Fields of Blood (42 page)

Muslims were always ready to learn from other cultures, and in the late fifteenth century they did so from the heirs of
Genghis Khan. The
Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa, the
Safavid Empire in
Iran, and the
Moghul Empire in India would be created on the basis of the Mongol army state and become the most advanced states in the world at the time. But the Mongols also unwittingly inspired a spiritual revival.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73) had fled the Mongol armies with his family, migrating from Iran to
Anatolia, where he founded a new mystical Sufi order. One of the most widely read Muslims in the West today, his philosophy is redolent of the
refugee’s homelessness and sense of separation, but Rumi was also enthralled by the vast extent of the Mongol Empire and encouraged
Sufis to explore boundless horizons on the spiritual plane and to open their hearts and minds to other faiths.

No two people will respond to the same trauma identically, however. Another thinker of the period who has also achieved great influence in our own time was the “fighting scholar”
Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1382), also a refugee who, unlike Rumi, hated the Mongols. He saw the Mongol converts, now fellow Muslims, as
kufar
(“infidels”).
⁸⁸
He also disapproved of the suspension of ijtihad: in these fearful times jurists needed to think creatively and adapt
Shariah to the fact that the ummah had been weakened by two ruthless enemies: the Crusaders and the Mongols. True, the Crusaders seemed a spent force, but the Mongols might still attempt the conquest of the
Levant. In preparation for a military jihad to defend their lands, Ibn Taymiyyah urged Muslims to engage in the
Greater Jihad and return to the pure
Islam of the Prophet’s time, ridding themselves of such inauthentic practices as philosophy (
falsafah
), Sufi mysticism,
Shiism, and the veneration of saints and their tombs. Muslims who persisted in these false devotions were no better than infidels. When
Ghazan Khan, the first of the Mongol chieftains to convert to Islam, invaded
Syria in 1299, Ibn Taymiyyah issued a
fatwa
(“legal ruling”) declaring that despite their conversion to Islam, the Mongols were infidels, because they observed the
Yasa instead of the Shariah, and their Muslim subjects were not bound to obey them. Muslims had traditionally been wary of condemning fellow Muslims as apostates, because they believed that only God could read a person’s heart. The practice of
takfir,
declaring that a fellow Muslim has apostatized, would take on new life in our own times, when Muslims have once again felt threatened by foreign powers.

During the Crusading period, Europe had adopted a narrower perspective and become what one historian has called a “persecuting society.” Until the early eleventh century,
Jews had been fully integrated in Europe.
⁸⁹
Under
Charlemagne they had enjoyed imperial protection and held important public posts. They became landowners and craftsmen in all trades; Jewish physicians were much in demand. Jews spoke the same languages as Christians—
Yiddish did not develop until the thirteenth century—and gave their children Latin names. There were no “ghettos”: Jews and Christians lived side by side and bought houses from one another in
London until the mid-twelfth century.
⁹⁰
However, during the eleventh century, there were rumors that Jews had persuaded the
Fatimid caliph
al-Hakim to destroy the Church of the Resurrection in
Jerusalem in 1009, even though the caliph, who seemed to have been certifiably insane, had persecuted Jews and his fellow Muslims as well as Christians.
⁹¹
In consequence, Jews were attacked in
Limoges,
Orléans,
Rouen, and
Mainz. Linked with Islam in the Christian imagination, their position grew more precarious with each Crusade. After
Richard I took the Cross in London in 1198, there were persecutions in
East Anglia and Lincoln, and in
York in 1193, Jews who refused baptism committed suicide en masse. The so-called
blood libel, whereby the deaths of children were blamed on the local Jewish community, first surfaced when a child was killed in
Norwich during the 1140s; there were similar cases in Gloucester (1168),
Bury St. Edmunds, and
Winchester (1192).
⁹²

This wave of persecution was certainly inspired by a distorted Christian mythology, but it was also the product of social factors. During the slow transition from a purely agrarian to a commercialized economy, towns were beginning to dominate Western Christendom, and by the end of the twelfth century were becoming important centers of prosperity, power, and creativity. There were great disparities of wealth. Lowborn bankers and financiers were becoming rich at the expense of the aristocracy, while some townsfolk had not only been reduced to abject poverty but had also lost the traditional support structures of peasant life.
⁹³
Money, in common use by the late eleventh century, came to symbolize the disturbing changes caused by this rapid economic growth that undermined the traditional social structure; it was seen as “the root of all evil,” and in popular iconography the deadly sin of avarice inspired
visceral loathing and dread.
⁹⁴
Originally Christians had been the most successful moneylenders, but during the twelfth century Jews had their lands confiscated and many were forced to become bailiffs, financial agents of the aristocracy, or moneylenders and were thereafter tainted by their association with money.
⁹⁵
The Jew in Peter Abelard’s
Dialogue
(1125) explains that because Jews’ land tenure is so insecure, “the principal gain that is left for us is that we sustain our miserable lives here by lending money at interest to strangers. But that just makes us more hated by those who think that they are oppressed by it.”
⁹⁶
Jews, of course, were not the only scapegoats of Christian anxiety. Since the
Crusades, Muslims, once regarded with vague indifference in
Europe, had now come to be regarded as fit only for extermination. In the mid-twelfth century
Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, depicted Islam as a bloodthirsty religion that had been propagated entirely by the sword—a fantasy that may have reflected hidden guilt about Christian behavior during the First Crusade.
⁹⁷

Disquiet about nascent
capitalism and the growing violence of Western society, both of which were so obviously at odds with the radical teachings of Jesus, also surfaced in the “
heresies” that the Church had begun to persecute actively in the late twelfth century. Again, the challenge was political rather than doctrinal. The conditions of peasants had reached their lowest level, and poverty had become a major problem.
⁹⁸
Some had become rich in the towns, but population growth had fragmented inheritances and multiplied the numbers of landless villagers roaming the countryside desperately seeking employment. The structural violence of the “three estate” system was the cause of much anxious soul-searching among Christians. In orthodox as well as
heretical circles, the well-to-do were coming to the conclusion that the only way to save their souls was to give away their wealth, which they now regarded as sinful. After a serious illness, Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), son of a wealthy merchant, renounced his patrimony, lived as a
hermit, and founded a new order of friars dedicated to serving the poor and sharing their poverty; it increased rapidly in membership. Francis’s rule was approved by
Pope Innocent III, who hoped thereby to retain some control of the poverty movement that threatened the entire social order.

Other groups were not such loyal adherents of the Church. Even after they had been excommunicated in 1181, the followers of
Valdes, a rich businessman of Lyons who had given all his wealth to the poor,
continued to attract much support as they traveled through the towns of Europe in pairs like the apostles, barefoot, clad in simple garments and holding all things in common. Still more worrying were the Cathari, the “Pure Ones,” who also roamed the countryside, begging for their bread, and were dedicated to poverty, chastity, and
nonviolence. They founded churches in all the major cities of northern and central
Italy, enjoyed the protection of influential laymen, and were especially powerful in
Languedoc,
Provence,
Tuscany, and
Lombardy. They embodied the gospel values far more clearly and authentically than did the worldly Catholic establishment who, perhaps because they felt at some level guilty about their reliance on a system that so clearly contradicted Jesus’s teachings, responded viciously. In 1207 Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) commissioned
Philip II of France to lead a Crusade against the
Cathars in Languedoc, who, he wrote, were worse than the Muslims. The Cathar Church “gives birth continually to a monstrous brood by which its corruption is vigorously renewed after that offspring has passed on to others the canker of its own madness and a detestable succession of criminals emerges.”
⁹⁹

Philip was happy to oblige, since this would enhance his hold over southern France, but Counts
Raymond VI of Toulouse and Raymond-Roger of Béziers and Carcassonne refused to join his Crusade. When one of Raymond’s barons stabbed the papal legate, Innocent was convinced that the Cathars were determined “to annihilate us ourselves” and eliminate orthodox Catholicism in Languedoc.
¹⁰⁰
In 1209
Armand-Amalric, abbot of Citeaux, led a large army there, laying siege to the city of Béziers. It is said that when his troops asked the abbot how they could distinguish orthodox Catholics from the heretics in the town, he had replied: “Kill them all; God will know his own.” Indiscriminate slaughter followed. In fact, it seems that when the Catholics of Béziers were ordered to leave the town, they refused to abandon their Cathar neighbors and chose to die with them.
¹⁰¹
This Crusade was as much about regional solidarity against outside intrusion as it was about religious affiliation.

The extremity of both the rhetoric and the military ruthlessness of the Catharist Crusade is symptomatic of a profound denial. Popes and abbots were dedicated to the
imitation of Christ, but, like
Ashoka, they had come up against the dilemma of civilization, which cannot exist without the structural and military violence against which the Cathars were protesting. Innocent III was the most powerful pope in history:
he had secured the
libertas of the Church and, unlike his predecessors, could command kings and emperors as their monarch. But he headed a society that had almost succumbed to barbarism after the collapse of the
Roman Empire and was now in the process of creating the world’s first predominantly commercial economy. All three
Abrahamic faiths began with a defiant rejection of inequity and systemic
violence, which reflects the persistent conviction of human beings, dating back perhaps to the hunter-gatherer period, that there should be an equitable distribution of resources. Yet this militated against the way Western society was heading. Cathars,
Waldenses, and Franciscans all felt torn by this impasse, realizing perhaps that as
Jesus had pointed out, all who benefit from the inherent violence of the state are implicated in its cruelty.

It seems unlikely that Innocent agonized unduly about this dilemma, though his neurotically exaggerated anti-Cathar rhetoric may express some dis-ease with his position. Far more poignant was the stance of
Dominic de Guzmán (c. 1170–1221), founder of the Order of
Preachers; like the Franciscans, his friars had adopted a poverty that was so extreme that they could own no property and begged for a living. The mendicant Dominicans traveled throughout
Languedoc in pairs trying to bring the “heretics” back to orthodoxy peacefully, reminding them of
Saint Paul’s insistence that Christians obey the political authorities. But they were inevitably tainted by their association with the anti-Cathar Crusade, especially after Dominic attended the
Lateran Council of 1215 to seek Innocent’s approval of his order.