europe. On the one hand, the Dark Ages had ended
thanks to the Benedictines and the little renaissance
promoted at
Charlemagne's court. The
marauders who had vexed
settled Europe, such as the Vikings and Normans,
and the marchlands
of Bohemia, Hungary, and
Poland were tamed and converted around 1000 A.D. In the core regions
of France and
the Rhineland, and
in England after 1066, the Frankish feudal system had taken root.
Agriculture was booming thanks
to the
invention of
the mouldboard
plough, the three-field system, and the clearing of forests, which
meant both a
growing population and the surplus food necessary to support
towns and tradesmen. Europe was gaining a self-confidence it had
never known, and was primed for the explosion of cultural creativity
that would characterize the High Middle
Ages. On the
other hand, Latin Christendom was rent internally by religious
dissent and new heresies in the Church, worldly
corruption among clergy and within wealthy monasteries, and the incessant
fighting of lords and knights who, having
vanquished all foreign
foes, turned on each other.
The kings of
France were helpless
to enforce their authority over
feuding vassals, while
in Germany and Italy the Holy Roman
Emperors not only
battled local lords, but challenged papal authority by attempting
to tax the church and appoint bishops.
The popes had fought
back by flinging excommunications in
all directions, decreeing
celibacy for priests, and insisting
on their primacy to
the point
of schism with
the Eastern
Orthodox Church.
But nothing
worked-until Urban hit on the idea of a crusade.
Mind
you, the Arabs
who had swept
over half the Christian world in
the eighth century
were no longer
a threat, and were being
slowly pushed back in
Spain, while
the new
invaders, the Seljuk Turks, threatened
only the Byzantine
Empire. So no immediate security imperative justified
an expedition to the
Holy Land, and while it was a scandal for Christianity's
holiest places
to be ruled by
Muslims, Europeans had resigned
themselves to that for three hundred years.
What
prompted Urban
II to
preach a
crusade was
the excellent, perhaps divinely
inspired notion that a holy war far away
might ameliorate all
four of
Europe's internal
problems at once.
Through a crusade he could reassert papal prestige and
authority over the
secular rulers,
reimpose orthodoxy at a
time of wayward opinions,
restore law and order
by diverting the restless warrior class
abroad, and forge in Europe
an internal unity it
had not enjoyed since the breakup
of Charlemagne's empire. "Christendom possessed in the
Crusade Idea an instrument uniquely suited to express its sense of
oneness," while Pope Innocent III confessed (in 1213),
"that of all the desires of our heart we long chiefly for two
in this life, namely . . . to recover the Holy Land and to
reform the Universal Church."[1]
The
capture of Jerusalem
and establishment of
a Crusader State there
was taken by contemporaries to be providential, but more
to the point the
pope appeared to
achieve his
domestic agenda. The
monks who chronicled
the Crusaders'
fight for the Holy Land marveled at their penitent demeanor, as if
they comprised "a military monastery on the move," and
testified to their
virtue as much
as their valor. Back in Europe, the
knights so recently
condemned by the Church as violent and
lustful brutes were transformed, in sermons and troubador
songs, into heroes
of faith and
sacrifice which the home front
would do well to
emulate. And indeed clergy and laity
rallied behind the
Crusade with such
enthusiasm that Urban had to prohibit many clergy and women from
taking up arms themselves.
Meanwhile, the Cluniac
reform movement flourished as new
orders of monks founded model monasteries rededicated to orthodoxy,
work, prayer, and abstinence, then fanned out
to the people "to
infuse secular
life with
monastic values."[2]
Similarly,
the Church's pacifist movement,
which had long
condemned war among
Christians, rushed to
endorse what the pope now called milites Christi-soldiers of
Christ-and their wars "in defense of righteousness." In
short, the pope hated armies until
he found uses
for them, after which he became the most eager interventionist of
all. And that, in turn,
required a certain
tweaking of inherited doctrine, for ever since Augustine
of Hippo the
Church had justified violence only in
self-defense or
response to
injury. But
Urban justified the
crusade as
a literal
"war of
liberation"-bellum libertatis-not
only for Christians under the Muslim
Crescent, but "for the liberation
of the whole church."[3] This
was a war for the spiritual freedom of all Christians, not
only the physical freedom of some.
Likewise,
since Augustine war had been considered just only
And
that is why the pope's
absolution of sins for Crusaders and those
who supported them was not just a cynical tool of
recruitment, but an
expression of the
very nature of
the enterprise. To go
to Jerusalem was a
pilgrimage as well as crusade, and
there is abundant evidence that many knights, who had
no scruples about
bashing skulls for a province or plunder or
just for the fun
of it, now felt serious guilt about taking up arms in the
name of the Lord. "Frequently he burned with
anxiety," says the
biographer of one
Norman knight, "because
the warfare engaged in as a knight [of the cross] seemed
to be contrary to the Lord's command to turn the other
cheek . . . and these contradictions deprived him of courage.
But after Pope
Urban granted remission of sins to all Christians fighting the
gentiles, then at last, as if previously asleep, his vigor was
aroused."[4]
Think
now what we have heard so far. First, this Crusade was deemed just
precisely because it employed armed force in the absence
of any
participant's political
or material
interests. Secondly, the
Crusade was needed
to reforge an alliance within
the West that
was falling
apart in
the absence of threats: it must
go "out of area or
out of
business." Thirdly, the Crusade was sold as a moral cause in
the interest of
"enlargement" of
the realm of
peace and
virtue. Fourthly, an
ulterior motive of the
Crusade was to "remoralize"
the home
front and
restore its
"national greatness," if
you will. Fifthly,
this was a Crusade meant to elevate the leader of
the alliance, the
Church itself, above all particularist interests so that it might
exercise, as it were, a benevolent hegemony.
We
know the results
of the Crusades:
huge expenditures of wealth; immense
loss of life
among Christians,
Muslims, pagans, and heretics;
gratuitous, spasmodic
slaughter of
Jewish communities in Europe
and Asia;
the suicidal
Children's Crusade
and other
"lambs to
the slaughter" pilgrimages; attempts at forcible conversion of Muslims and Jews in
strict violation of canon law;
and all manner of
impure motives
on the part of
knights who
had often
mortgaged or sold all they
owned to finance
their quest. Plunder became
the primary
goal of
several crusades,
climaxing in the
notorious sack of
Constantinople in 1204, and imperialism
of others, as
when Crusaders
dreamed of
conquering Egypt and Syria. As subsequent campaigns aborted, and
appeals to virtue
and sacrifice lost
their power
to motivate, preachers themselves appealed to kings and
knights to avenge the deaths of
their kinsmen
or forbears.
And rather than
"enlarging" and
purifying Christendom,
the Crusades only served as a
conduit for the
importation to Europe of Islamic ideas and customs, secret
abominations and gnostic cults,
which survived for centuries. Many Crusaders went native,
or took the
occasion to indulge
rather than purge their
own vices.
One knight
from Aquitaine,
the chronicles record, "went
with many others to Jerusalem, but contributed nothing to the
Christian cause. He was a fervent womanizer
and for that
reason showed
himself to
be inconstant in all that he did."[5] His name was
William.
And
what did it all achieve? The Latin kingdom set up in the Holy Land,
perhaps the most outlandish pre-modern example of state-building,
lasted a
mere eighty-eight
years until
reconquered by
Saladin. The
strangest of
all episodes
followed in 1229 when
the Emperor Frederick
II, himself
under a papal ban,
negotiated a
treaty that
peacefully restored Jerusalem
to Christian
rule, thereby
making a mockery
of all
the papal
dispensations and
military campaigns that
preceded and followed.
Frederick's Crusader State survived a mere fifteen years.
But
success no longer
mattered, if it
ever really
had. Crusading had become a system,
an integral
part of
the domestic political, social,
and religious
structure of
Europe, a
mediator and
safety-valve and
blanket justification to
mobilize force
for all
sorts of
institutional purposes. Crusades
were launched against the Moors of
Spain, Saracens in
the Mediterranean, the
Mongol horde, and Albigensian
heretics in France,
while along the Baltic coast "the
Teutonic Knights developed the 'perpetual crusade,' without
the need for
repeated and specific papal proclamations."[6] The
thirteenth-century scholar Hostiensis "defended the
use of crusades
against all
heretics and
political enemies
of the papacy" and
advanced "the
revolutionary idea that
Christendom had an
intrinsic right to extend its sovereignty over all who did not
recognize the rule of the Roman Church."[7]
In
sum, once crusading
is institutionalized, it
ceases by definition (and certainly
by dint of
human frailty) to be crusading
at all.
And the
Crusades did
not lack
for insightful critics inside
and outside the Church,
which is why perhaps the most interesting
document of
the whole period is the
systematic apologia on behalf of the Crusades composed by
Humbert of Romans,
a former master general
of the Dominican Order.
He adumbrated the seven most salient objections to
the Crusades, and rebutted them. I ask you to substitute in
your mind the
words "democracy"
or "human
rights" or
"the United
States" each time
you hear
"Christendom" or "the
Church," and judge
how contemporary old Humbert sounds.[8]
The
first critique holds
that to shed blood, even the blood of wicked
infidels, is not in accord
with the
Christian religion. Humbert
replies that Bible
passages can be found to support
both pacifism and
militancy. The correct way to reason it out is to recall that when a
man is young and weak he gets along
by acting humbly, but
when mature and strong he accords
himself in manly
fashion. So it
is with
the Church, which in
its youth was suckled
by miracles and the suffering of
saints, but once
grown large and
strong, is rightly defended
by swords. "For who is so stupid as to . . . say
that, were infidels
or evil men
to desire to
kill every Christian and
to wipe out the worship
of Christ from the world, one ought not to resist them?"
The
second critique holds
that while it is
permissible to spill Saracen blood, one must be sparing of Christian
blood. This, replies Humbert, is spurious.
Indeed, "the fact that Christians cross
their borders
and invade
their lands,
although at much risk
to their
own lives,
means that
Christian blood is
spared, for the
Saracens would
spill blood much more
abundantly if the Christians were not to do this."
The
third critique holds
that Crusades are
inviting heavy casualties and defeats
because the conditions of war are much
worse for Christians if
they sail far away to fight on the enemy's
ground, in short
supply, and
in a
strange climate. To do
thus is to
tempt the Lord
thy God.
No, replies Humbert, such
doubters forget that the
Christians are fighting for
justice, which makes them fight well, with God as
their helper, whereas
the Saracen cause is
unjust. But even on
human terms,
our weapons
and training
are better, and our wise leaders would never give battle
without good hope of victory.
The
fourth critique approves only of battle in self-defense, condemning
invasion of an
infidel's lands so
long as
he leaves us in
peace. To
which Humbert
replies that
the Saracens hate us so much that
had we not attacked them on their
own soil
they would
by now
have overwhelmed
Christendom. What is
more, the sacred land
they occupy was once in the
hands of Christians, so
the Crusaders do not
invade, but seek only to take back their own.
The
fifth critique states that if we should fight to rid the world of
Saracens, why do
we not do the same to the Jews? Humbert retorts that a remnant
of the Jews will be converted according to
prophecy, and in
any case the
Jews are
so abject that they cannot molest
us as do the Saracens.
The Jews even help us in temporal things, and pay tribute.
The
sixth critique
questions the whole
point of Crusades, since they
will never convert
the Saracens, but only
stir them up all
the more
against Christianity.
Hence, the
Crusades yield neither
spiritual nor temporal
gain. That, answers Humbert,
is precisely the point! The
fight is for honor, not gain,
and it does
serve to build up the Church insofar as God is all the more
worshiped and justice all the more served.
Thus, even as a worthy knight will challenge a wicked lord on
his own domain to prevent him from despoiling his yeomen, so does
Christendom at large.
The
seventh critique asks
whether the Crusades can possibly be God's
will in light of
the misfortunes the
Christians have encountered. O,
ye of little
faith, replies Humbert, you do
not know how
God acts.
In Scripture
God often
chastises those whom He loves, but who have strayed from the Law. If
certain Crusaders suffer and fail it is because they
Now,
it is significant that
almost no one today, especially the advocates
of American global
hegemony, uses the
word "crusade." They
are unabashed,
even militant,
in their
insistence that U.S.
foreign policy
be both
moral and
forceful, yet they shy from
the word
"crusade." That
is because crusading is
associated with
religion and cultural imperialism. It
calls to mind politically incorrect
vices such as intolerance,
hypocrisy, violence,
and greed,
and politically incorrect
virtues such as chivalry, gallantry, sacrifice, and faith. Just as it is
not only acceptable, but lauded in
our Hollywood culture
to practice
fasting and
abstinence for any
reason other than religious devotion, so it is
acceptable to invade,
bomb, or impose sanctions
on other countries for any principle except a spiritual one.
How
do these echoes of the
High Middle Ages resonate, if at all, today?
First, I believe
we have discovered
what it means
to be
a Crusader
State in
pristine theory
and practice. In theory,
to crusade means to go far afield to fight for
a cause in which
you have no material stake. On that
score America
is assuredly
a Crusader
State. In
practice, however, crusades
are launched to shore
up a leader's
authority, reduce or
distract from conflicts at
home, forge an
artificial unity among
flagging allies, or just put
a humanitarian gloss
on a political act. On
that score, too, America is a Crusader State. And the Crusades do
have something
to teach
us today,
because all
those critiques cited by
Humbert remain
valid-unless, of course, we infuse America's civic religion with a
teleological force equal to that of Medieval Catholicism.
Why,
then, should Americans
enlist in the crusades preached by today's
benevolent hegemonists?
If you
accept their
logic, we should do so for the same reasons Urban II offered at the Council of Clermont:
to cleanse the
earth of the
enemies of our
orthodoxy, to enlarge our empire of freedom, to rekindle
our idealism at
home, to bolster the
unity of the Western democracies and give NATO a mission beyond
self- defense.
But
to preach a
crusade is a
dangerous thing, for you may just succeed
in launching one,
in which
case you
may encourage fanaticism
and black-or-white judgments,
and so lose the
ability to manage
the violence toward realistic ends and according
to the standard
of proportionality. To preach a
crusade also risks the opposite
result. Like the boy who cried
wolf, or the football coach whose pep talks wear thin,
the pope or president who turns every cause into a holy one,
every enemy into a Hitler, every conflict into a genocide, may
soon find his audience rolling
its eyes and sinking into the very cynicism he hopes to surmount.
When
must the U.S.
act, when must
it lead-and when
not? There is no simple answer, especially when our strategic
and moral calculus is
complicated by a lack of
trust in the
president and his
motives. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, wrote Samuel
Johnson. To do the right thing for the wrong
reasons is the
greatest of treasons,
said T. S. Eliot. "Lilies
that fester smell
far worse
then weeds,"
recalled C. S. Lewis, because the "higher the pretensions of
our rulers are, the more
meddlesome and
impertinent their rule is likely
to be and
the more the thing in whose name they rule will be
defiled."[9]
That
is why, as America
enters the twenty-first century, we would do well to reflect on the
malignant effects as well as the impious
motives that tarnished the Crusades of the last new
millennium. To
be sure,
the Psalmist
prophesies, "righteousness and peace will kiss each
other"-but only when Messiah arrives. Until then, to be always
righteous means to be never at
peace, which is
what caused the
thirteenth- century poet, Rinaldo d'Aquino, to lament:
The
cross saves the people, but causes me to go mad
The cross makes me
sorrowful, and praying to God does not help
Alas, pilgrim cross, why
have you thus destroyed me?[10]
____________________
1 Edward Peters, ed., Christian Society and the Crusades 1198+1229 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. xii, ix.
2 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: Athlone Press, 1986), p. 2.
3 Riley-Smith, First Crusade and the Idea, pp. 17+18.
4 Ibid., p. 36.
5 Riley-Smith, First Crusade and the Idea, p. 134.
6 Riley-Smith, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 10.
7 Louise and Jonathon Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), p. 29
8 Ibid., pp. 103+17.
9 C. S. Lewis, "Lilies That Fester," The Twentieth Century, Apr. 1955.
10
"La croce salva la giente," in Riley-Smith, Oxford Illustrated
History of the Crusades, p. 105. ____________________
Other
Publications by Walter McDougall Available Upon Request
"The
Merits &; Perils of Teaching About Other Cultures,"
Footnotes, May 1999 "The Wisdom of Robert Strausz-Hup‚,"
FPRI Wire, March 1999 "The Place of Words in the Arena of
Power," Night Thoughts, November 1998 "The Ideological
Agenda of History," Academic Questions, Winter 1998-99
"Nixon, Clinton, and the Baby Boom Rising," Night
Thoughts, August 1998 "The Three Reasons We Teach
History," Footnotes, February 1998 "The Purposes of
Teaching History," The American Scholar, Winter 1998 "Why
Some Neo-Cons Are Wrong About U.S. Foreign Policy, Night Thoughts
Dec 1997 "Religion in Diplomatic History," FPRI Wire,
December 1997 "Sex, Lies, and Infantry," Commentary,
September 1997 "Kennan's "X" Plus Fifty," FPRI
Wire, September 1997 "First Fruits of Those History Standards:
Textbook Review," Footnotes, 4/97 "Back to Bedrock: The
Eight Traditions of American Statecraft,"
Foreign Affairs, March-April 1997 "Bury My Heart at
PBS," Commentary, December 1996 "What Johnny Still Won't
Know About History," Commentary, July 1996 "Whose History?
Whose Standards?," Commentary, May 1995.
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