Chapter IV. From Exile to Supremacy
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Brief Reference-List of Authorities by Chapters
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BOOK I. THE CRUSADES
PREFATORY ESSAY
THE VALUE OF THE CRUSADES IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN HISTORY
By the Rev. WILLIAM DENTON, M.A.[44]
The interest with which we continue to regard the Crusades is, in its way, as significant as the enthusiasm which led to their being undertaken. It is easy now to underrate the dangers which they averted, and to forget the obligations which the civilised world is under to Charles Martel, to the crusaders, to Don John of Austria, and to John Sobieski; yet to these men we owe it that Europe is not now Bulgaria; and that Italy, France, and England—that the whole of the countries from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, from Archangel to Sicily, are not trampled upon and desolated as Syria is at this moment. It is not easy for us to comprehend how recently the terror once inspired by the Turk has ceased. We need to be reminded that down to the time of the Stuarts the English and Irish channels were infested with Turkish corsairs, and our ports blockaded by Turkish ships of war in quest of slaves.
It is only indeed since the eighteenth century that collections of money to redeem English captives from the intolerable evils of Turkish slavery have ceased to be made in our churches. That such captivity is not national, and only occasional and individual, is one of the inestimable fruits of the Crusades. At the time when these were undertaken, the whole of Asia, from the borders of China to the Bosporus, was subject to the Turks; and had these people been able to cross into Europe, and to hold the countries on the south of the Danube as a basis for military operations four hundred years earlier than they succeeded in doing, or indeed at any time whilst the Moors of Spain and of Sicily were in their full career of victory, the whole of Europe would inevitably have fallen under the dominion of the Moslems, and industrial progress had been stayed and civilisation extinguished. So recently has this danger disappeared that, at the close of the seventeenth century, a statesman as calm and unenthusiastic as Richelieu seriously meditated the renewal of the Crusades, in order to avert the evil which even then threatened to overwhelm the civilised world. That he did so is sufficient to remove from the leaders and projectors of the Crusades the charge of being moved by blind, unreflecting fanaticism.
In the eighteenth century, indeed, the school of historians represented by Voltaire and Gibbon, which discredited all great efforts of past times when prompted by religious zeal, treated the Crusades with unphilosophical ridicule. It was an easy task to do this. We are arrested in every page of their history with the lamentable consequences of popular ignorance, with the selfishness of many of the leaders, with the record of personal ambition and unworthy jealousy which too frequently hindered the success of these expeditions. The whole, however, is not heard when we have listened to accounts of popular fanaticism, of royal insincerity, of military ambition, and of papal selfishness, which chequer the history of the crusaders, as these faults chequered the history of Europe at the time when the Crusades were undertaken. The great, the imminent danger of Turkish conquest inspired the minds of the people with fear before it induced the chieftains to combine in averting the danger. The anarchy which pervaded Europe in the ages of feudalism was, indeed, the chief source of danger in any advance of the Turkish forces, and this was in a great measure cured by the enthusiasm communicated from the people to the great landed proprietors, who, more jealous of their independence than careful of their obligations to their sovereign, yet felt the necessity of union and of submission to military discipline in the hour of peril.
The First Crusade was one undertaken without sufficient leaders, with but little preparation, and with smaller knowledge of the countries to be traversed and the difficulties to be overcome. It was a spontaneous effort of terror and of zeal, in which we can at least satisfy ourselves of the reality of the fear which pervaded all men, and which we know to have been warranted by the merciless character of the horde which, having subjugated Asia, was on its way to attempt the subjugation of Europe. Men have come to see that the Turk is now what he always has been; it is well to bear in mind the correlative truth that essentially he always was what he is now; and when we recall the massacres of the last century, the bloody scenes of Scio and Aleppo, of Jiddah and of Lebanon, of Bosnia and Bulgaria, we may without effort understand what he was when Asia lay at his feet, and Europe was terrified at the rumours of his attempt to cross the Bosporus.
It is too much the practice of those who would deprecate our obligation to those who strove to arrest the progress of the Turks, to dwell upon some instances of magnanimity or of mercy, of justice or chivalrous conduct which lighten up the pages of the history of the Saracens, and to insinuate from these instances that the Turks possess the same claim to our admiration. The Turks, however, are not Arabs, neither have they ever manifested any of that care for intellectual pursuits which has thrown a lustre on the career of the Saracens of Asia and the Moors of the Spanish peninsula. On the contrary, the career of the Osmanli has been marked by deeds of savage atrocity, by an indifference to the obligations of oaths, as well as by his brutal ignorance and hatred of all intellectual progress; and at the present day his inferiority to the Arab in statesmanship, in honesty, and in intelligence is acknowledged.
In estimating the effects of the Crusades the reader will do well to consider the calm judgment and weighty words of a modern historian, who thus expresses our obligation to the devotion and bravery of those men whose deeds are here briefly recorded. “By arresting the progress of the Turks,” says Mr. Sharon Turner, “by stunning them with blows which a less hardy, fanatic, and profuse population could not have survived, and by protracting their entry into Europe until its various states had grown up into compacted kingdoms—until the feudal system had been substantially overthrown; until free government and humanising law had blended and concentrated individual energy and self-will into national unity and co-operating strength; until polity had begun to be a science, and that order of men whom we both venerate and revile (statesmen and politicians) had everywhere arisen—the crusaders preserved Europe from Turkish desolation, if not from conquest. And when the Ottoman power, recovering from its alarms by their discontinuance, arose in renovated vigour to a new struggle for the sovereignty of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries—though it conquered Greece, overran Hungary, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia, attempted Russia and Poland, and endangered Vienna—yet the rest of Europe had then become prepared to resist its further progress; and has hitherto successfully kept it at bay, notwithstanding its mighty population and desperate fanaticism, until its political infirmity has become decided, the period of its decrepitude arrived, and its political dissolution has commenced.”
Since these words were written the decrepitude of the Turks has increased, though their cruelty has not diminished; nay, in some instances, the periodical massacres of their Christian subjects, which have ever marked the rule of this race, have been carried out more systematically and with circumstances of greater horror than of old. We are, indeed, no longer alarmed at the progress of their arms, and have no fear for our own safety. We may gather, however, from the accounts of the suffering of the Christians dwelling in our own days among the Turks, how natural it was for Europe to be terrified at the prospect of their invasion; and from the generous indignation which thrilled the heart of England at the time of the Armenian massacres, we may faintly understand why it was that Europe was so moved at the rude eloquence of Peter the Hermit, as he detailed the sufferings of the Christians of Asia Minor when first subjected to the yoke of the Turk.