There's 26, titled as God willseth crusades or missions. We're going to begin with a prayer not from one of the crusaders, but I'm a man who lived about the time that all of this was taking place. A man whose name is Richard of Chichester, that is a place in England, and it's a very wonderful prayer that you probably know, although you may not know that it actually came from Richard of Chichester. So we begin, let's bow in prayer, let's pray. Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits which thou hast given to thee, for all the pains and insults which thou hast borne for me. O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother, may I know thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, and follow thee more dearly, day by day, amen. Suppose if there is one lecture in the survey course that I would like to leave out, it would be this one, at least the first part of this lecture, because it's embarrassing. And it's hurtful for me to have to talk about the crusades. It's not much good that I can say about this event in church history, but it is part of the record, and it is something that we need to know about. These things that took place in the name of the Lord, we might say, but not purely by true Christians, but even so, in the name of the Lord, with the sign of the cross, the crusades are a disastrous period, period of the crusades in church history, as people went forth to do battle, not realizing that Christ was really the prince of peace and not the leader of a crusade. There are some times in church history that we come to things like this that we just have to study and forgive. Nothing much here that we can celebrate. The second half of the lecture will have some brighter moments. But let's look first of all at the crusades, and to do that, just a brief review of Christianity and Islam. Your 622 was the flight of Mohamed, so we could use 622 as the beginning of the period of Islam. It was not too many years, 638, when Jerusalem, holy city of the Christians, was conquered by the Muslims, and then you know the Muslims spread rapidly across North Africa into Spain all the way up into France until they returned back at the Battle of Tours in 732 in the West. But Islam then threatened for years, for centuries, the great Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople. And in the 11th century, it looked as though the end was coming soon for that great city. That's the context of the crusades, really, to do something about Islam, to do something about the Muslims. There are seven crusades, I've given you a chart in the syllabus which helps to summarize the information about the crusades, so you can study that and I will not go through the details of that in the lecture. Usually there are eight crusades, if you count the so-called children's crusade, I'll speak about in a moment. It all began about the year 1095 when one of the popes, Pope Urban II, began to preach the first crusade. We called upon Christian people in the West to leave their homes and to make the long journey to Jerusalem, to fight against the Muslims and to free that city from the control of the Muslims. Somehow it all caught on, as Urban made his appeal. The people began to respond, Deus Vult, God wills it, God wills it, and pretty soon that cry went out across Europe and not really only professional soldiers, but ordinary people began to pack up and it was a kind of mass migration of all of these people from Europe making the long walk down the Constantinople and then on down to Jerusalem. For about 200 years then we have crusading activity, we can divide that into three parts, so I've done in the syllabus, first the attack of the Franks, the early leaders of the crusades were the Franks, and that first period, that first 50 year period in terms of military accomplishment was perhaps the most successful, was certainly the most successful, in fact was the only successful time in the period of the Crusades because the crusaders did capture Jerusalem and set up some Latin kingdoms there, much to the dismay of the Eastern Byzantine Emperor who wanted any territory captured to belong to his empire, but these crusaders were from the West and they were not about to cooperate with the Eastern Emperor in giving him what they had won. So for about 50 years at least some small success was accomplished by the crusaders, but then Islam produced a very great military leader, the great Saladin, and for the next 50 years it was totally the reverse of the first 50 years as the Muslims reconquered the territory they had lost and defeated crusading army after crusading army. Then for the next 100 years or so a kind of downward spiraling as people in Europe tried to recover some of the early enthusiasm for the crusades and launch other crusades that would accomplish what the first 100 years had failed to do, but the second 100 years were even less successful. The last crusade was led by Louis IX of France, the man who was known as St. Louis, or whom this city is named, not for C.S. Louis as Jack Collins said in chapel the other day, but for Louis IX the one Louis who is the saint, the Catholic church, St. Louis. You want to get a good picture of St. Louis as a crusading soldier, you can go down to the art museum and see that statue of St. Louis on his horse going off to fight in the crusades. He was killed in an attack on Tunis in the year 1270 and that pretty much wraps up the whole history of the crusading period. Might look at a map for a moment. I have outlined here in red the route of the first crusade from the heart of the Holy Roman Empire all the way down through the kingdom of Hungary, into the Byzantine Empire, and finally across the Vosporus into Asia and then through the kingdom of the Seljuk Turks to Jerusalem. There were many other routes too that crusaders took. St. Louis in his last crusade went down just as far as Tunis here in North Africa where he was killed in the year 1270. Well, why did people do all of this? Let's talk about motives for a moment. Why was it that Western Christians were so intrigued and inspired by the idea of the crusades? First of all I think there was the concern to honor Christ in it all. Very mistaken ideas but there were ideas that Christ has really been insulted by the Muslims and any real Christian would take up his cause and fight for his honor. That was actually the appeal that the saintly Bernard of Clarevo made in preaching the second crusade in 1147. Now it might surprise you that Bernard of Clarevo was a preacher of a crusade because we've already noted that Bernard wrote the wonderful book on loving God but he was also very concerned that Christians go on this crusade. Bernard said this our king Jesus is accused of treachery. It is said of him by the Muslims that he is not God but that he falsely pretended to be something he was not. Any man among you who is his vassal ought to rise up to defend his lord from the infamous accusation of treachery. He should go to the sure fight where to when will be glorious and where to die will be gain. So with that kind of preaching coming from people like Bernard of Clarevo saying the honor of Christ's stake there were many people that responded to that and joined in the crusading movement. Another motive was simply the recovery of the Holy Land. It was important for Christians at this time Catholic Christians to make pilgrimages and they went on pilgrimages to sacred sites particularly to Jerusalem. For some years before the beginning of the first crusade it was not possible to do that. The early period after the Muslims had conquered Jerusalem they did allow pilgrims to make those journeys to the sacred sites of Christianity but from about 1079 they cut off that access to Jerusalem and ambush Christian pilgrims in Root. So the concern in Europe was to recapture Jerusalem and make it possible for Christians again to go and visit the Holy Land. Those were not really just tourists going because this will see a visit to the Holy Land had tremendous significance as far as one's spiritual status was concerned. Another motive was to try to bring together the two halves of Christianity. We've already seen that the eastern church broke with the western church in 1054 and actually the whole thing started when Alexius the emperor in the east and a letter to the Pope in Rome urban asking for some help against the Muslims who were coming very close to his great city and the Pope responded by preaching the first crusade. But Alexius got more than he bargained for he thought he would get a few hundred well-trained soldiers that he could have at his disposal to help his army against the Muslims and what arrived was a huge rag tag company of people most of whom were not soldiers and Alexius hardly knew what to do about this new barbarian invasion as he saw it from Europe. Who had arrived on the doorstep of his capital. Actually the relationship between the west and the east got worse and worse during the crusades because the crusaders if they could not find Muslims to fight settled for eastern orthodox Christians and in the year 1200 and 4 the crusaders attacked and sacked the city of Constantinople. Greatest city in Europe in fact a greater city than all the cities of Europe put together and a great city of wonderful ecclesiastical treasures. Most of those were taken away and taken over to Venice. If you go to Venice today you'll see many great treasures that originally were in Constantinople. So rather than helping the unification of these two branches of Christianity the crusades really made the situation far worse. It was also the matter of personal salvation because the popes pulled out all the stops in preaching these crusades and Pope Urban said at the very beginning the sins of those who set out thither if they lose their lives shall be remitted in that hour. So sinners could see an opportunity here to go and fight the Muslims and if they died then automatically and immediately all their sins were forgiven. That was a tempting offer and many people who felt they did not have a very good chance in Europe because their sins were many were willing to leave and take the risk and even perhaps look forward to being killed in battle and going straight to heaven. And then mixed in with all of this it was just a lot of ambition, adventure, opportunity to do something exciting and different. In fact the the popes made no secret of the fact that European Christians were spending too much time fighting each other in this rather hectic feudal period of European life would be far better for them to not fight each other but to go down and fight the Turks and the Muslims and deflect some of that military energy in that direction. There are some great figures, kind of romantic figures in all of this history. The third crusade for instance had Richard I called the lionhearted of England and King Philip Augustus of France and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa three great romantic figures from history. Nothing much came of that the emperor drowned and Richard and Philip Augustus ended up most of the time fighting each other. One of the most curious events in all of this history is what is called the children's crusade. That took place in the year 1212 when as many as perhaps 30,000 children. They may have been more like teenagers it's hard to know how all these people were but the kind of crusading spirit so gripped all of Europe that thousands of very young people decided that they would go on a crusade. There were several branches of this crusade the first one left from France and another left from Germany but the children felt that their elders had failed and that they could perhaps succeed. They went without arms this was not an armed crusade just a big company of young people thinking that God was in it all because of the various prophecies that they had heard and they set out to go to North Africa or to the lands around Jerusalem to perhaps convert the Muslims. I'm not sure what their motive was or what they felt they would do when they got there they probably did not know either. In fact they really did not know how they were going to get there. They got as far as Marseilles and then they found a big sea before them and they could not walk any further but they did not disturb them because they felt that if God had made a tribe path for Moses and the children of Israel then he could certainly do it again for them. They waited a while and nothing happened in the Mediterranean. Some of them went home but others got on ships were seven ships that purported to be ships of friends who would take them where they wanted to go. Two of those ships were lost at sea. The other five met some Muslim ships in the Mediterranean transferred all these children to the other ships to be soulless slaves to the Muslims. Well there were several episodes of this children's crusade but all ended the same way.
Well you might wonder that all this going on did anybody object to this? Did anybody say this is not the right thing to do? Well some people did and I did include in the syllabus an article actually I would have included the objections if I could have found them but the article is by a man named Humbert of Romans who was answering the objections but you can read that article and you can see the objections that were being made to the crusades, the ones that you would expect to be made but you can also see how a churchman was able to turn those arguments and dismiss them. Well the crusades certainly fell far short of achieving their goal. There was that brief success in the first crusade and the small Latin kingdoms that were set up in the Holy Land but those were soon lost. Some new orders were established in the Catholic Church such as the Knights of the Temple, the two Tonic Knights, the Knights of St. John, these were military orders. For the first time you have orders established that have the usual marks of obedience and poverty and chastity but add the military service, these are crusading military orders but the real result of the crusades was just a long legacy of bitterness on the part of Jews and the Eastern Orthodox Christians and the Muslims. I haven't mentioned this but you have read about it in the text and perhaps other places but quite often along the way the crusaders would simply stop and attack the Jews. Sometimes swiping out whole communities of Jews in Europe as they felt they were going to the Holy Land to liberate that from the Muslims somehow they had in mind too that these Jews who were closer to them were really responsible for the death of Christ anyway and so it would be a good idea to eliminate them as well in route to the Holy Land. Well that's the long sad story of it all. I was intrigued to read in Christianity today the issue that came out in October 7, 1996, an article called Christians retrace crusaders steps and there's a kind of reconciliation walk that got underway then began in April 1996 and those people are still walking somewhere in Eastern Europe perhaps close to Constantinople by now because they plan to arrive in Jerusalem in 1999 which will be the 900th anniversary of the crusaders invasion of Jerusalem. They go across Europe through the Balkans and Turkey and then south to Jerusalem they're meeting with Muslims and Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians and apologizing for what the crusaders did so many years ago. That might seem like a very small and people thing to do in the wake of all of this disaster but it is something it is a gesture toward reconciliation. Well, you show you something here, cartoon, man on the horse is a crusader he has his cross on his garment also has his spear, his sword and a poor Muslim there on the ground is facing a real difficult situation and he says tell me more about this Christianity of yours. I'm terribly interested. Well, that cartoon is somewhat misleading because the crusaders really had no intention to convert the Muslims even by force. The idea was to defeat the Muslims and generally kill them not to convert them to Christianity but were there no people at all who were thinking of the fact that the Lord sends us into the world not to kill and massacre people but to love them and to bring the message of Christ redemption to them. There were a few at this time. So come to the second part of the lecture. First is Crusades. Second is missions. That's why I call the lecture Crusades or missions. God wills it, Deus Vult, Crusades or missions. What is it really that God wills? And one example of a person who took quite a different approach to the Muslims, a man that we've met already was that poor little man of Italy, Francis of Assisi. Francis not only wandered about Italy preaching to the animals and helping the poor and taking care of lepers but he also made a journey down to Egypt. On his own personal mission he was able to meet the Sultan Al-Khamil, unbelievable that he would be able to wander in and somehow have an audience with this man but Francis was so guileless and so well he had no weapons at all and he was just he didn't look like much and the Muslims may have thought that he was a bit insane and some of them had the idea that sometimes God speaks through people kind of like this. So maybe we better listen to him. When he got there he said, I am not sent of man but of God to show you the way of salvation. Well he had many conversations with the Sultan and many of the Muslims there they were not converted to Christianity but they were converted to St. Francis. They liked him and he preached to them and taught them and I'm sure expressed love to them. Sam Malfit says in his book on History of Christianity in Asia that a model of innocent faith unarmed witness and a complete willingness to die for his Lord inspired the members of his order in the same century and with the same utter disregard of their own safety to become the first Europeans to preach to the Mongols and the Chinese. So with Francis and with the Franciscans we have the beginning of a missions movement not only to the Muslims but to many other lands as well and areas as well. The greatest of the missionaries of this period and one of the greatest of the missionaries to Islam in all of history is a man named Raymond Law. I want to talk about Raymond Law for a few minutes because it's important for us to know about him. He was born in Spain he was born on the island of Marjorca one of those tourist islands today but the home of Raymond Law like Francis he was a very worldly young man with a lot of ambition very showy and dress and in life writing love poetry to various women and enjoying himself greatly when he was converted and then he dedicated himself to one single goal for the rest of his life as he grew up in Marjorca and as he lived in Spain of course the Muslims were still there and he was in a Muslim context later the Muslims would be driven out of Spain the moors as they're called in Spain but that would not happen until the 16th century or at least would not be completed until the 16th century so Raymond Law decided that God was calling him to be a missionary to the Muslims to proclaim in the very home of Islam in the speech of the people the gospel of Christ so what he wanted to do to go somewhere into one of those Muslim areas probably in North Africa and be able to speak in Arabic and preach the gospel to them took him nine years to learn Arabic he said it's an awful sounding language sounds like the grunts and groans of beast but he worked hard at it not only did he learn Arabic actually wrote some books in Arabic including his own spiritual autobiography which he wrote in Arabic not in Cantolan or Latin but he also traveled through Europe talking to popes and others whoever would listen to him about his vision for missions to the Muslims he started missionary colleges where people could study languages and study apologetics and study how to preach in Muslim setting and three times in his life he ventured down into Muslim countries each time barely escaping with his life and the last time he did not escape but as an old man of 85 he was stoned to death in Tunisia modern Tunisia as he attempted to preach to the Muslims low did not lack boldness he would simply arrive stand up denounce Islam and preach Christ to anybody who would listen to him neither did he like brilliance he was a wonderful scholar who wrote some very intriguing books that nobody since that time has been able much to understand but other books in which he does set forth things more clearly so a man of scholarship of brilliance and a man of boldness he would have done well to have had attacked to all of that but we have to admire him as a person who knew what had to be done and that is these people need somehow to hear the gospel right and law said if God were to convert the Muslims it would be a very easy thing for him to convert the rest of the world because he realized here is a very resistant people and take a great miracle of God not much has changed since the day of law as I say he wrote many books scholastic theology wrote books on mystic religion and allegory and he wrote huge books on apologetics and polemics in which he tries to devise ways in which Christianity can be presented argued defended in the Muslim world one book a verse that he wrote which I have never seen but I read about it's intriguing it's called the hundred names of God and in his preface he says in the Quran it says there are 99 names of God and that he who knows the hundredth name will know all things there's kind of a tradition a legend saying that the camel knows the hundredth name that's why the camel has a kind of superior look because it knows that one name that nobody else knows and I haven't seen this book haven't been able to read it but I imagine the hundredth name is the name of Christ that Raymond Law would add to the long list of the names that are found in the Quran well law died as an old man preaching and the next 500 years one writer has said and this probably isn't greatly exaggerated no human voice publicly proclaim Christ to the Muslims this silence was not broken until the saintly Henry Martin stepped on Arabian soil at musket in the year 1800 and 11 we'll study Henry Martin much much later in the Reformation in modern church history but I expect that Raymond Law is rejoicing in heaven if he knows about the 1040 window in the fact that Christians now are beginning to be aware of the Muslim world and sending missionaries to that world and he's rejoicing if he knows about Kirk Pistrup in London covenant seminary graduate of a couple years ago who it's working with Muslims there with the idea of eventually moving to one of the Islamic home lands where he can present the gospel to these people in a book that I looked at not long ago called God has chosen me forever lasting life God has chosen me forever lasting life there are the testimonies of a number of converts from Islam to Christianity and one of these converts and Indonesian man wrote that he took his initial step toward faith in Jesus Christ when he began not to pray and ponder a verse that he read in the Quran well that intrigued me that here's this man doesn't have a Bible but he finds a verse in the Quran and he becomes so interested in that what it says that that was the beginning of his pilgrimage into the Christian faith and here's the verse say O people of the book of course the Quran will use that expression for Jews and Christians where the people of the book say O people of the book you will be nothing unless you uphold the Torah and the gospel and all that is revealed to you from your Lord it's too bad the crusaders that hear that verse from the Quran you'll be nothing unless you uphold the gospel and this Indonesian Muslim was so interested to know what that myth that he had to find a gospel and begin to read it to see what it was that Christians should believe and should uphold the basic ingredients in the accounts of these various converts to Christianity from Islam I would say are just three or four things one is the scripture they finally get the Bible the second is always almost always a very good friend who's a Christian who will stay with them through the thick and thin of the experience of trying to come out of Islam and then thirdly biblical teaching about sin and about grace and about salvation the grass withers by our fades but the word of our God will stand forever are any of Raymond Lawles books translated some are translated I don't know if we have those in our library or not here but you can find some of his works translated by far most of it isn't but some is in English yes Dan yes question is were there some deeper motives of truth and serity among the crusaders I expect there there was individual people of course at this time and we haven't talked all that much about this but at this time what the church said what the Pope said what the bishop said that was the word of God so there were very sincere people who felt they were hearing the voice of God in all of this that was a lot of superstition and a lot of weird things happening to there was a story about a kind of inspired goose that people felt somehow God had communicated to and that this goose would lead the crusade so for a few miles at least they followed the goose but I didn't work out too well and there's a lot of superstition there's a lot of sinfulness but undoubtedly there were some people with high ideals and who genuinely felt that what God wanted them to do was to try to recover these very precious things for the church that they felt were in the hands of the infidel that was always the the word used for the Muslims the infidel yes right the question no no the question is what about the man from Indonesia that found this verse in the Quran that verse really said Christians ought to listen to the gospel that's what it said now that did not convert him but it did make him very interested to know what the gospel was the Christians ought to listen to so eventually he didn't have access to a Bible and that brought the gospel to him yes question has to do with the israel coming a nation in Palestinian land in this century compared to the crusades well I suppose there is there is one analogy that can can be made israel of course claims that it was their land they were not taking anybody else's land somebody else had taken their land so they were just taking it back and I think the the crusaders felt the same way this was not Muslim land before it was Muslim land it was Christian land well it really never was Christian land it was Jewish land but same thing although they did kill the Jews in route to Jerusalem things get very mixed up here but I think that would have been an analogy whether we can say it was wrong for Israel to return to its land because it would have been wrong we think for the crusaders to fight the Muslims it's another question that gets much more involved with a lot of other issues I think but you know whatever whatever we make of this it really isn't going to work for Christians to say to the Muslims well you started it all I mean we can make a case that these people were pretty ruthless and they did wipe out many Christian churches and perhaps some of that has been exaggerated and the idea that Muslims force Christians to convert has been exaggerated sometimes that happened but not always actually many of the Christian settlements in North Africa and in the Middle East were already disillusioned with both Rome and Constantinople and welcome Muslim control to be free from these other Christians so situations a lot more complex than we sometimes make it but I don't think we can say to Muslims you started it we have to say something like we're sorry and there's no way we can defend that action we're sorry it was under the name of Christ but it doesn't reflect Christ and his spirit and his gospel thank you question is was it at this time that the the great churches and shrines were built on the sites that people felt represented the place where Jesus was born and so on that really had already taken place Constantine soon as Constantine became Emperor that began to happen and Constantine's mother was very instrumental in providing money for great churches and buildings to be erected the place of the tomb of Jesus at Galgotha at Bethlehem many of the shrines would date to that earlier period and pilgrims were going to those shrines from Europe when the Muslims cut that off then that created added incentive for the Crusaders to try to open the door again so that people could visit those places the churches were already there maybe not the present buildings that are there today but great churches and shrines were there early control of Palestine was under a more lenient open type of Muslim you know there are different types of Muslims they're the Egyptian Muslims and the Seljuk Turks the Turks are going to be much more radical and aggressive and anti-Christian the earlier Muslims who controlled Jerusalem restricted Christianity greatly but they did not prevent pilgrims from making that journey it was in some wars within the Muslim world that a stricter more militant group took over okay we'll have to close now thank you