Death as a Virtue

THE CRUSADES by Zoe Oldenbourg. 650 pages. Pantheon. $6.95.

The Crusaders who stormed Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, slaughtered the Turkish garrison and then ran amuck, firing mosques and synagogues, battering down doors, killing, killing, killing. Even as the slaughter of 40,000 people was still going on, the leaders of the Crusade, the barons of France, Germany and Sicily, humbly went "barefoot, with sighs and tears, through the holy places where Jesus Christ had lived in the flesh," devoutly kissing the "places where his feet had trod." In the end, wrote Chronicler William of Tyre, "the city offered a spectacle of such a slaughter that the victors themselves could not help but be struck with horror and disgust."

The Crusades, as Russian-born Historian Zoe Oldenbourg (The World is Not Enough, The Massacre of Montsegur) says in this authentically detailed book of horrors, brought out both the noblest and the most despicable in feudal society.

The First Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II, a French aristocrat who had donned a monk's cassock. Urban's purposes were to help Byzantium resist the Turkish onslaught, heal the schism between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople, and harness the anarchic violence of the feudal soldiery in the service of a righteous cause--the reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher from the Moslem infidel.

Miracle of Faith. Great lords like Godfrey of Bouillon mortgaged their estates to raise armies and took up the Cross to serve God's cause with their swords. Bohemond of Taranto, the impoverished son of the Norman conqueror of Sicily, sought to carve a kingdom of his own in the East. And they were joined by religious fanatics, adventurers and brigands who sought only pillage, murder and rape. In the Crusades, idealism and gangsterism were in harness.

The Crusaders, variously estimated at 70,000 to 600,000 strong, poured into Asia Minor, took the quarreling Turkish sultans by surprise, defeated them, and then captured Antioch, the city of 400 towers, by assault. Besieged in Antioch by a superior army of the atabeg of Mosul, the Crusaders were saved by a miracle of their own faith. Fired by the conviction that an old, rusty piece of iron unearthed beneath an Antioch church was the lance with which the Roman soldier had pierced the side of the crucified Christ, the Crusaders, half-starved and crazed with religious fanaticism, swept out of the city and routed the Turks. Afterward, Bohemond of Taranto ordered the severed heads of captured Turks roasted on spits, "encouraging the rumor that the Prankish barons fed on human flesh," and so spread terror among the demoralized infidels. Within a year, the Crusaders had carved out for themselves feudal principalities in Syria and Palestine.

Saladin in Paradise. The Second Crusade, launched in 1101, was slaughtered in Anatolia without ever reaching Palestine, and the survivors were sold into slavery in the markets of Damascus and Baghdad. Cut off from the West, the Christian principalities in the Middle East were gradually strangled by the Moslems. Under the leadership of Saladin (1174-93), a cunning Kurd who had made himself the master of Egypt and Syria, a Moslem holy war was launched against the Christians, and in 1187 Jerusalem was retaken. Saladin was one of those extraordinary military geniuses who knew how to temper cruelty with a noble magnanimity of the heart. He slaughtered without mercy all warrior monks of the Templar and Hospitaler orders captured at the decisive battle of Hattin in 1187, but bought back the infant of a captured French woman and returned it to its mother. His reputation for justice and wisdom was such that Dante a century later placed him in "the paradise of the non-Christian Just."

The Third Crusade of Richard the Lionhearted and France's treacherous King Philip Augustus failed to retake Jerusalem. The Fourth Crusade, like the Second, never even reached the Holy Land. It was used by the crafty Venetians to conquer Christian Constantinople in 1204, irreparably weakening the Byzantine Empire and thus opening the gates for the subsequent Turkish conquest of the Balkans.

The Crusades, concludes Zoe Oldenbourg, were a prodigious, irrational undertaking of medieval man, for whom courage was the ultimate virtue, death in battle the ultimate reward. To dash out the brains of one's enemies, to rip their bowels, lop off their hands, smash their teeth, "cleave them from chin to chine," and then to fall oneself in an orgy of blood and violence--this was the holy ideal of the Crusader knights. They succeeded pretty well too. All told, the Crusades led to the death or enslavement of more than a million Christians and Moslems.

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