Taking the Cross

My last post provided some theological and historical background to the crusades of the early medieval period, concerning the rise of

Islam and the theological debates of the time concerning the concept of a just war (there were also a few other reasons, such as the Byzantine Empire appealing for help after a long and tiring series of wars against the Turks and a general bout of religious mania that collectively gripped the Catholic world at the time, but these kinds of things are boring and can be summarised in an overlong clause-laden sentence.). Today is going to cover history in a more conventional manner: specifically, the early history of the crusades themselves.

The triggering act of the First Crusade was the Council of Clermont in July 1095, when Pope Urban II (in response to the Byzantine Emperor Alexios the First’s call for aid) made an impassioned speech to a large crowd of French nobles and clergymen. After beginning with the predictable rabble rousing stuff, detailing the atrocities performed by the Muslims on Christian pilgrims and other such bits of religious fervour, Urban moved on to propose a new type of ‘armed pilgrimage’ aiming to take back the Holy Land (although he didn’t specifically mention Jerusalem) from the Saracen infidels. And, like any good salesman, he ended with a special offer to nail down the deal; remission of sins (ie direct route to heaven) for all crusaders who either died in the attempt or successfully completed the crusade’s objective.

Whilst he had hoped for a big response, Urban never quite anticipated the sheer scale of what his crusade would become. Whilst he had anticipated (and got) a good number of knights and nobles making up his crusading army (mostly from France where he toured, but also from the Holy Roman Empire and Italy where local priests were encouraged to preach), what was not expected was the popular response. Thousands upon thousands of common people across Europe pledged to ‘take the cross’, armed with little more than religious fervour and a near-total lack of fighting ability, despite Urban’s attempts to make some of them (such as the women) stay home. Indeed, some 20,000 such pilgrims led by a successful Crusading preacher named Peter the Hermit were so wrapped up in zealotry that they set off for the Holy Land six months before anyone else (the disorganised mob were ambushed halfway through Turkey and only 3,000 escaped with their lives).

When the official crusade of some 30,000 relatively organised men finally kicked off in August 1096 and, despite nearly precipitating war with the Byzantines they had gone to help with regards to sourcing supplies, was reasonably successful. They took back Nicaea, a city a little way to the south east of Constantinople, for the Byzantines, defeated a large Turkish army in the Battle of Dorylaeum, before laying siege to the large, historic Muslim city of Antioch (close to the border between modern-day Turkey and Syria). The siege lasted for nearly a year and the crusading army had to deal with an Islamic relief army shortly after capturing it, but the area was eventually subdued (read; the entire Muslim population were slaughtered) and the first European Prince of Antioch put in power. The remaining troops then marched to Jerusalem, dealing with plague, cannibalism and more enemies than you could shake a stick at on the way, but managed to force their way into the city, massacred the local Muslims and Jews who had fought against them in one of the most horrific acts of genocide in human history (the persecution of the Jews in Europe following Urban’s Christian, anti-semitic rabble rousing has been referred to as ‘the first Holocaust’), sacked every non-Christian building they could find and installed Godfrey of Bouillon as the first King of Jerusalem. Thus he became head of the most powerful and significant of the four ‘crusader states’ that the First Crusade founded in this region of the world. There was the landlocked County of Edessa in modern-day south-east Turkey, the Principality of Antioch in western Syria (on the mediterranean coast), the somewhat confusingly named County of Tripoli that covers modern-day Lebanon and is nowhere near Libya, and the largest and greatest of the lot: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, stretching from the County of Tripoli to the Sinai desert, taking in the Lebanese city of Tyre to the north, the walled city of Acre further south, and of course the city of Jerusalem itself.

That should have been that, and a new Christian land should probably have entered the world; but we must remember that most of those on the crusade had plenty of responsibility and property waiting at home for them. This meant the entire army pretty much dissipated in a few years, leaving Godfrey (who died a year later) and a small group of a few hundred knights to their fate in Jerusalem. Thanks to infighting amongst the Muslims however, there was initially no organised attempt to conquer the new Christian states, so the crusaders were able to survive and prosper. Indeed, even when some of them finally united (after a fashion) under Imad ad-Din Zengi, efforts to recapture the Holy Land were slow. Aleppo fell in 1128, but it wasn’t until 1144 that he caused the European world to sit up and take notice, when he conquered the County of Edessa (by far the weakest of the crusader states both militarily and financially). This prompted a second crusade, ordered by Pope Eugenius III, that completely failed to take it back; French and German troops were harassed by Muslim forces throughout their march through Turkey, arriving in Jerusalem with only enough men to launch a failed siege of Damascus (although one does have to wonder why they bothered, given that Damascus is miles away from Edessa). This failure, on it’s own, still wasn’t a massive issue, with the Kingdom of Jerusalem still together prosperous. Indeed, other aspects of the crusade were a resounding success: perhaps emboldened by the success of the first crusade, the powers that be decided that the second one would attempt to push back the Moors in Spain, and the men who arrived to do that job managed to make significant territorial gains in both Cataluña and Portugal. However, by the 1180s there was real trouble brewing in the Middle East. The great Muslim leader Salah al-Din, best known by his western name Saladin, had united much of the Muslim world behind him, using his not inconsiderable military nous to great effect. As well as building a sultanate so large and powerful that it spanned Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Syria, he brought the full might of the Islamic world to bear on the crusader states. The Principality of Antioch and County of Tripoli were both reduced to slivers of their former selves, and in September of 1187 Jerusalem was overrun and the Kingdom of Jerusalem destroyed, prompting Pope Gregory VIII to prompt a third crusade. And we will pick up the story of that next time (which will be the last one of these, promise).

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The Seven Slightly Harmful Quite Bad Things

The Seven Deadly Sins are quite an odd thing amongst western culture; a list of traits ostensibly meant to represent the worst features of humanity, but that is instead regarded as something of a humorous diversion, and one, moreover, that a large section of the population have barely heard of. The sins of wrath (originally spelt ‘wroth’, and often represented simply as ‘anger’), greed (or ‘avarice’), sloth (laziness), pride, lust, envy and gluttony were originally not meant as definite sins at all. Rather, the Catholic Church, who came up with them, called them the seven Capital Vices (their original religious origin also leads to them being referred to as ‘cardinal sins’) and rather than representing mere sins in and of themselves they were representative of the human vices from which all sin was born. The Church’s view on sin is surprisingly complex- all sinful activity is classified either as venial (bad but relatively minor) or mortal (meant to destroy the inner goodness of a person and lead them down a path of eternal damnation). Presumably the distinction was intended to prevent all sinful behaviour from being labelled a straight ticket to hell, but this idea may have been lost in a few places over time, as might (unfortunately) be accepted. Thus, holding a Capital Vice did not mean that you were automatically a sinful person, but that you were more naturally predisposed to commit sin and should try to exorcise them from you. All sin falls under the jurisdiction (for want of better word) of one of the vices, hence the confusion, and each Deadly Sin had its own counterpart Heavenly Virtue; patience for wrath, charity for greed, diligence for sloth, humility for pride, chastity for lust (hence why catholic priests are meant to be chaste), kindness for envy and temperance for gluttony. To a Catholic, therefore, these fourteen vices and virtues are the only real and, from a moral perspective, meaningful traits a person can have, all others being merely offshoots of them. Pride is usually considered the most severe of the sins, in that one challenges your place in comparison to God, and is also considered the source of the other six; Eve’s original sin was not, therefore, the eating of the fruit from the forbidden tree, but the pride and self-importance that lead her to challenge the word of God.

There have been other additions, or suggestions of them, to this list over the years; acedia, a neglect of ones duty based on melancholy and depression, was seen as symptomatic of a refusal to enjoy god’s world, whilst vainglory (a kind of boastful vanity) was incorporated under pride in the 14th century. Some more recent scholars have suggested the addition of traits such as fear, superstition and cruelty, although the church would probably put the former two under pride, in that one is not trusting in God to save you, and the latter as pride in your position and exercising of power over another (as you can see, ‘pride’ can be made to cover a whole host of things). I would also argue that, whilst the internet is notoriously loath to accept anything the Christian church has ever done as being a remotely good idea, that there is a lot we can learn by examining the list. We all do bad things, that goes without saying, but that does not mean that we are incapable of trying to make ourselves into better people, and the first step along that road is a proper understanding of precisely where and how we are flawed as people. Think of some act of your behaviour, maybe something you feel as being good behaviour and another as a dubiously moral incident, and try to place its root cause under one of those fourteen traits. You may be surprised as to what you can find out about yourself.

However, I don’t want to spend the rest of this post on a moral lesson, for there is another angle I wish to consider with regard to the Seven Deadly Sins- that they need not be sins at all. Every one of the capital vices is present to some degree within us, and can be used as justification for a huge range of good behaviour. If we do not allow ourselves to be envious of our peers’ achievements, how can we ever become inspired to achieve such heights ourselves- or, to pick a perhaps more appropriate example, if we are not envious of the perfectness of the Holy Trinity, how can and why should we aspire to be like them? Without the occasional espousal of anger and wrath, we may find it impossible to convey the true emotion behind what we care about, to enable others to care also, and to ensure we can appropriately defend what we care for. How could the Church ever have attempted to retake the Holy Land without the wrath required to act and win decisively? Greed too acts as a driving force for our achievements (can the church’s devotion to its vast collection of holy relics not be labelled as such?), and the occasional bout of gluttony and sloth are often necessary to best aid our rest and recuperation, enabling us to continue to act as good, kind people with the emotional and physical strength to bear life’s burden. Lust is often necessary as a natural predisposition to love, surely a virtuous trait if ever there was one, whilst a world consisting solely of chaste, ‘proper’ people would clearly not last very long. And then there is pride, the deadliest and also the most virtuous of vices. Without a sense of pride, how can we ever have even a modicum of self-respect, how can we ever recognise what we have done well and attempt to emulate it, and how can we ever feel any emotion that makes us seem like normal human beings rather than cold, calculating, heartless machines?

Perhaps, then, the one true virtue that we should apply to all of this is that of temperance. We all do bad things and we may all have a spark of the seven deadly sins inside us, but that doesn’t mean necessarily that the incidences of the two need always to coincide. Sure, if we just embrace our vices and pander to them, the world will probably not end up a terribly healthy place, and I’m sure that my description of the deadly sins is probably stretching the point as to what they specifically meant in their original context. But, not every dubiously right thing you do is entirely terrible, and a little leeway here and there can go an awfully long way to making sure we don’t end up going collectively mental.