God's Battalions

In his famous speech at Claremont on October 27, 1095, Pope Urban II graphically detailed the torture, rape and murder of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land and the defilement of churches and holy places committed by the Turks. He then asked followers of Christ to become “soldiers of the living God” and go to war; the next year a Christian army set out for Jerusalem and the First Crusade was underway. Yet according to Rodney Stark, most scholars now seem to regard the Crusades as nothing more than the case of an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalizing, looting and colonizing a tolerant and peaceful Islam. Stark takes issue with virtually every aspect of what he calls this “prevailing wisdom” in God’s Battalions.

Stark begins his history of the Crusades not with the pope’s speech at Claremont, but with the rise of Islam and the onset of the Muslim invasions of Christendom in the seventh century, when Islamic armies swept over the larger portion of what was then Christian territory, including the Middle East, Egypt and all of North Africa, Spain, southern Italy and numerous Mediterranean islands including Sicily, Corsica, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta and Sardinia. And having thus ruthlessly conquered, Stark maintains that the Muslims were also brutal and intolerant rulers. Christian retaliation was inevitable.

Having thus set the stage, Stark gives a detailed history of the First Crusade, following the Christian army though the sieges of Nicaea and Antioch in 1097 to the siege and conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. He tells the history of the Crusaders’ kingdoms subsequently established by the First Crusade and the history of the four Crusades that followed. And he describes the founding of the two knightly religious orders of military monks—the Templars and the Hospitallers—dedicated to defending the Holy Land.

Throughout God’s Battalions, Stark attempts to debunk claims of Muslim technological and cultural superiority to Christendom. He also rejects the notion that the Dark Ages in Europe were in fact dark, arguing that during that time Europe actually began the technological leap forward that would put it far ahead of the rest of the world. Little wonder, Stark argues, that the Crusaders were able to march more than twenty-five hundred miles, defeat an enemy that vastly outnumbered them and continue to do so as long as Europe was prepared to support the fight.

Ultimately this provocative reassessment of the Crusades asserts that the Crusades were precipitated—perhaps even justified—by centuries of Islamic aggression and atrocities, and that the Crusaders themselves were not barbarians who victimized cultivated Muslims in search of land, loot and converts, but men of faith who “sincerely believed they served in God’s battalions.”