"Not to us, O Lord, not to us; but to thy name give glory." Psalm 113 (Vulgate), motto of the Templars
Once in a discussion with a fellow historical novelist I was informed that the crusades are the earliest examples of genocide. I was surprised that the novelist, being Jewish, seemed unaware of the various ancient persecutions against her own people, including that of the Greeks in the days of the Maccabees, that might be considered genocidal. I reminded her of that, as well as of the fact that there were twelve major crusades, taking place over nearly three hundred years. They were led by different people, with the principle goal of liberating the Holy Land from Muslim rule and thus delivering the Christian population from slavery and oppression. Some were more successful than others. Some, like the Fourth Crusade, were total disasters. In fact, the Fourth Crusade is the one which most people think of when they view the crusades as orgies of mass murder. In that case, those being killed were other Christians. Did other massacres of the innocent occur during the course of the various crusades? Yes. So, did the crusaders journey hundreds of miles to the Middle East, braving fatal diseases, pirates, brigands and an ocean of foes, just for the joy of killing people? That is one of the questions answered by Raymond Ibrahim in his brilliant trilogy about the centuries-long conflict between Christianity and Islam. Ibrahim's books are The Sword and the Scimitar, Defenders of the West, and The Two Swords of Christ. The books present a background to the crusades, containing detailed information of which most contemporary people are unaware, as well as the histories of heroes like El Cid and the rise of the two greatest military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers.
In the early Church the practice of Christians was, even in the era of persecution, to visit the places where Jesus Christ had been born, lived, died and risen. Pilgrimages were regarded as highly penitential, in which the pilgrim would not only risk life and health, but leave behind property, home, family, occupation and offices. The Romans built pagan shrines over the venerable spots like the stable at Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulcher but those temples only served to remind everyone where the sacred sites were hidden. When Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Fourth Century, his mother Empress St. Helena went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she discovered not only the True Cross, but found and reopened many of the other places sacred to the memory of the Savior. This ignited centuries of pilgrimage to the Middle East. Rich and poor would go, often in parish-sponsored groups as now. Special costumes were worn when on pilgrimage, and one was often regarded as being temporarily in religious life when journeying to a holy site. For Jerusalem was not the only destination; there were shrines throughout Europe, including Rome and Compostela. But the pilgrimage to the Holy Land remained the ultimate of penitential practices, with many indulgences attached. People would go for themselves and for loved ones who were sick or who had died.
All this changed with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, meticulously described by Ibrahim in his book Sword and Scimitar. Founded by Mohammed, an Arabian who claimed to be a prophet of the One True God, Islam combined elements of Nestorian Christianity and Judaism with the prophet's own inspirations, many of which included teachings abhorrent to Judeo-Christian morality. One such teaching permits Muslim men to take a non-Muslim "infidel" woman by force. Mohammed commanded his followers to spread Islam by warfare. Within 200 years, the Christian lands in North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and the Middle East were conquered. Great Christian cities like Antioch and Alexandria, which had been Apostolic sees, fell to Islam, with the churches and basilicas becoming mosques. Christians, especially children, young men and young women, were made into sex slaves and concubines, including monks and nuns. Many boys were castrated to be eunuchs in the harems of the various Muslim elites. Hatred in the form of desecration was lavished upon Christian shrines, churches, monasteries, and cathedrals, with special contempt reserved for icons, church bells and crosses. The latter were dragged upside down through the streets, to be spat and urinated upon by the disciples of the prophet. Altars were sometimes desecrated by the gang-rape a Christian virgin. Those Christians and Jews who were not killed or sold were subject to oppressive laws and taxes in their own lands. This is documented in Muslim sources which repeatedly rejoice when describing the oppression of "infidels" and especially the defilement of Christian women.
A war-like, nomadic people called the Turks embraced Islam; they eventually overran the old Roman province of Anatolia so it became "Turkey." In the late 11th century, Jerusalem, which had fallen into Muslim hands before, was captured by the Seljuk Turks, who tortured, raped, and sold into slavery the Christians of the region. Those who were killed were regarded as lucky. The violence disrupted the flow of pilgrimages from Europe to the Holy Land. The Muslims made a point of harassing and robbing pilgrims, sometimes capturing them to be sold into slavery. Blond and red-haired girls and boys with blue, gray or green eyes were especially favored for the slave markets. Although one beautiful abbess from Germany, traveling with a group of pilgrims to Jerusalem, was waylaid by Muslim bandits and raped to death in front of her fellow Christians, who were also mistreated in various horrific ways. This led Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 to call for a crusade of Christian soldiers to deliver the Christians in the Holy Land. Thus began the era of the crusades. Defenders of the West describes some of the great heroes of Christendom who kept Islam out of Europe, including at least one from Albania whom I had never heard of before. My opinion of Richard I "Lionheart" had suffered in the past but in Defenders he is revealed as among the bravest of the brave. The Two Swords of Christ traces the history of the two great military orders in a deeply inspiring way. For when the weak and innocent are attacked, it is unquestionably the duty of Christians who are able to defend them.
From The Chivalry Guild:
If I had to pick the best way to describe the recent works of Raymond Ibrahim—Sword and Scimitar (2018) and Defenders of the West (2022)—I’d
call them no-going-back books. The equally chilling and invigorating
experience of his histories cannot be undone and you cannot see the
world the same way afterwards—especially since it’s not just history,
but a forgotten prelude to what we’re living with today. Reality looks
different post-Ibrahim.
Sword and Scimitar
takes the reader through fourteen centuries of warfare between Islam and
the West, with emphasis on eight great battles within that conflict.
Better than any book I know, it dynamites the old public school
narrative about the Crusades as a brutal act of Christian aggression
against those poor, peaceful, tolerant Muslims. Ibrahim tells a much
darker story about our ancient adversaries, documenting the scale of
their conquests and the horrors that followed pretty much everywhere the
armies of the prophet went. What we call “the West,” he writes, is but
“the last and most redoubtable bastion of Christendom not to be
conquered by Islam. Simply put, the West is actually the westernmost
remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that
Islam permanently severed.” Three-quarters of the formerly Christian
world was conquered by these people. It is both chilling and
invigorating, like I noted, to think about how much danger we were
in—and what kind of virtue was required to meet that danger and triumph
over it, at least for a time.
Defenders of the West
is an even more important book. It’s personal and compelling, and it
reverses a long trend of hiding Christian heroes from those of us who
need to learn about them. Thanks to Enlightenment propagandists, a vague
narrative persists that heroism basically died out after the
assassination of Julius Caesar and wasn’t revived again until Napoleon
and George Washington walked the earth. The intent is a broadside
against the Faith, leaving you with the vague impression that the
teachings of Christ and his Church effectively snuff out all martial
virtue, as though heroics cannot co-exist with the Gospel. Ibrahim shows
this to be absolute nonsense. With his chronicles of Godfrey of
Bouillon, El Cid, Richard the Lionheart, Fernando III, Louis IX, John Hunyadi, Scanderbeg, and Vlad Dracula, he brings to life eight legends whose deeds rival or exceed those of any heroes of any age.
These
works are, in my humble opinion, on the shortlist for books of the
century. So it was with special interest that I anticipated his
follow-up effort. The Two Swords of Christ
(published November ’25) continues with his major theme but looks at a
different aspect of the conflict: the crucial work done by the Templars
and the Hospitallers, basically the special forces of Christendom.
Ibrahim’s
title comes from Luke 22, in which Jesus tells his disciples to buy a
sword. When they reply, “Look, there are two swords here,” Jesus says,
“It is enough!” What’s fascinating is his use of the singular pronoun it rather than the plural they. It suggests
not the swords, but a way of life that employs “a spiritual sword
against spiritual enemies, and a physical sword against physical
enemies.” If your religious education was anything like mine, your
teachers blithely passed over this and similar passages in favor of all
the nicer-sounding directives about loving everybody and just being
nice, along with never fighting—because fighting is unchristian. For
those looking for simplistic formulas for life, it’s far easier to
reduce the character of the Lord to that of a harmless meditation
instructor, rather than wrestling with the much more challenging and
dynamic truth.
The two swords also work as a metonymy for
the knightly orders, filled with men whose particular way of serving God
and their neighbors was with weapons. (Read more.)
All three books are so detailed in citing source material that one comes away with a refreshed world-view, for a deeper understanding of history leads to a more profound comprehension of the present. Plus Raymond Ibrahim is an engaging and descriptive writer so that I often felt I was watching a film of the events he has so richly described. I recommend this excellent trilogy for every home library and every college history class.
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