“Holy War”

Many people in the modern world are made uncomfortable by the notion of “holy war”: of wars fought in the name of religions whose central message (in the case of the major salvation religions) appears to be anti-violence. This discomfort leads some students and scholars to discount the genuineness of beliefs expressed in favor of holy war and to see religion as a mere rationalization or pretext for the real, usually material, motives they think more plausible. For example, some scholars have characterized the Crusades as western Europeans’ device for hooking into the lucrative circuits of Asian trade that had theretofore largely passed them by.

Such a view imposes modern notions of believable motivation on a different world (almost as if the Crusades were the first Gulf War) and does violence to the evidence. Not only are religious motives as we see them in the sources clearly sincere, but the best economic evidence for the Crusades is that, at the individual level, crusading was almost always a losing bet. Only Italian merchants profited consistently from crusading, and they were neither crusaders themselves nor the motivating force behind crusading.

The discomfort may stem from the difficulty of reconciling modern notions of the role of religion with aggressive war. But religion’s role as an all-encompassing worldview in the traditional world meant that it had to accommodate warfare in some way. How comfortably did it do so? A brief survey of the major salvation religions reveals a range of answers.

Buddhism conforms most closely to modern preconceptions: There is no Buddhist idea of holy war, and, although Buddhist polities have conducted warfare, the religion has legitimated war only in a limited range of cases, most notably medieval Tibet. Asoka, the first great Buddhist ruler, renounced wars of conquest on his conversion. Only in Japan, in this as in many things an exception, did a form of Buddhism, Zen, become central to the values of a warrior class. Japan and Korea also saw the rise of Buddhist warrior-monks, but in terms of the religion as a whole, they are an even greater aberration than the Zen beliefs of Japanese secular warriors, and they fought not in the name of religion but in defense of their landed estates.

Hinduism accommodated warfare early on: Warriors were one of the four major classes in the caste-bound Hindu conception of society and fulfilled their dharma, or class duty, through fighting. But the caste system that accommodated warfare also limited its legitimate scope to the warriors. A militant Hinduism did arise in response to Muslim raids and conquests, but not in any organized or centralized way, and not as a mass movement. Modern mass Hindu militancy is really a variant of nationalism, not holy war.

Islam apparently incorporated warfare into its theology from the beginning in the form of jihad, but this may be deceptive. The regular appearance of slave soldiers in a wide range of Islamic polities is a sign of discomfort at the heart of Islamic ideology with states wielding force. Islam maintains both military and spiritual interpretations of jihad, which in any case is supposed to be a defensive policy in terms of warfare. The history of Islamic holy war is further complicated by issues of conversion of nomadic peoples, fundamentalism, and, more recently, resistance to imperialism and western hegemony, in which nationalism and other modern ideologies play a large part.

Perhaps ironically, Christianity has historically made the easiest alliance with war. In contrast to Asoka’s renunciation of conquest after his conversion, Constantine, the first great Christian ruler, converted after winning a battle under the sign of the cross. The tradition of in hoc signo vinces—“in this sign you shall conquer”—became a constant part of the religion, expressed, among other ways, through the Crusades, through orders of warrior-monks unprecedented elsewhere (the Japanese monks being in truth incommensurable with the Templars and their like), and through the deep penetration into society of crusading ideals, as evidenced in events such as the Children’s Crusade. Christianity’s warlike zeal would later be turned inward in the Wars of Religion (though Islam too has had its Sunni–Shi’ite conflicts).

Two other religions are worthy of note in this context. Christianity’s accommodation with war derived in part from the Jewish notion of holy war attested in numerous biblical stories and in the Jewish revolts against Roman rule. And Zoroastrianism, like Judaism the universal-seeming religion of a particular people and state, sanctioned the state’s wars unproblematically. Indeed, Sassanid Persian warfare with the Byzantines rose to the level of a crusade on both sides at its climax around 600.

Religion, of course, was not the only factor in traditional or modern motivations to war and patterns of the use of force. But especially in the traditional world, religion should not be discounted as a sincere motivation to violence as well as to nonviolence.

‘The Profit That God Shall Give’

The principal route followed by the First Crusade bypassed the Mediterranean and took the army overland through the Balkans and Anatolia; many crusaders never saw more of the sea than the Bosphorus at Constantinople until, much reduced in numbers through war, disease and exhaustion, they reached Syria. And even in the East their target was not a maritime city but Jerusalem, so that its conquest in 1099 created an enclave cut off from the sea, a problem which, as will be seen, only Italian navies could resolve. Another force left from Apulia, where Robert Guiscard’s son Bohemond brought together an army. The Byzantines wondered whether he was really planning to revive his father’s schemes for the conquest of Byzantine territory, and so, when he reached Constantinople, he was pressed to acknowledge the emperor’s authority, becoming his lizios, or liegeman, a western feudal term that was used because Bohemond was more likely to feel bound by oaths made according to his native customs than by promises made under Byzantine law. When in 1098 he established himself as prince of Antioch, a city only recently lost by the Byzantines to the Turks, the imperial court made every effort to insist that his principality lay under Byzantine suzerainty. It was amazing that a vast rabble of men, often poorly armed, proved capable of seizing Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099, though the Byzantines were more inclined to regard this as a typical barbarian stroke of fortune than as a victory masterminded by Christ. Seen from Constantinople, the outcome of the crusade was not entirely negative. Western knights had installed themselves in sensitive borderlands between Byzantine territory and lands over which the Seljuk Turks and the Fatimid caliphs were squabbling Bohemond’s religious motives in joining the crusade should not be underestimated, but he was a pragmatist: he saw clearly that the crusader armies would be able to retain nothing without access to the Mediterranean, and without naval support from Christian fleets capable of keeping open the supply-lines to the West. He would therefore need to build ties with the Italian navies. He could count on the enthusiasm that had been generated in Genoa and Pisa by the news of Pope Urban’s speech, conveyed to the Genoese by the bishops of Grenoble and of Orange. The citizens of Genoa decided that the time had come to bury their differences and to unite in a compagna under the direction of six consuls; the aim of the compagna was primarily to build and arm ships for the crusade. Historians have long argued that the Genoese saw the crusade as a business opportunity, and that they were hoping to secure trade privileges in whatever lands the crusaders conquered comparable to those the Venetians had recently acquired in the Byzantine Empire. Yet they could not foresee the outcome of the crusade; they were willing to suspend their trading activities and pump all their energy into the building of fleets that were very likely to be lost far away in battles and storms. What moved them was holy fervour. According to a Genoese participant in the First Crusade, the chronicler Caffaro, even before it, in 1083, a Genoese ship named the Pomella had carried Robert, count of Flanders, and Godfrey of Bouillon, the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem, to Alexandria; from there they had made their way with difficulty to the Holy Sepulchre, and had begun to dream of recovering it for Christendom. The story was pure fancy, but it expresses the sense among the Genoese elite that their city was destined to play a major role in the war for the conquest of Jerusalem.

Twelve galleys and one smaller vessel set out from Genoa in July 1097. The crew consisted of about 1,200 men, a sizeable proportion of its male population, for the overall population of the city of Genoa may have been only 10,000. Somehow the fleet knew where the crusaders were, and made contact off the northern coast of Syria. Antioch was still under siege, and the Genoese fleet stood off Port St Symeon, the outport of the city that had functioned as a gateway to the Mediterranean since the Bronze Age. After the fall of Antioch in June 1098, Bohemond rewarded the Genoese crusaders with a church in Antioch, thirty houses nearby, a warehouse and a well, creating the nucleus of a merchant colony. This grant was the first of many that the Genoese were to receive in the states created by the crusaders. In the early summer of 1099 members of a prominent Genoese family, the Embriachi, anchored off Jaffa, bringing aid to the crusader army besieging Jerusalem – they dismantled their own ships, carrying the wood from which they were built to Jerusalem for use in the construction of siege engines. And then in August 1100 twenty-six galleys and four supply ships set out from Genoa, carrying about 3,000 men. They made contact with the northern French ruler of the newly established kingdom of Jerusalem, Baldwin I, and began the slow process of conquering a coastal strip, since it was essential to maintain supply-lines from western Europe to the embattled kingdom. They sacked the ancient coastal city of Caesarea in May 1101. When the Genoese leaders divided up their loot, they gave each sailor two pounds of pepper, which demonstrates how rich in spices even a minor Levantine port was likely to be. They also carried away a large green bowl that had been hanging in the Great Mosque of Caesarea, convinced that it was the bowl used at the Last Supper and that it was made of emerald (a mistake rectified several centuries later when someone dropped it, and it was found to be made of glass). Since the bowl is almost certainly a fine piece of Roman workmanship from the first century AD, their intuitions about its origins were not entirely wrong. It was carried in triumph to the cathedral in Genoa, where it is still displayed, attracting attention as one of several candidates for the title Holy Grail.

The green bowl was, for the Genoese, probably as great a prize as any of their commercial privileges, all of which were celebrated in the city annals as signs of divine bounty. The Genoese made friends with the rulers of each of the crusader states (Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch) that needed help in gaining control of the seaports of Syria and Palestine. In 1104 their fortunes were further boosted by the capture of the port city of Acre, with an adequate harbour and good access into the interior. For most of the next two centuries, Acre functioned as the main base of the Italian merchants trading to the Holy Land. The Genoese produced documents to show that the rulers of Jerusalem promised them one-third of the cities they helped conquer all the way down the coast of Palestine, though not everyone is convinced all these documents were genuine; if not, they are still evidence for their vast ambitions. They were even promised a third of ‘Babylonia’, the current European name for Cairo, for there were constant plans to invade Fatimid Egypt as well. To all this were added legal exemptions, extending from criminal law to property rights, that separated the Genoese from the day-to-day exercise of justice by the king’s courts. The Genoese insisted that they were permitted to erect an inscription in gilded letters recording their special privileges inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Whether or not this inscription was ever put in place, the demand for such a public record indicates how determined the Genoese were to maintain their special extra-territorial status in the kingdom of Jerusalem, which never developed a significant navy of its own.