It Takes An Army

Rodney Stark argues the Crusades were defensive wars.
by Terry Scambray
The New Oxford Review

A review of God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark (Harper One, 2009, 260 pp.).

Speaking in Egypt last June, President Obama apologized for an imagined American imperialism on territory that itself was gained by Islamic conquest. The New York Times in 1999 compared the Crusades to Hitler’s atrocities. Even Pope John Paul II joined in by apologizing for the sacking of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204.

Rodney Stark, Distinguished Professor of Social Science at Baylor, shows that such statements are serious bunk. For, as he writes, the Crusades were defensive wars to repel the Islamic conquest of Byzantium as well as to prevent the destruction of the Holy Land.

So when in 1095 the Greek Byzantine emperor in Constantinople requested help, Pope Urban II called for a crusade.

However, the table was already set for a response to Islamic colonialism. For Mohammedanism had been ascendant since the 7th century when Mohammed led his Bedouin tribesmen out of Arabia into Syria, Persia and Egypt, robbing in service of religious conversion. As Mohammed said on his deathbed, “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no God but Allah.’”

Next the Moors, as they were then called, swallowed up North Africa, Spain, and Sicily. They later sacked Rome in 843 and 846, forcing the pope to pay tribute.

Yes, Stark, in his short book, does omit the fact that when the interests of Christians and Muslims coincided, they banded together to fight their co-religionists. This happened, for example, when the Muslims were assisted by the city states of Naples and Amalfi in attacking their rivals, Rome and Messina. But this episode was concluded when the pope cobbled together a united front to eliminate the Muslims from the Italian peninsula, though attacks did continue for another century.

Nonetheless, by the 1100s, Islam was menacing the Orthodox Greeks.

Yet Christianity had correspondingly gained a second wind: the Greeks had defeated Islam at Constantinople in 672 and Charles Martel’s Franks defeated the Moors at Tours in 732.

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