The historian Franco Cardini responds to some errors.
ROME, July 21, 1999 (ZENIT).- The controversy over the Crusades is not subsiding. The fact that this year marks the 900th anniversary of the First Crusade has become, in the eyes of a certain anti-Catholic publicistic current, an argument for discrediting the Church and her teachings.
Articles have appeared in which the Crusades are described as holy wars, and the massacres of Jews that took place on that occasion as the antechamber of the Holocaust. The Church has been accused of always having tried to eliminate adversaries in the name of orthodoxy. “La Repubblica,” Italy’s second-largest newspaper by circulation, has written that “the Franks massacred seventy thousand people in a mosque,” which should lead one to suppose that the mosque was as large as a modern football stadium.
In order to try to avoid nonsense and errors, the historian Franco Cardini, a profound expert on medieval events, has written an article in today’s “Avvenire” under the title “Crusades, Not Wars of Religion.”
Professor Cardini explains that the interpretation of the Crusades as antecedents of the wars of religion and of ideological wars was upheld in Enlightenment circles. It is a broadly misunderstood and pretextual controversy.
According to Professor Cardini, “the Crusades were never ‘wars of religion’; they never sought the forced conversion or suppression of infidels. The excesses and violence carried out during the expeditions — which existed and must not be forgotten — must be evaluated within the framework of the normal, though painful, phenomenology of military events, always bearing in mind that some theological reason justified them. The Crusade corresponds to a movement of armed pilgrimage that slowly took shape and developed over time — between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries — and must be understood by placing it in the context of the long encounter between Christendom and Islam, which produced positive cultural and economic results. How else can one explain the fact of frequent friendships and even military alliances between Christians and Muslims in the history of the Crusades?”.
To confirm his theses, Professor Cardini recalls the contribution of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), who, against lay chivalry — such as that of the twelfth century, formed by greedy, violent and amoral people — proposed the constitution of “a new chivalry” at the service of the poor and of pilgrims. Saint Bernard’s proposal was revolutionary: a new chivalry made up of monks who would renounce every form of wealth and personal power and who, even in war, would learn that the enemy may even be killed when there is no other option, but must not be hated. Hence the teaching not to hate even in battle.
The Crusade understood as a “holy war” against the Muslims would also be, according to Cardini, an exaggeration. “In reality — the professor emphasizes — what mattered in the expeditions at the service of the brothers in Christ threatened by the Muslims was the restoration of peace in the West and the setting in motion of the idea of aid to distant coreligionists. The Crusade meant reconciling oneself with one’s adversary before departing, renouncing dispute and revenge, accepting the idea of martyrdom, placing oneself and one’s possessions at the disposal of the community of believers, projecting oneself into an experience in light of which, for a certain number of months and perhaps years, the following of Christ and the memory of the living Christ in the land that had been the theater of his earthly existence would be placed at the summit of one’s own experience”.
