Jerusalem taken
The Crusaders enter Jerusalem
On July 15, 1099 AD, the Crusaders breach the walls of Jerusalem. What follows is one of the most documented and most discussed massacres in medieval history.
The Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of the city are slaughtered. The sources differ on the scale — some contemporary accounts are clearly exaggerated — but the killing is indiscriminate and systematic. The Jewish community shelters in the synagogue. It is burned. The Crusaders wade through blood in the Temple Mount, or so the sources report.
The Crusader Raymund of Aguilers describes scenes of extraordinary violence and interprets them as divine judgment. He quotes the Psalms. He gives thanks.
The same sources describe Crusaders weeping at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, removing their shoes before entering, walking barefoot through the city in procession, overwhelmed by the reality that they had arrived at the place they had been traveling toward for three years.
Both things are true simultaneously: the massacre and the tears. The violence done in the name of Christ and the genuine devotion to Christ. The same people, the same day, the same city.
This is not a comfortable history to tell honestly. It is a necessary one.
The church that will spend the next three hundred years holding these holy sites will eventually lose them — and the losing will not change what was done to get them.
“Our pilgrims cut down in the Temple of Solomon to their horses' bridles, by the just and marvelous judgment of God.”
— Raymund of Aguilers, Historia Francorum, 1099 AD
“He has showed you, man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
The Crusaders wept at the Holy Sepulchre and waded through blood to get there.
The church must hold both facts honestly, without either minimizing the atrocity to protect the devotion or dismissing the devotion to condemn the atrocity. Both were real. The same human beings contained both.
This is the most important lesson in the history of religious violence: the sincerity of the devotion does not justify the means. The tears at the tomb do not wash away the blood in the streets.
The call to justice and kindness and humility does not suspend itself during holy wars. It is more, not less, urgent when the cause seems most sacred.
What does it mean to pursue a holy goal by holy means — to refuse to separate the how from the what?