The Crusades: When The Church Went To War

This episode of The Unintentional Heretic explores the Crusades as one of Christianity’s most sobering examples of what happens when faith becomes entangled with empire, violence, certainty, and political ambition. It traces the Crusades through their most consequential and tragic moments — the First Crusade’s conquest of Jerusalem, the rise of Saladin, the heartbreaking Children’s Crusade, and the catastrophic Fourth Crusade — while asking how a faith centered on the way of Jesus became capable of blessing holy war, and what that history still warns us about today.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the unintentional heretic. Today we're exploring one of the darkest, most fascinating, and most misunderstood chapters in Christian history, the Crusades. For many people, the Crusades represent the ultimate contradiction. How did a movement, founded by a man who said, love your enemies, become a movement that marched armies across continents under the banner of the cross? How did the faith of the Sermon on the Mount become associated with holy war? How did Christians come to believe that killing could be an act of devotion? And maybe the deeper question, what happens when the kingdom of God becomes entangled with political power? And the story is complicated. It involves genuine fear, political ambition, religious fervor, economic opportunity, heroism, violence, faith, propaganda, and tragedy. A lot of tragedy. When people talk about the crusades, they often imagine a single war. There wasn't one crusade, there were many. Historians typically count at least eight major crusades between 1096 and 1270, along with numerous smaller crusading campaigns. The crusades lasted nearly two centuries. Entire generations were born, lived, and died during the crusading era. And to understand why they happened, we have to go back to the 11th century. For centuries, Christian pilgrims had traveled to Jerusalem. The city was sacred to Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. After Muslim armies conquered the region in the 7th century, pilgrimage generally continued. Relations were often tense, but Christians could still visit holy sites. Then conditions began to change. The Byzantine Empire, Christianity's eastern stronghold, was under increasing pressure from Turkish armies. In 1071, the Byzantines suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Manzikert. Large portions of Asia Minor were lost. The Emperor appealed to the West for help. What he likely wanted were mercenaries. What he got was a crusade. In 1095, Pope Urban II delivered one of the most consequential speeches in history. At the Council of Claremont, he called Christians to take up arms and reclaim Jerusalem. The speech survives in several versions, but one line became legendary. God wills it. In Latin, Deus Volt. The crowd reportedly erupted. People sewed crosses onto their clothing. Thousands pledged themselves to the cause. And for the first time in Christian history, violence was not merely permitted, it was sanctified. War became holy. That represented a profound shift. For the first three centuries of Christianity, many Christians refused military service. Some early church fathers viewed participation in warfare as incompatible with following Jesus. Tertullian asked, Shall it be held lawful to make a profession of the sword when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? But Christianity had changed dramatically since becoming aligned with imperial power under Constantine. Augustine's just war theory had already provided a framework for morally justified warfare. The crusades pushed beyond that. Now participation in a war could be an act of penance, a path toward salvation, a spiritual duty. One chronicler records Pope Urban promising remission of sins for those who died on crusade. Think about that. The cross, once a symbol of self-sacrificial love, became a military banner. The first crusade began in 1096. What followed was both remarkable and horrifying. Before many crusaders even reached the Holy Land, mobs attacked Jewish communities throughout Europe. Entire Jewish neighborhoods were massacred. Men, women, and children were slaughtered. One chronicler wrote, The earth was covered with Jewish blood. These attacks were not the stated goal of the crusade, but they revealed what can happen when religious zeal becomes untethered from compassion. The crusaders eventually reached Jerusalem in 1099, and what happened next remains one of the most infamous episodes in Christian history. After breaching the city's defenses, crusaders massacred large numbers of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Contemporary accounts describe streets filled with bodies. One crusader chronicler, Raymond of Algiers, wrote, Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. And obviously historians debate the literal accuracy of that statement, but they do not debate the massacre. It happened. Thousands died. And many crusaders believed they were doing God's work. This is one of the most sobering lessons of history. Human beings are capable of committing terrible acts when convinced that God approves. Yet history is never simple. The Muslim world was not unified. Various Muslim rulers fought among themselves. Christian states fought one another. Political alliances crossed religious boundaries. The reality was more complicated than Christians versus Muslims. And into this complicated world stepped one of history's most admired figures, Saladin. When he captured Jerusalem in 1187, he became a legendary figure throughout both the Islamic and Christian worlds. Unlike the Crusaders of 1099, Saladin largely avoided mass slaughter. Many Christian inhabitants were allowed to leave after paying ransom. Some were released freely. His reputation for mercy became famous. The medieval Christian writer Baha'Adin described him as gentle in character, generous in spirit. Even many European chroniclers admired him. He became the model of the noble adversary, the kind of enemy one respects. And that alone tells us something important. History is rarely divided into heroes and villains. Human beings are more complicated than that. The loss of Jerusalem sparked the Third Crusade. And this is the crusade most people know because it involved Richard the Lionheart. Richard and Saladin became legendary rivals. Yet despite years of warfare, neither side achieved complete victory. A truce eventually allowed Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem while leaving the city under Muslim control. Ironically, some of the greatest stories from the Crusades involved moments of mutual respect between enemies, because even amid violence, humanity has a way of breaking through. Then came one of the strangest and most tragic episodes in medieval history, the Children's Crusade. Around 1212, reports emerged of thousands of young people convinced that God would miraculously reclaim Jerusalem through their innocence. The details remain debated. Some participants were likely teenagers rather than small children, but the tragedy remains. Many never reached the Holy Land. Some died from disease and starvation. Others were reportedly sold into slavery. No miracle occurred, only heartbreak. The children's crusade reveals both the power and danger of religious idealism. Faith without wisdom can become destructive. Good intentions are not enough. Yet even the Children's Crusade was not the darkest chapter. That distinction may belong to the Fourth Crusade. If the First Crusade represented Christianity's war against outsiders, the Fourth Crusade became Christianity's war against itself. In 1204, Crusaders never reached Jerusalem. Instead, through a bizarre mixture of political intrigue, financial debt, and opportunism, they turned their attention towards Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, a Christian city filled with Christian churches, Christian relics, Christian people, and the crusaders attacked it. They looted churches, desecrated sacred spaces, destroyed libraries, stole priceless works of art, raped women, murdered civilians. The historian Stephen Runciman famously wrote, There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade. Even Pope Innocent III, who had called the Crusade, was horrified. The damage was immense. Many Orthodox Christians view 1204 as the moment the relationship between East and West became permanently broken. The Great Schism of 1054 had created a theological division. The Fourth Crusade created an emotional wound, one that still echoes today. By the late 13th century, the crusading movement was collapsing. The last major Christian strongholds in the Holy Land fell, the dream of a Christian Jerusalem faded, yet the legacy of the Crusades endured for Christians, for Muslims, for Jews, for East-West relations, for global politics, for the relationship between religion and violence. So what do we do with this history? Some Christians want to defend the Crusades, others want to dismiss Christianity because of them, and neither response is sufficient. The Crusades remind us that the church is capable of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary failure. The same tradition that produced Francis of Assisi also produced holy war. The same church that cared for the poor also blessed armies. The same faith that proclaimed love of enemies sometimes demonized them. The crusades force us to confront an uncomfortable truth that I think we're all aware of, that the church has not always looked like Jesus. And maybe recognizing that is not a threat to faith, maybe it's an act of faith, because Christianity has always distinguished between Christ and Christendom, between Jesus and the institutions built in his name. The question is not whether Christians have failed, history answers that clearly. The question is whether we are willing to learn from those failures, whether we are willing to ask how the church became so intertwined with power that violence could be blessed, whether we're willing to recognize the danger of confusing God's kingdom with our political ambitions. Because whenever religion becomes certain that God is exclusively on its side, people tend to get hurt. They're a warning, a warning about certainty, a warning about power, a warning about what happens when we stop seeing our enemies as human beings. And maybe this is why Jesus' words remain as radical today as they were two thousand years ago. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Not because it's easy, but because history repeatedly demonstrates what happens when we don't. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep asking questions.