“Deus vult!” — God wills it! — was the battle cry of the First Crusade, in which armies of Europe, at the very end of the 11th century, marched off to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem and conquer the infidel Turks, who were then sweeping all before them in Asia Minor.
Whatever God’s actual intentions in the matter, and He is known to move in mysterious ways, His representatives on earth, Pope Urban II in Rome and the Emperor Alexios in Constantinople, quite clearly fostered this great martial enterprise for political purposes of their own. The emperor, assailed by enemies on his frontiers and by rivals within his family, was desperate for military aid, just as the pope was comparably eager for a galvanizing cause that would confirm his primacy as the leader of the Christian world.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
Older studies of this complex military venture — merely one in a series of clashes between “Europe” and “Asia” that goes back as far as the Trojan War and continues to this day — often tend to emphasize its romantic character. In this view, Pope Urban’s electrifying call to arms at Clermont in 1095 is regarded as the starting point for years of heroism and self-sacrifice. That day, in a field in France, the pontiff thundered out that that the Muslims, “a foreign people and a people rejected by God, had invaded lands belonging to Christians, destroying them and plundering the local population.” He then proceeded to detail the horrors inflicted by these demonized Turks:
“They throw down altars, after soiling them with their own filth, circumcise Christians, and pour the resulting blood either on the altars or into the baptismal vessels. . . . When they feel like inflicting a truly painful death on some they pierce their navels [and] pull out the end of their intestines. . . . They shoot arrows at others tied to stakes; others again they attack having stretched out their necks, unsheathing their swords to see if they can manage to hack off their heads with one blow. And what can I say about the appalling treatment of women, which is better to pass over in silence than to spell out in detail?”
Given such atrocities, how could any respectable Christian warrior hesitate to act? As it happens, Urban’s oratory hardly exaggerated the Turkish ruthlessness, although very soon the Crusaders would slaughter with a comparable barbarity.
The subtitle of Peter Frankopan’s highly readable “The First Crusade: The Call From the East” — underscores his revisionist approach to his subject: He seeks to understand the roots of the Crusades in the literally Byzantine politics of Asia Minor during the late 11th century, focusing especially on the empire’s strategic accommodations with its enemies in the aftermath of an ignominious defeat at the battle of Manzikert in 1071. The book’s hero is, in effect, the Emperor Alexios I. Komnenos, who spent his reign in a relentless quest for stability.
In some instances, Alexios triumphed on the battlefield, as when in 1091, at Lebounion, he essentially wiped out the marauding Pecheneg nomads. But more often he preferred high-level diplomacy, either co-opting or buying the friendship of various Muslim warlords, although such ententes lasted only until those leaders were killed or died. Eventually, Alexios’s enemies grew too powerful to be placated. In short order, his dominion over the seaboard and interior of Asia Minor essentially collapsed. There was a coup attempt involving close associates, including his brother. The empire was tottering.
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