Particular Skills

In a recent interview Bible-bashing actress Sydney Sweeney helpfully reminded everyone that the Crusades were “defensive”.

 

 

 

Well, kinda, in the same way Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills is being super defensive when he makes telephone contact with the ‘scummers’ holding his daughter.

From the point of view of the Pope who first preached them, there was undoubtedly a perceived, urgent need to defend Christendom, to get back what had been Taken. 

 

The problem was that the first (heavily armed) people to heed the call were Normans, relatively recently-Christianised former Vikings whose whole approach was a lot more front footed.

And they had “a very particular set of skills”…skills that made them a nightmare for just about anybody who got in their way. 

 

 

If Urban II rather naïvely saw them as useful idiots who would enable Constantinople to recover Jerusalem and much of the rest of the Levant, sending the Arabs back home, for the Normans it was always going to be more of a smash and grab. 

 

And the resulting Crusader States were radically new i.e. they were no kind of return to the former status quo.

 

Something else the Papacy maybe mis-assessed about its Norman allies: their broad inclination towards tolerance once all the smashing and grabbing had been done. Wherever they set themselves up around the Med, they were content to rule over fairly diverse populations of Greeks, Latins, Jews, Arabs and other minority communities.

 

Only the original eleventh century version of the venture could be characterised as a locking of horns between northern and western Europeans and the Arab empire. 

 

By the time of the second iteration, the antagonists had largely changed: Seljuks: a Turkic people who were also comparatively recent converts and still in full expansionist mode. 

 

Then, come the Fourth Crusade, the westerners had twigged that the Orthodox Christian Greeks presented an even juicier target, though even the Normans had taken a bite or two out of Byzantium en route to the Holy Land. 

The Emperor had then dispatched his Varangian Guard to deal with the Norman threat, and as this elite body of warriors was by then largely made up of battleaxe-wielding Anglo-Saxons exiled from England after 1066, the ensuing scrap has been hailed by historians as Hastings, the rematch...in the Balkans. 

 

The result, sadly, was unchanged — ‘a victory for the equestrian classes over the pedestrian’.