The First Crusades (Part I) (src: Ryan Reeves)

Video

• Link to recording segments on Dropbox

Summary

TODO: Summary

Content

How should we characterize the Crusades, at a high level?

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

This lesson is the first of two parts going over the Crusades, the Christian pilgrimage-holy-wars to Jerusalem and surrounding regions of the Middle East.

Few periods in history have the same level of popular investment as the Crusades, nor the same level of narrative-shaping impact (in terms of affecting how people think about broad trends or patterns in history and sociology). This has been ever more the case post-9/11.

In our modern times characterized by a renewed focus on religiously-motivated violence, the Crusades are something that is discussed frequently—not only at the level of everyday people, but also at the level of politics:

• For example, in 2001, not long after 9/11, speaking at Georgetown, Bill Clinton placed the blame for faith-based violence on religious extremism—and not just that within Islam. He said the religious extremism of the Middle Ages had caused the Crusades and all the atrocities therein. (Note the strong language of moral condemnation; “atrocities” is far from a neutral label).
• George W. Bush also used language and imagery related to what happened in the Crusades when speaking about the Iraq War… or at least the ongoing popular understanding of what happened in the Crusades.
• More recently, Barack Obama, speaking at a prayer breakfast, urged those who identify as Christians to remain humble because we too have atrocities in our background.

The amount of conversation and debate that erupted on account of such statements was really quite striking. Clearly, people have ideas and opinions about what happened during the Crusades, and what we are to make of them. Anyone who has ever had to teach on the subject knows that this is one area of history that tends to spark passionate feelings, and that can make it decidedly difficult to talk about objectively. For example, many Protestants have a very negative view of the Crusades, and view them largely as the result of problematic Catholic doctrine and corruption within the Church hierarchy.

While there are an exceedingly large number of things one would need to discuss to make a full analysis of the cause and effect of the Crusades (rather than only touching the tip of the iceberg, so to speak), we don’t have the space here to do that sort of deep dive. Instead, we will predominantly be laying out evidence against a single point of view that we will argue is too simplistic: that the Crusades were a completely unprovoked attack on peaceable Muslims by bloodthirsty Christians who wanted land and loot. This is the sort of position typically put forward by those who wish to cast the entire affair in an overwhelmingly negative light, and make some point to the effect that Christians too have innocent blood on their hands. (At least if one buys that it is ever proper to blame the majority for the sins of the minority, which I do not).

Now, we aren’t going to be arguing that there were absolutely no selfish motives in play here (to be frank, when is that ever true in history?), but merely discuss some historical context that sort of explodes the completely neat, tidy version of this particular narrative. In other words, we won’t be pretending there is nothing to criticize on the Christian side, but we also won’t be overly whitewashing the Muslim side (like is necessary in order to paint the Crusades in the one-sided overwhelmingly negative way some people do).

As in most other conflicts in history, when viewed from a neutral perspective, you can make a good case that nobody was completely innocent, and both sides had plenty of problems. That is the approach I take in analyzing the Crusades, at any rate.

In the video, Dr. Reeves says this:

There are several points made here, as it seems to me:

1. That retaking the Holy Land was, at the least, not the only initial motivation for the Crusades. For example, there was also the matter of aiding Byzantine Christians in their conflict with the Muslim Seljuk Turks.
2. That the fact that Crusader oath made knights yield conquered lands over to the Byzantine Empire shows that personal greed could not have played a role as much as some people say.
3. That this is not the first conflict between Christians and Muslims, and so must be analyzed in terms of all that came before.

I should note that how much of the First Crusade was motivated by coming to the aid of the Byzantine Empire (i.e., defending territorial borders) and how much by a desire to reconquer the Holy Land (i.e., expanding territorial borders) is actually rather controversial, as far as scholarly debates go. In The Byzantine Background to the First Crusade (an excellent source for background on the Byzantine side of things), Paul Magadalino days this:

Unpacking this statement requires us to have a bit of background:

• Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza in March 1095, requesting military assistance against the Seljuk Turks, who were encroaching upon Byzantine lands.
• In November 1095, there was a different council called the Council of Clermont called by Pope Urban II. The actual purpose of this council was actually pretty unrelated to the Crusades, but on the last day (November 27, 1095) Pope Urban II gave a famous speech that served as the call to arms that kicked off the First Crusade. This is viewed by most scholars as being in response to Alexius I’s prior request for aid.

As is ever the case in historical analysis, the sources we have that describe Pope Urban II’s speech at Clermont do not all agree with each other. Excluding a letter about the council that Pope Urban II wrote himself, we have five main sources of information:

• The anonymous Gesta Francorum (“The Deeds of the Franks” dated c. 1100/1101)
• Fulcher of Chartres, who was present at the council, in his Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium (c. 1100–1105)
• Robert the Monk, who may have been present at the council, in Historia Hierosolymitana (c. 1107)
• Baldric, archbishop of Dol (c. 1105)
• Guibert de Nogent, Dei gesta per Francos (c. 1107/1108)

According to Dana Carleton Munro’s The speech of Pope Urban II at Clermont, all versions except the Gesta Francorum agree that Pope Urban II talked about:

1. The violence of European society and the necessity of maintaining the Peace of God
2. Helping the Greeks, who had asked for assistance
3. The crimes being committed against Christians in the East
4. A new kind of war, an armed pilgrimage, and of rewards in heaven, where remission of sins was offered to any who might die in the undertaking

Past these goals, Robert the Monk’s account of Clermont also specifically mentions the reconquest of the Holy Land (i.e., on top of merely aiding the Greeks in their pre-existing conflict), which leads us to ask whether or not Pope Urban II actually spoke of the reconquest of Jerusalem right from the get-go. Not all the sources specifically mention Jerusalem as the ultimate goal, so it is hard to say with certainty. It doesn’t help that all of these versions were written after Jerusalem had been captured in 1099, and it is therefore difficult to know what was actually said versus what was recreated in the aftermath of the successful crusade in a form of post-hoc retcon. Either way, it is clear that no matter how things started, the First Crusade clearly ended up targeting Jerusalem in fairly short order.

Some scholars think that the papal goalposts were adjusted on a rolling basis based upon the growing popularity of the Crusade among the common people. That is, after the papacy saw the growing tide of popular support and realized they might be able to accomplish more than initially thought, they dynamically updated the public-facing messaging. This point of view is somewhat persuasive, insofar as the papacy seems to have wanted to recruit knights initially, but instead in practice ended up recruiting a bunch of peasants. For example, compare Peter the Hermit and the so-called “People’s Crusade”. Whatever the papacy’s initial intentions, this popular movement clearly wanted to target Jerusalem specifically. So it is possible that the papacy decided to pivot to use this groundswell of popular support, rather than planning for it from the beginning. Although you might also argue that the papacy always intended to spark and then harness a wave of popular support, which is why Pope Urban II promised that anyone who participated would receive immediate remission of sins. That is quite the carrot to dangle, especially in context, given how most viewed forgiveness of sin at that point in time.

So which is it—did the papacy pivot to go along with popular support, or intentionally manipulate public sentiment behind-the-scenes in order to bring about the outcome they planned beforehand? We needn’t necessarily take a firm position here to accomplish our goal of arguing that the motivations behind the Crusades are objectively much less clear-cut than popular narratives often suggest (including the specific narrative that the Crusades were an act of unprovoked aggression on the part of greedy Christians who wanted land and loot). Rather than going down this path of trying to boil the Crusades down to neat categories of black and white that can serve to provoke emotional outrage (either for or against), in my opinion, it is much healthier as an academic approach to try to take a step back and come up with evidence-based explanatory models that make a good-faith effort to account for all data (not just cherry-picked data supporting only one side). This is much, much harder to do properly, and will necessarily involve speaking mostly in terms of probabilities and hypotheses (rather than moral absolutes). It also has the disadvantage of getting dry and technical rather quickly. But this path is the only one likely to avoid gross oversimplification.

So what then will we argue sparked the First Crusade, if it was not merely a blatant land grab? Well, I think you go too far the other way if you try to argue that the First Crusade was limited in scope to just being a defensive war to support the Byzantine Empire’s borders against the encroaching Seljuk Turks. Those circumstances are certainly related to the launching of the First Crusade (and we shouldn’t try to pretend otherwise), but I don’t think it is appropriate to put 100% of the focus there either, as if that was all that was going on here.

Rather, the reasons for the First Crusade seem to be decidedly complex and multifaceted. In my opinion, this Reddit post on r/AskHistorians does a good job explaining some of the casus belli, without weighting any one factor higher than is appropriate:

It would also be remiss of me not to mention here that as I understand it, there is actually a good bit of disagreement in the academy about how to characterize the Crusades, with some modern scholarly takes essentially breaking completely with past views on the subject. To quote The Byzantine Background to the First Crusade again:

In other words, the way in which certain more recent scholars like Jonathan Riley-Smith have approached the Crusades is very different from some older sources like Steven Runciman. I am not here taking a position on which view to hold, so much as noting that there are in fact views plural to pick between, rather than one dominant paradigm that is universally held.

While I certainly cannot speak for him, parts of what Dr. Reeves says in the video seem to lean towards some of Riley-Smith’s views, which hold that the Crusades were not really driven by a desire for material gain, pace popular narratives. Compare again Dr. Reeves’s statement that I previously quoted: “[W]hat’s going on here is not a land grab or a money grab; it’s not necessarily corrupt people initially saying that they are going to enact a war in an effort to steal money or land or any of these kinds of things.”

In fact, you cannot discuss the Crusades in a vacuum, ignoring the hundreds of years of prior conflicts between Christians and Muslims (including many with the Muslim side being the aggressors, to be clear). Put simply, trying to blame the Crusades for all Islamic hostility towards Christianity is misguided at best, and outright propagandistic at worst. This notion that there were all these peaceful Muslims out there minding there own business until bloodthirsty Christians showed up and burned everything down (and only then did Muslims start fighting Christians, making the origin of the religious conflict between these two groups rest solely upon the shoulders of Christians) is plain fiction.

Ever since its conception, it was not uncommon for Islam to expand more through the sword than the pen, particularly when conquering the lands of those with markedly different cultures (like, say, Christians). Was it always bloody wars of conquest? Of course not. But it certainly was sometimes. Regardless of where exactly one draws the lines in categorizing specific events in the expansion of Islam, the point is that by the time you get to the Crusades, there was in fact plenty of Christian blood on Muslim hands. This does not necessarily justify what came after (since vengeance is to be the Lord’s; cf. Romans 12:19). But it certainly does mean that the narrative articulated above about absolutely peaceful Muslims and completely bloodthirsty Christians is mostly nonsense.

Rather, the Crusades merely mark the latest in a series of ongoing struggles between Christendom and Islam. Out West, there was the Muslim conquest of Spain, and their attempted expansion northwards and eastwards into parts of southern France (cf. the Battle of Tours). Out East, the Byzantine Christians had been having land disputes with various Muslim political structures for many centuries. This is not to say that the two sides were never able to peacefully coexist (since there was plenty of that too in history); the point is, the Crusades were far from the first time the two religions had crossed blades, so to speak.

And in fact, the Crusades were far from the last time too. Frankly, all the way up until as late as the 16th century, European forces and Byzantine forces clashed with various Muslim states almost constantly.

So while the Crusades are indeed an enormously important part of the history of Christian-Muslim relations, they are not the only part of the story.

Follow-on topics

Should we as Christians care about specific places, like Jerusalem? No, we should not

Whether or not the papacy initially intended for the Crusades to reconquer Jerusalem, that goal quickly got adopted in practice. It is no straw man to say that the Christian propaganda of the time did clearly paint the military expeditions as a form of holy war to once again take control of the holy land. (To be fair, historical Muslims also frequently justified wars using religion, although we cannot be overly anachronistic in this, since many singularly militaristic views on jihad are in fact quite modern).

So, to put it bluntly, is there anything valid about this? That is, with respect to so-called philosophy of war, is “this place is holy to my religion!” a valid justification jus ad bellum?

The answer for Christians is no, biblically speaking, and I don’t even view this is as my personal opinion, but as a biblical fact. It might seem odd for me to be so aggressive in emphasizing this, but it is quite necessary, since plenty of religious conflicts right up until the present involve this matter, and lots of people seem to get this wrong.

Now, we need to be extremely careful how we talk about things here. For example:

• God did tell the people of Israel to conquer Canaan, and treat the covenantal Promised Land He gave to them as something special and important.
• Lots of stuff in the Law required going to the (definite article) temple in Jerusalem.
• During the Babylonian exile (for example), we know that the longing Jews had for their homeland was entirely proper and godly.
• Geographic Israel will play an important role in eschatology.
• Etc.

So the question is not “Does God ever want us to treat some specific place as special?” but “Does God right now (i.e., current dispensation) want us to treat some specific place as special?” Those are two different matters entirely.

Old Testament Jews living under the Law clearly were supposed to treat Jerusalem and the temple therein with great reverence. But we are not Old Testament Jews living under the Law. Moreover, that version of Jerusalem entirely ceased to exist after 70 A.D., when Titus essentially razed the city to the ground (including the temple).

Unlike the Law—which involved many physical rituals—the new covenant of grace is mostly inward not outward. Moreover, Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36); our homeland is not a place upon earth, but in heaven:

How ironic it is then that Christians throughout history fought wars over physical Jerusalem! They ought to have instead turned their eyes towards heavenly Jerusalem.

What is even worse is that Christians have taken an obsession with the physical far further than just Jerusalem (which at least has going for it that it used to be a place of proper focus for believers, and will be again in the future). For example, plenty of Christians act like cathedrals and church buildings are holy. They are not. They are just buildings. What have buildings to do with our faith, or the teaching of the Word of God? Those are the important things, but they are not physical.

It is in fact blasphemous to think God specially dwells in things built by human hands; He only did that (insofar as one can call a symbolic physical column of cloud “doing that”) with the tabernacle and then the temple. But now we are the temple (1 Peter 2:4-5), indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Focusing on physical buildings is therefore emphasizing exactly the wrong thing.

If the Vatican were to get wiped off the face of of the earth tomorrow, nothing changes. If the physical local church we attend were to get wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow, nothing changes. Why? Because the church is us, the assembly of human beings, not the building. After all, that is what the word “church” (Greek: ἐκκλησία) actually means.

To take things even further, imagine for a moment that traditionally Christian regions (e.g., Western Europe, America) were to get conquered by theocratic Muslim regimes. What ought we make of that? Well, are we American first, or Christian first? Is our loyalty first to God, or to the physical land? You may scoff, but lots of nations throughout history have completely ceased to exist, and we see all too many examples of people who compromise themselves fighting for a country that is physical not spiritual. We are not citizens of this world, but are citizens of heaven.

So when we read in history of Christians going on physical pilgrimages to supposedly holy places (and even going to war to support such pilgrimages), we should shake our heads, and have the same attitude as Paul did with the Galatians:

We are all of us on a spiritual pilgrimage towards Zion (cf. Psalm 84). What then are these physical journeys people are so proud of? Of what use are they? They are of no use at all.

Rather than caring about the physical, we should live out our daily lives wherever we are, with our eyes fixed firmly upon the Kingdom of Heaven. Whether we find ourselves in a beautiful stained-glass cathedral or a dirty slum, a Western democracy with freedom of religion or an oppressive regime wherein Christianity is heavily persecuted, all of this matters not. Instead, the only thing that matters is the spiritual dimension beyond this physical world.

Further discussion

What exactly was a crusade? Some combination of plenary indulgence, pilgrimage, and holy war

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

We will be arguing that a crusade was really a combination of several different concepts sort of stitched together:

1. A plenary indulgence
2. A pilgrimage to the holy land
3. A holy war to defend the faith

Around the time of the First Crusade, several different concepts sort of coalesced and came together, a set of convictions and principles that were to define the crusading era. Rather than these things somehow themselves launching the First Crusade, it is more like the definition of what exactly a crusade even was sort of developed alongside the First Crusade itself.

So when Pope Urban II gave his call to arms at Clermont in 1095, at that time those hearing him would not have had a fleshed-out conception of what precisely this endeavor would be. But as the First Crusade achieves some measure of success—as it self-identifies as a crusade—then a sort of de facto definition gets built on the fly. This means the First Crusade in essence caused the concept of crusading to gain a firm definition; a pre-existing firm definition did not cause the First Crusade. It is important for us to not flip the order here when we think about things, since getting it backwards can warp our view of how the First Crusade developed.

In terms of doctrinal issues in play, one important thing was the plenary indulgence offered to crusaders. In Catholic theology, an indulgence is some way to reduce the temporal punishment for forgiven sin (i.e., sin that has been formally confessed to a priest). In their understanding, the process of sanctification requires not only forgiveness from the guilt (culpa) of sin, but also purification from the harmful effects or wounds of sin.

To use video game terminology, even after absolution is granted by a priest during confession, you could say that the penitent are still under a “negative consequences of sin” debuff. This debuff even persists after death; in Catholic theology, purgatory exists so that this debuff (i.e., the temporal punishment of sin) can be fully cleansed before eternity. (Purgatory is seen as being still essentially “temporal”).

In Catholic theology, there are two basic ways the debuff gets removed: 1) penance, and 2) indulgences. The mechanics here are very different.

Penance is:

1. Assigned by a priest during confession; Catholic priests assign sacramental penance as part of the Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation, before they give absolution.
2. Obligatory/mandatory
3. Related to helping remove the debuff for a specific sin (i.e., something that was just confessed). Penance is therefore limited in scope.

Indulgences are:

1. Pursued electively. The recipient of an indulgence can choose to perform some action to receive it, but does not “have” to in order receive absolution through confession.
2. Completely optional
3. Related to removing the debuff for all already-confessed sins generally. Indulgences are therefore broad in scope.

Another difference is that indulgences can be applied to the debuff of someone other than yourself: in Catholic teaching, indulgences can be applied to the dead in purgatory, but they cannot be applied to other living people on earth.

There are two types of indulgences: plenary indulgences (cf. the Latin adjective plenus, meaning “full” or “complete”) completely remove the debuff across all past sins, while partial indulgences only partially remove the debuff across all past sins. This means plenary indulgences are “more powerful”.

What I have just gone through is a general summary of current Catholic teachings on these things, just to define terms and introduce the concepts. What I am going to do now is discuss some history related to indulgences.

Hand-waving a bit:

• Plenary indulgences were extremely rare and a massive deal in early medieval history. Pope Urban II’s speech at the Council of Clermont more or less directly stated that participation in the the First Crusade would serve as a plenary indulgence. This is widely seen as being the first official plenary indulgence in Catholic church history.
• During most of the High Middle Ages, plenary indulgences were practically unheard of outside of going on a crusade.
• But by the late High Middle Ages, the Church allowed people to gain them by proxy—such as paying for a substitute fighter or funding a crusade if you were too old or sick to go.
• Non-crusade plenary indulgences only began later (cf. the First Roman Jubilee in 1300), and widespread commercialization and abuses did not peak until the 15th century. The blatant selling of indulgences was one of the things that brought about the Protestant Reformation.

To understand why tens of thousands of people trekked thousands of miles eastwards from Western Europe in the First Crusade, you have to put in context how big a deal this plenary indulgence was seen to be at the time. Medieval Christians deeply feared purgatory and the debt of temporal punishment left after sins were confessed. But Pope Urban II said that you could wipe out that entire debt instantly by going on a crusade. That was a powerful motivator indeed!

So this forms the first part of our definition of a crusade:

A crusade was:

1. A plenary indulgence

That brings us to the second concept involved here: the idea of going on a pilgrimage.

The idea of pilgrimages dates back to the very early church (which, in my opinion, is good evidence demonstrating how quickly the church visible went off the rails after the passing of the Apostles). Christians would basically go on trips to various locations (often those associated with the life of Christ). These trips were considered “good works”, meaning in practice that they often ended up intertwined with penance and indulgences (see above). The holy land in particular was seen as being especially meaningful as a target for pilgrimage.

This forms the second part of our definition of a crusade:

A crusade was:

1. A plenary indulgence
2. A pilgrimage to the holy land

And finally we arrive at the last big idea: the notion of a holy war. This is perhaps the hardest piece to define precisely, since there are a number of moving pieces.

First off, medieval Europe had a problem on its hands when it came to violence and war. The church was trying very hard to stamp out conflicts between feudal lords, and part of that was by instituting moral codes for warriors. Chivalry, in some senses, can be viewed as a propaganda effort on the part of the church to sidestep nobility and directly control knights. The problem is that moralizing to knights does not make them stop being warriors. Put differently, men who train very hard for years to gain experience in the art of war will not put down their swords just because you ask nicely and tell them to please stop fighting.

Compared to moralizing alone, the church calling a crusade was much more effective overall in eliminating knight-driven violence in Europe. This is so for a couple big reasons:

1. It let squabbling feudal kingdoms unite against a perceived common enemy.
2. It gave knights a way to engage in war without having to make restitution or justification for it. In fact, far from needing to undertake penance for their violence, they would now be receiving a plenary indulgence for the same. Clearly, that was received by them much more favorably.

In terms of dressing this up prettily so people would actually buy it, the papacy leaned heavily on concepts related to so-called “just war”, first put forward centuries earlier by theologians like Ambrose and Augustine. Pope Urban II may not have directly quoted Augustine in his Clermont speech (i.e., to outline a formal theory of just war to rationalize the First Crusade), but all the basic elements were there nonetheless.

This approach was quite a bit more hawkish than earlier Christian views on war, which tended more towards complete pacificism. But by casting the affair not as a war of aggression, but as as a moral fight to defend righteousness, taking up arms to defend the faith became inextricably linked to the crusader spirit. And so it was that the notion of “holy war” came to be an essential part of what the crusades were in practice.

This forms the third and final part of our definition of a crusade:

A crusade was:

1. A plenary indulgence
2. A pilgrimage to the holy land
3. A holy war to defend the faith

Follow-on topics

Avoiding straw men in discussing penance and indulgences

Oftentimes, Protestants partially or totally straw man the Catholic position on penance and indulgences, and say that this is directly teaching salvation by works. However, the Catholic position is not precisely that penance and indulgences forgive sin (in the sense of removing guilt, which even in their view is only removed by the blood of Christ), but that these things are necessary to remove the negative consequences of sin in practice.

We may disagree with this as a position, but we should make sure that at least this is what we are arguing against, rather than a misrepresentation of their position.

Arguing against penance and indulgences on the basis of Hebrews 12:4-13

Consider Hebrews 12:4-13:

In my opinion, one of the best arguments against penance and indulgences is that this passage mentions no way to mitigate God’s discipline, nor does trying to do that even make particularly good sense if the purpose of God’s discipline is to grow us. That is to say, if the purpose of discipline from the hand of our loving Father is to teach us, then seeking to completely sidestep it is somewhat counterproductive, is it not? Even after we confess and are forgiven (cf. 1 John 1:9), we may still face consequences. But this is entirely for our own good!

There is also the fact that this passage clearly teaches that discipline comes from God Himself. That would seem to be obvious, but it bears repeating, since Catholic doctrine teaches that priests assign penance. Interesting that Hebrews 12 doesn’t mention such a practice at all, is it not?

Also, more broadly, consider the training that the discipline of the Lord is supposed to effect in us. Because God is a perfect Father, His discipline always teaches us perfectly. Whatever area we need to be taught a lesson in (be it pride, lust, anger, or whatever else), God’s discipline will effectively train us in that area.

As I see things, the sledgehammer nature of indulgences would seem to inherently prevent such tailored training in righteousness. If I can get rid of the negative consequences of my lust by going on a pilgrimage to a specific place, well, what precisely does the latter have to do with the former? You can try to wave your hand at it and say that the good works of penance and indulgences help reduce our attachment to the world and so on (and that that is how the negative consequences of sin are minimized in practice), but to me, this is much less intuitive, and seems needlessly indirect.

As a human parent, if I am punishing my young son for trying to touch a hot stove, I am not going to stop lecturing him about the hot stove just because he did something else right (like doing well on a test, for example). How then will he effectively get the lesson about the hot stove?

So if we can see this as human parents, why would we think God works any differently? What is actually best for us is getting the entirety of the lesson (through God’s perfect tailored discipline)… even if we did something else good in the meantime.

The fact that the Catholic church hierarchy directly controls penance and indulgences (not to mention absolution) gives it inherent power over those who believe in these doctrines

I should point out that this is not itself a moral condemnation of the Catholic church. After all, if the Catholic church is in fact God’s chosen institution upon earth (as they claim), it having a lot of power is not necessarily a bad thing. But nevertheless, the fact that:

1. Priests have the power to gatekeep absolution behind mandatory acts of penance (and priests are controlled by the central church hierarchy)
2. The church higher-ups are the only one who can define indulgences

Means that the central church has an enormous amount of power over those who buy into these things… like the crusaders.

Think about it. According to Catholic theology, temporal punishment for sin (even after you confess it to a priest) might lead to Bad Things in time, or even land you in purgatory. And the only way to avoid said Bad Things and/or purgatory is to do what the church tells you; they are the ones who set the rules. No matter how you look at it, the church now has complete control over you.

It even gets worse, because according to Catholic doctrine, you need a priest in order to receive absolution; you cannot do it on your own. That is to say, if you are not willing to bow the knee to central church authority (since they are the ones who ultimately control the priests), you cannot even receive forgiveness at all.

Of course, most of us Protestants reject all of this. We believe that confession should be directly to God (1 John 1:9), and after confession/genuine repentance, that is it. Under this system of belief, there is no mechanism for my pastor to inject himself into the forgiveness of sin. Even if he wanted to, he cannot weaponize fear and guilt to control me (e.g., by directly stating or even just implying that I have to XYZ in order to not face Bad Things on account of my sin).

The question thus becomes whether or not the centralized Catholic church has ever actively used penance and indulgences to exploit fear and guilt to manipulate people. Given that I am a non-denominational Protestant and have never hidden my distaste for centralized church authority structures, you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear that I believe the answer to this is very much yes.

Some things I think should also be considered when examining these doctrines critically:

• In the beginning, apparently the only way you could get a plenary indulgence was by yourself going on a crusade. Then it changed to maybe paying for someone else to go on the crusade on your behalf, if you could not do it yourself for some reason. Fast forward many centuries, and now there are all sorts of ways people can receive a plenary indulgence that are far simpler than going on a crusade. In fact, modern Catholic teachings allow people to receive a plenary indulgence once daily. So let me ask, did God suddenly start treating sin much more casually? On what basis can modern people do objectively trivial things to receive full remittance of sin, whereas medieval people had to risk their lives for the same? You can wave your hand and say that modern popes have, out of mercy and benevolence, just opened more paths to achieve full remittance of sin, but I submit that while using the papal authority/ex cathedra card might “work” if you presuppose your own position, the “cheapness” of modern plenary indulgences (compared to the early plenary indulgences that required going on crusades) should cause anybody with a remotely open mind to seriously question these teachings.
• Only in the 1960s did the Catholic church stop specifically quantifying partial indulgences in terms of “days/weeks/months/years of canonical penance equivalent”. I am not straw manning; they really put specific number values on things. Of course, before this, they already had fixed numbers within penitential codes for penance, so I suppose quantifying indulgences too ought not be surprising on balance. I find both practices to be wholly arbitrary.

• Of course, no discussion about indulgences would be complete without mentioning how the blatant selling of indulgences played no small part in triggering the Protestant Reformation. One cannot get around the fact that this is established historical fact. Of course, Catholics have plenty of explanations for how the centralized Catholic church can apparently go astray here and there without it ultimately losing its authority, but taking a step back, I think we ought to seriously question the usefulness of trusting an institution that can be so blatantly corrupt. That is, if we accept that the Catholic church was terribly wrong at that point and time in history, what stops it from being terribly wrong about some other matter in the present? Nothing makes that logically impossible. To me, that is a very good reason to not put your trust in the centralized church, and to instead only trust in the Bible.

Further discussion

The historical context of the First Crusade, and the initial call to arms

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Out in in the East, as various Muslim empires rose and fell, there arose a division between Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. This meant that to some extent there was not as much unity on the part of Muslims as their might have otherwise been, and this proved fortunate to the Byzantine Empire, in that they faced relatively smaller and more fragmented armies, which let them resist more effectively.

Nonetheless, the Byzantine world did at times lose land to the Muslims (or rather, the borders went back and forth over hundreds of years of conflicts)—at one point to the extent that Constantinople itself was at risk.

But by the early part of the 11th century, the Byzantine Empire found themselves having restored and even extended many of their eastern borders.

But then the Seljuks came on the scene (triggering the Byzantine–Seljuk wars), and things started going more poorly for the Byzantine Empire. Now, the Seljuks were an interesting group. They actually came from nomadic Turkic tribes from the steppes of Central Asia who moved south and converted to Islam. This means the Seljuks were not Arab, and that is important in understanding their society and culture, in that there were definite differences compared to the Arab Caliphates (like the Rashidun Caliphate, Umayyad Caliphate, and Abbasid Caliphate, for example).

At any rate, a crushing strategic defeat of the Byzantine Empire by the Seljuk Empire in the 1071 Battle of Manzikert opened to the door to the Turkification of Anatolia, and a crumbling of the Byzantine Empire’s ability to maintain its borders. The eastern emperor at the time (Romanos IV Diogenes) was even captured alive by the Seljuks.

Of course, it was not just conflicts out east that set the backdrop for the Crusades. The Great Schism between the Eastern Church and Western Church (which we discussed previously here) happened in 1054. At the time the First Crusade rolled around in the 1090s, the schism was still only several decades old, and this close proximity meant that there was at that point a proportionally much higher percentage of people who though that reunification was inevitable, and just a matter of time. That sentiment clearly colored relations between East and West. In fact, arguably, you can see this attitude in action in Alexios I sending his embassy to Pope Urban II to request aid against the Seljuks. Basically, why would he bother reaching out to the West if there was not at least some hope of reconciliation? (I suppose one could argue that desperate times call for desperate measures).

Whatever the case, this brings us to Pope Urban II’s speech at Clermont that we already analyzed extensively in a previous section (§How should we characterize the Crusades, at a high level?). (Relative to Dr. Reeves sequence in the video, I covered Clermont a bit earlier, since I thought it is quite important to bring up when going over potential Christian motivations for the First Crusade). Recapping some of the main points:

• On November 27, 1095 Pope Urban gave a speech at the Council of Clermont (which was a church council that was initially about more or less unrelated things) that kicked off the First Crusade. Many scholars think that Alexios I’s appeal is what ultimately led to this speech.
• All the main historical accounts of Clermont we have were written down after the First Crusade itself, so it is hard to separate myth from fact here.
• Pope Urban II demonizes the Seljuks in this speech, painting them as bloodthirsty savages persecuting Christians left and right.

The initial papal call to arms (which was perhaps intended to recruit a few thousand people to go help the Byzantines in their conflict with the Seljuks) was quickly supplemented by lay preachers who sort of took the ball and ran with it. We just previously talked about how the people of the time self-defined crusades (§What exactly was a crusade? Some combination of plenary indulgence, pilgrimage, and holy war), and many of these views were shaped by the popular movement that took on something of a life of its own.

Whatever people’s individual reasons (since the reasons did no doubt vary to at least some degree across individuals), the overall marketing proved effective, for in the end, more than 100,000 people ended up embarking on the First Crusade. Even today a mobilization of 100,000 people is a lot, but how much more so back then when populations were much smaller on the whole!

Further discussion

The so-called People’s Crusade

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

The first mobilization of the First Crusade somewhat surprisingly did not actually involve a sortie by an army of professional soldiers. Instead it was a rather rag-tag group of peasants that first set out East. This band of more-or-less untrained people (often called the People’s Crusade) set out in Spring 1096, whereas the professional armies (often called the Princes’ Crusade) did not set out until Late Summer 1096.

Now, if the professional Byzantine armies fell to the military might of the Seljuks, how much more so the People’s Crusade. A bunch of mostly untrained peasants attacking the well-trained Seljuk army calls to mind a quote from the ancient Chinese text Mozi: “To refute my principle with one’s own principle is like throwing an egg against a boulder. The eggs in the world would be exhausted without doing any harm to the boulder.” (The wider idiom this quote spawned—以卵投石 (pinyin: yǐluǎntóushí), literally, “throwing an egg against a boulder”—essentially means “to overestimate one’s capabilities or to attack a stronger opponent as the weaker side, which is sure to end in failure”). Here, the Seljuk army is the boulder, and the peasant army is the egg. The clash between the two went exactly as one would expect: in the battle of Battle of Civetot most of the individuals making up the People’s Crusade got completely slaughtered. Calling it a battle is even giving them more credit than one probably should, particularly since the crusaders weren’t even properly unified at this point in time (since they splintered across ethnic lines and started squabbling basically as soon as they actually reached Anatolia…).

This entire affair might seem eminently irrational… and it really was, as hindsight clearly shows. That then leaves us as students of history with the problem of figuring out what exactly was going through these people’s heads at the time. What would cause them to think that running on ahead of the professional armies was even remotely a good idea?

Were they just crazy? If what you mean by that is diagnosable mental illness, then probably not. But if you mean brainwashed by delusional end-of-the-world drivel, then yeah, at least some of them were certifiably crazy.

Humans seem to have a morbid fascination with the end of the world, and it has the unfortunate tendency to induce utterly nonsensical behavior in “true believers”. This is true in modern times (cf. the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978, the tragic true origin of the idiom “drink the Kool-Aid”), and it has also been true all throughout history, including here with the People’s Crusade.

As best we can tell, there was a fervent Apocalyptic/Millenarian sentiment simmering during this period, stoked by some of the leaders of the People’s Crusade like Peter the Hermit (who we discussed before), as well as Volkmar and Emicho. The thought seems to have been that if they successfully marched on Jerusalem, they could bring in the second coming of Christ and begin the end times struggle against Antichrist, or something to that effect.

So how did this sort of sentiment find a foothold in the minds of the common people? Well, severe droughts, famines, pestilence, and economic collapse across Europe in 1095 created an undeniably apocalyptic mood:

• 1095 began with a brutally severe winter. There were massive snowstorms that killed multitudes of livestock and people. Rivers across Europe froze over, and subsequent thaws caused floods that at times swept away critical bridges.
• Following the severe winter, Europe experienced an intense, suffocating summer heatwave. The extreme temperatures and resulting droughts directly killed large numbers of people.
• At least partially as a result of the extreme weather patterns, there were successive harvest failures in 1095 that left grain reserves empty, inflating food prices and starving rural and urban populations.
• Driven by the consecutive blows of freezing winter floods, severe drought, and failing crops, a widespread pestilence and famine swept through Europe in 1095.
  • At least some of the pestilence was a horrific gangrenous illness known as ergotism, which rotted limbs and caused agonizing deaths.
• Widespread economic despair, hunger, and death eroded normal societal bounds, making the common folk desperate for divine intervention.

In the midst of all this, there was a massive meteor shower in April 1095. The awe-inspiring celestial phenomena of falling stars was seen as a divine sign by some (cf. the statements made by Gilbert of Lisieux).

All these things together are hypothesized to be the reason why people at the time were willing to seriously entertain thoughts that this really might be the end.

Unfortunately, the fanaticism that took over here caused much greater damage than just the deaths of the brainwashed themselves. Put simply, the People’s Crusade was a walking catastrophe, looting and pillaging wherever it went. Even worse than that, some of the leaders like Volkmar and Emicho stirred up the mob to massacre Jews, in organized pogroms (cf. the Rhineland Massacres).

The same sort of sentiment is thought to underpin some of the horrific slaughter that followed the later capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Again, no more People’s Crusade at this point, but that doesn’t mean that all the ideas completely died with them.

I should note that how much of the violence and brutality was definitively driven by runaway apocalyptic sentiment is still something of a debate in the academy. The theory goes that the crusaders thought that both Jews and Muslims had to be destroyed or converted for the Earth to reach the end of days. The problem is, there are also other plausible explanations for the violence too. For example, the Medieval mindset commonly justified antisemitism (up to and including outright violence) by arguing that the Jews were the ones who crucified Jesus.

I should be clear that neither one of these things is any sort of excuse for slaughtering innocents. The point is not that the crusaders doing this was at all OK, but that figuring out why they did it is actually not as simple as one might think.

Follow-on topics

Theology saves lives. Literally

A previous study we had discussed how reading the Bible protects us from cult influence. In my opinion, what we have gone over here serves as an excellent historical example of how good theology can literally save lives.

It reminds me of this passage from Ephesians 4:

Attaining spiritual maturity makes us resistant to being led astray by false teaching. Given that some of the consequences of being led astray by false teaching can be so terrifying, maybe this can help us be more motivated to pursue spiritual growth. After all, you don’t want to end up like the peasants in the People’s Crusade who died futile deaths that achieved nothing, right?

Further discussion

The so-called Princes’ Crusade, and the Siege(s) of Antioch

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Follow-on topics

Further discussion

Disagreements about end conditions for the First Crusade, and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Follow-on topics

Further discussion

The legacy of the First Crusade

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Follow-on topics

Further discussion

Review Questions

Coming soon!