A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

In similarly indirect ways, organized Christianity tended at times to restrain feudal tyranny. The bishop and the abbot were territorial magnates, who to some extent counterpoised the baron; and though the bishops were too often only barons with a difference, they were often a barrier to lay ambition and violence. Even as the king’s rule might protect the common people as against their local lords—though the feudal system did not originally suppose this—so the Church might be a local benefactor in virtue of its local interests. Here again, however, the influence was not doctrinal; and Churchmen in general endorsed the feudal law in letter and in spirit, always availing themselves of its machinery to extort their own dues.

On the other hand, insofar as the papacy in the twelfth century began to throw its weight on the side of the popular party in Italy as against the aristocratic and imperial party, thus constituting the Guelph faction as against the Ghibeline, it indirectly furthered the cause of self-government; and even in its official doctrine there thus came to be inserted provisions in favour of the claim of subjects to choose their rulers. The teaching of Thomas Aquinas to this effect must have counted for something in the later evolution of political doctrine. Nothing however is more remarkable than the ease with which dutiful kings, as those of later Spain and France, secured the assent of the Church, as the early barbarian kings had done, to the suppression of all popular liberties. The economic or administrative interest of the Church was always the determinant of its action. It supplied no fixed principle conducive to peace; on the contrary, it was always a force the more for war in Europe.

§ 4. Influence of the Crusades

That some social gains may be correlative with great historic evils is perhaps best seen in the case of the Crusades organized by the Church against the Saracens in Palestine. These campaigns were first conceived in the interests of the papal power; and as early as 999 Pope Sylvester II (Gerbert), who had been anti-papal before his elevation, sent a letter through Europe appealing for united action on behalf of the Church of Jerusalem. There was no response. In 1074 Gregory VII strove hard to the same end, seeing in a conquest of the Turks a means to extend his power over the Eastern Church. Not, however, till Europe was full of tales of the cruelties wrought by the new Eastern power, the Turks, against Christian pilgrims—a marked change from the comparative tolerance of the Caliphs—was it possible to begin a vast crusading movement among all classes, aiming at the recovery of the empty sepulchre from which the Christ had risen. To this movement Pope Urban II zealously lent himself, backing up the wild appeal of Peter the Hermit (1094) with the fatal bribe of indulgences.

The first effect (1096) was to collect several immense and almost formless mobs of men and women who by all accounts were in the main the refuse of Europe. “That the vast majority looked upon their vow as a licence for the commission of any sin there can be no moral doubt.” The devout exaltation of the few was submerged by the riot of the many, who began using their indulgences when they began their march, and rolled like a flood across Europe, massacring, torturing, and plundering Jews wherever they found them, and forcibly helping themselves to food where plunder was easy. Multitudes perished by the way; multitudes more were sold as slaves in Byzantium to pay for the feeding of the rest there; and of the seven thousand who reached Asiatic soil with Peter the Hermit, four thousand were slain by the Turks at Nicæa; some 300,000 thus perishing in all. Inasmuch as Europe was thus rid of a mass of its worst inhabitants, the first crusade might be said so far to have wrought indirect good; but the claim is hardly one to be pushed on religious grounds.

The more organized military forces who soon followed under Godfrey of Bouillon and other leaders, though morally not better witnesses to Christianity, achieved at length (1099) the capture of Jerusalem, and founded the Latin kingdom of Palestine, which subsisted in force for less than a hundred years, and in a nominal form for a century longer. As a display of Christian against “pagan” life and conduct, the process of conquest was worse than anything seen in the East in the Christian era. No armies were ever more licentious than those of “the cross”; and those of Attila were hardly more ferocious. Their own lives were lost in myriads, by the sword, by disease, and by debauchery; they were divided by mutual hatred from first to last; and the one force to unify them was the hatred against the infidel which wreaked itself in the massacre of men, women, and children after the capture of a city. Besieging Antioch, they shot heads of hundreds of slain Turks into the city from their engines, and dug up hundreds of corpses to put the heads on pikes. It is even recorded that when their savage improvidence left them starving at the siege of Marra they fed on the corpses they dug up; and when the place was stormed Bohemond gave up to the general massacre even those inhabitants who had paid him large sums for their lives, sparing only the young, whom he sent to the slave-markets of Antioch. When Godfrey took Jerusalem, the Jews there were all burned alive in their synagogues; and the chronicles tell that the crusaders rode their horses to the temple knee-deep in the blood of many thousands of slain misbelievers. On the second day, in cold blood, there was wrought a fresh massacre by way of solemn sacrifice; and in the name of Jesus were slain a great multitude of every age—mothers with the infants in their arms, little children, youths and maidens, and men and women bowed with age. Thus was retrieved the mythic Saviour’s sepulchre.

Eight times, during two hundred years, was the effort repeated, as the fortunes of the Christian principalities in the East were shaken or overthrown by Moslem assailants, and as the papacy saw its chance or need to weaken the emperor, or otherwise avert danger to itself, by renewing the call to arms. No religious teacher seems ever to have doubted the fitness of the undertaking. St. Bernard preached the second Crusade as zealously as Peter did the first; eloquent monks were found, as they were needed, to rouse enthusiasm for each of the rest in turn; and King Louis IX of France, the model monarch of Christendom, saw in his vain expedition to recover Jerusalem (1248) the highest service he could do to God or man. As each successive crusade failed in the act or was followed by decadence and defeat, the Church professed to see in the disaster a penalty for Christian sin; and under Innocent III the very cardinals of Rome vowed to mend their ways, by way of reviving the warlike zeal of the laity. Among other fruits of the crusading movement had been a vast increase in the papal revenues; and whereas the imposts specially laid on for crusading purposes were said by many to have been appropriated by the papal court, the pope undertook to put the administration of all such revenue under non-clerical trustees. But between the hardness of the military task and the endless strifes and degeneracies of the leaders on the one hand, and the growing distrust of the Church on the other, the crusading spirit died out in the thirteenth century.

To all who could sanely judge, it had become clear that the crusades were at once a vast drain on the blood and treasure of Europe and a vast force of demoralization. In the course of the fifth, the government of Venice succeeded in using the crusaders, in despite of the protests of Innocent III, to wrest the city of Zara from the king of Hungary, himself a zealous crusader. Then the expedition, with the pope’s approval, proceeded to interfere in Byzantine strifes, making and unmaking emperors, until they had created chaos, whereupon they sacked Constantinople (1204) with every circumstance of vileness and violence. The pope, who had hoped to reconcile the Byzantines to papal rule, burst out in bitter indignation at the deeds of the men to whom he had given his indulgences; but morality was at an end all round, as might have been foretold; and the pope accepted the conquest for what it was to bring him in new power. Christendom thenceforth crusaded with its tongue in its cheek. From the first the papacy had taught that no faith need be kept with unbelievers; and so was given a very superfluous apprenticeship to bad faith between Christians. When in 1212 there broke out the hapless Children’s Crusades, out of the 30,000 who followed the boy Stephen some way through France, 5,000 were shipped at Marseilles by merchants who, professing to carry them “for the cause of God, and without charge,” sold them as slaves at Algiers and Alexandria. The last recruits furnished by pope Nicholas IV to the Grand Master of the Templars were drawn from the jails of Italy: the papacy itself had ceased to put any heart in the struggle. It is a reasonable calculation that in the two centuries from the first crusade to the fall of Acre (1291) there had perished, in the attempts to recover and hold the Holy Land, nine millions of human beings, at least half of them Christians. Misery and chronic pestilence had slain most; but the mere carnage had been stupendous.

Much has been written as to the gains to civilization from the “intercourse” thus set up between West and East. Gains there were; and if we remember that thus to have gained was the measure of the incapacity of Christendom for peaceful traffic with the world of Islam, we can learn from the process something of real sociological causation. Men who, from ferocity and fanaticism, could not make quiet acquaintance with their neighbours, were hurled against them in furious hordes, generation after generation, and in the intervals of fighting came to know something of their arts and their thought, exchanging handicrafts and products. The crowning irony of the evolution lay in the entrance of unbelief into the Christian world through the very contact with the “infidel” who was to have been crushed. This perhaps was the discovery that disillusioned the papacy. And but for the spirit of faith and hate—the true correlatives in Christian history—every gain from the Crusades might have been made ten times over in commerce. To make such gains at the price of nine million lives and unutterable evil is the contribution of the Crusades to civilization.