Books: Death as a Virtue

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Saladin in Paradise. The Second Crusade, launched in 1101, was slaughtered in Anatolia without ever reaching Palestine, and the survivors were sold into slavery in the markets of Damascus and Baghdad. Cut off from the West, the Christian principalities in the Middle East were gradually strangled by the Moslems. Under the leadership of Saladin (1174-93), a cunning Kurd who had made himself the master of Egypt and Syria, a Moslem holy war was launched against the Christians, and in 1187 Jerusalem was retaken. Saladin was one of those extraordinary military geniuses who knew how to temper cruelty with a noble magnanimity of the heart. He slaughtered without mercy all warrior monks of the Templar and Hospitaler orders captured at the decisive battle of Hattin in 1187, but bought back the infant of a captured French woman and returned it to its mother. His reputation for justice and wisdom was such that Dante a century later placed him in "the paradise of the non-Christian Just."

The Third Crusade of Richard the Lionhearted and France's treacherous King Philip Augustus failed to retake Jerusalem. The Fourth Crusade, like the Second, never even reached the Holy Land. It was used by the crafty Venetians to conquer Christian Constantinople in 1204, irreparably weakening the Byzantine Empire and thus opening the gates for the subsequent Turkish conquest of the Balkans.

The Crusades, concludes Zoé Oldenbourg, were a prodigious, irrational undertaking of medieval man, for whom courage was the ultimate virtue, death in battle the ultimate reward. To dash out the brains of one's enemies, to rip their bowels, lop off their hands, smash their teeth, "cleave them from chin to chine," and then to fall oneself in an orgy of blood and violence—this was the holy ideal of the Crusader knights. They succeeded pretty well too. All told, the Crusades led to the death or enslavement of more than a million Christians and Moslems.