pambo's Full Review: Robert Payne - The Dream and the Tomb: A History o...
Robert Payne has painted a beautiful, nuanced portrait of life and belief that surrounded the efforts of Christians to seize control of Jerusalem and drive the Muslims out of the Holy Land.
His book is an outstanding introduction to events that still shape the attitudes of mistrust that prevail in the Middle East.
Smack in the middle of most of these efforts to regain Jerusalem through the bloody, mystical and doomed efforts known as the Crusades were a series of French kings, noblemen, clerics and peasants who prodded, inspired and talked each other into participating in the attempts to recapture the Holy Land.
What Payne has done is lay out the history of the eight Crusades, which began in 1095 and collapsed in 1270. In lovely style, he reveals the attitudes and beliefs of people at the time that help explain why both those we would consider politicians today and very ordinary folks would risk absolutely everything-their lives, their homes, their families-to venture to a land most of them had never seen.
While it has become common to sneer at the Crusaders as money-grubbing Westerners determined to grab what they could, Payne makes a very strong case for the spiritual aspects underlying their actions:
"Rarely were men more sinful than when they set out to conquer the Holy Land, and rarely were they more deeply religious, more certain of their faith. Amid all the confusions and uncertainties surrounding the crusades there existed the one absolute certainty: the Christian faith. Everything else could be argued about but the existence of Christ as the lord of the worlds was beyond argument."
While alleged Christians committed some of the worst crimes imaginable in the name of faith, Payne's argument is that the times made things different: anything that promoted the faith, and kept the Muslims from further ventures into Europe, was acceptable, even desirable. The belief systems of the time were entirely different from what most of us experience today and therefore, their actions seem less comprehensible to us today.
No doubt, other books exist that present the Crusaders as little more than the rapacious scum of Europe, bent on destruction and extermination of the Muslims. But if, as some contemporary historians like to say, money were main motivator, how to explain the disastrous Children's Crusade of 1212 when a French boy of 12, citing an encounter with Christ, persuaded roughly 8,000 children to follow him to the Holy Land where they would "conquer" the Muslims through their Christian example and not through force? Their attempts, and a similar one rooted in Germany, met with tragedy; many of the French children were lost in a storm at the sea; the French children, as were the German children, wound up sold into slavery.
Like the original Children's Crusade, most of the Crusades can be traced back clearly to the French, then the dominant religious and secular power of the Western world.
That most of the Crusades ultimately failed, and in some ways, fostered the rise of Islam in parts of the world, is unquestionable. What Payne does is set us straight about the Crusaders' motivation and try to help us understand what motivated people, many of whom had never before left their villages, to travel hundreds of miles to retake a land in the name of faith.
Payne is no fool; he doesn't attribute all interest in the Crusades to divine inspiration. For example, in writing about the Fourth Crusade (1199-1204) which ended in the Christian massacre of other Christians*, he points out that a priest instrumental in driving the Crusade was in part motivated by his interest in eliminating vice and corruption in Paris.
The priest's desire for a Crusade can't be separated, though, from the wider ideal of living a more Christian life: vice was to be renounced in the name of the Holy Spirit. His drive meshed with those of the French nobles who for a variety of mostly spiritual reasons, felt compelled to regain the Holy Land.
(That the Fourth Crusade was not only a failure but a terrible crime can be blamed mostly on the Doge of Venice, who used the French nobility's desire to reconquer the Holy Land to wreak his own vengeance on Constantinople. The French envoys, in meeting with the Doge, said they had come, "on behalf of the high barons of France who had taken the sign of the Cross to avenge the shame of Jesus Christ and to reconquer Jerusalem, if God wills it." The Doge, apparently, used their original relatively pure ideas to avenge himself on the Byzantine city, where he'd lost his eyesight in an accident.)
What Payne has given us is a sharp, clear view of another time, though not that distant, showing us actions and thinking that affect our politics today. The power and influence of belief and its role in governing every facet of everyday life is unmistakable, clearly different from what most of us experience today.
If you want to know why Muslims resent Christians-or why some Eastern churches are suspicious of the Vatican-- you'll get an explanation here. More important, you'll get a piece of our common history with another part of the world, and a great look at a time when different beliefs held sway.
(*Ernle Bradford, writing in The Great Betrayal, has provided a marvelous and stunning account of the destruction of Constantinople. Though the Crusaders had set out to first conquer Egypt and then grab Jerusalem, ultimately, through a series of deals, betrayals, errors and crimes the Crusaders instead crushed the Byzantine Christians in a brutal siege and massacre of their co-religionists. There is an appalling account of the Byzantine people kneeling and making the sign of the cross as the Crusaders enter the city. A few hours later, most of those who had knelt in prayer would be butchered. This book isn't listed on epinions or I'd review it.)
This book review is part of the Bastille Day writeoff, involving the following writers.
Please read them all! Thanks for reading this.
If you're wondering why someone named Robinson would celebrate Bastille Day, my mother's family is named LeTourneau; while most of them are in New England, their roots are in Trois Rivieres, Quebec. A great-uncle of mine was a Marist brother, though my immediate family is Protestant.
So, to the glorious French, happy Bastille Day!. You can hear their grand national anthem at http://digischool.bart.nl/mu/volklied/france.htm
Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes!
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