War vs. Religion: A Meditation

As someone who teaches the Crusades at the college level, one of the most common things I hear from students is that the Crusades were not about religion. They were actually about quite a lot of things but rest assured, a huge motivator for many involved was fervent religious belief. While modern Christians today might balk at that idea, medieval Christianity was a very different thing than the modern faith, and as I often quote, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." We might not like that idea--that those who participated in the Crusades held genuine religious belief that at least in part motivated them to act as they did--but we don't get to make that untrue as a consequence.

What's more, virtually every Crusades historian working today, no matter what aspect of the Crusades they study, agrees on this point. While I do not like arguments from authority (i.e. you have to believe me just because I have a PhD), one would have to work quite hard to convince me that all the historians who agree on this point are wrong in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

One of many things that might support the idea that the Crusades were not about religion though is a statistic I've had several students ask me about over the years: that only 7% of wars throughout history have been "caused by religion." Not only do students mention this to me from time to time but I've seen it more than once referenced in more popular publications on various military history topics. The first time this happened it came as quite a surprise to me, especially because I was unsure of how such a hard, specific number could have been generated. Well, to figure that out, I did some digging....

Note first that this number comes from the Encyclopedia of War (2004), in which authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod in three volumes documented numerous recorded wars in human history. In their work, they supposedly argued that of the 1763 wars they analyzed, only 123 were classified to involve a religious cause. Ergo, the vast majority of wars in history have not been fought over religion as many people have proposed.

Well, it turns out that there are a great many problems with this data and the approach overall:

 

1. It turns out that the 7% statistic is a misunderstanding of and then oft-repeated mistaken reference to Phillips' and Axelrod's Encyclopedia. Rather than summarizing these problems myself, just read this brief blog entry by another medieval military historian. He did a nice job of showing why the 123 number is actually an incorrect reading of the source and more importantly, why it represents a misuse of the Encyclopedia's purpose and intent (which was neither to document "all" recorded wars nor differentiate religious wars from non-religious).

2. Even if one wants to set aside the misuse of the Encyclopedia and work with 121 religious wars rather than 123 (the number of wars actually listed in the Encyclopedia's index under “religious wars”), I can practically guarantee that there are more than 1763 recorded wars in human history. After doing a brief analysis, I found almost 530 wars in Europe alone during the surveyed time. As such, one fundamentally cannot assess the nature of "all" recorded wars using the Encyclopedia (which, again, in the authors' strong defense, was never their claim nor their intent).

 

3. The Encyclopedia attempted to include major wars in recorded history yet the vast majority of the conflicts they included were rather formal in nature between more organized states/societies/peoples. Most had a rather defined beginning, middle, and end. But this does not include warfare between cultures/peoples that might not be easily bound by defined "wars" and yet was warfare nonetheless. Viking raiding during the Viking Age, violence in the Middle East outside the bounds of formal campaigning during the Crusades, or really any type of guerrilla action between groups not formally at war are great examples of this.

4. Let's say one acknowledges these limitations but still argues that if so few of the wars Axelrod and Phillips did include involved religion then surely one can extrapolate from there about war more broadly. Yet we must remember that their volumes analyzed recorded wars. This does not include unrecorded conflicts throughout human history and there were certainly many, many, many that occurred. Just think of the innumerable cultures that have existed that did not have written languages! If you try to include the wars those cultures surely engaged in, you might be able to double or even triple the proposed total number of wars that have occurred in human history. That is to say nothing of their causes, many of which are lost to time.

 

5. As a final death-knell to the 7% statistic and the concept of counting wars more generally, we must remember that there is practically no correlation between the number of wars that occur for a given reason and the scope/impact of each war that is counted. For example, in 1859 the US and Canada were briefly embroiled in a dispute about the ownership of a small island along the Oregon Territory/Canada border called San Juan Island. Because it was not clearly given to one country or the other in a treaty established some years earlier, both British/Canadian and American farmers began settling on the disputed land. Then one day an American farmer on the island found a pig eating his plants so he got his gun and shot the pig. It turned out, however, that the pig belonged to an Irish inhabitant of the island who demanded a high price for his lost animal. When the farmer refused to pay, both the British and American communities on the island requested military assistance from their governments, which escalated matters quickly. The so-called Pig War was eventually settled without bloodshed, save the pig of course, and 30 years later the island became part of Washington state. Juxtapose this with WWI, which began in 1914 when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. That war, to be sure, did not end with only a deceased pig. Yet if the number of wars is all that matters when considering causes, it's perfectly true to say that 1/2 of the wars I've just mentioned began with the death of an animal of the Suidae variety. More starkly: only one war of the nearly 200 globally in the 20th century was caused primarily by Nazism; does that mean that at only 0.5% of the total, that ideology should not be viewed as a dangerous motivation for war? Of course not. The counting approach, in my view, should therefore always be qualified or perhaps even discarded entirely.

 

6. Here's the biggest and most problematic issue with this entire subject though: to classify wars as having a finite number of causes/motivations--so much so that you can clearly differentiate wars seemingly caused by or heavily involving religion from those that were not--is far too simplistic. What's more, I would argue that this idea constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of how wars begin and why people fight them. For example, (a) if a historical war was fought between two different religious cultures, it does not automatically follow that the given war was really motivated by religion (even if it might seem so superficially enough that one could label the war as having religious tones); (b) even if a historical conflict was partially motivated by religion, that could have been one of numerous causes for fighting that were not religious; (c) there are many historical situations where a war was not caused or motivated be religion but the animosity between the belligerents was exacerbated by religious differences; (d) just because a war was caused and fueled by religion on the macro level does not mean that every power/group fighting in that war was doing so for religious reasons; and (e) paradoxically, even wars seemingly fought for many reasons other than religion can, after more thorough inspection, have surprisingly strong or unexpected religious undertones.

 

A perfect example demonstrating many of these scenarios is the 30 Years War (1618-1648), which was, without a doubt, one of the most violent religious wars in human history. Yet even this seemingly straightforward example of a war for religion proves to be far more complex when we take a closer look: by the dawn of the 17th century, the Catholic Spanish Hapsburg kings were also in control of the Holy Roman Empire. They resented what at the time was called the Spanish Netherlands for their economic independence, their periodic insubordination under Hapsburg rule, but also because the Dutch were Protestant. The 30 Years War began because the Spanish wanted to impose new taxes and more direct rule tinged with Catholic dogma on the Dutch to exploit their economic prosperity. When the Dutch resisted because they feared for their economic stability and their religious freedom (which the Hapsburgs as avid Catholics resented), the Spanish sent an army to quash the rebellion. The Dutch called upon other Protestant principalities/kingdoms through Europe to support their cause while the Spanish did the same for Catholic kingdoms. The result was 30 years of bloody war where Protestants and Catholics killed each other with impunity.

 

Yet the Hapsburgs wanted control of the Dutch Netherlands because they wanted the economic/political benefit of that control just as much as they wanted to quash Protestantism. They absolutely felt Protestants were heretics and held a deep, fervent belief that suppressing them was religiously correct. Still, that was not their only motivation for acting; if it was, they would have actively worked to suppress the Dutch decades earlier. Second, many belligerents on both sides of the conflict hired mercenaries to fight for them who were motivated by pay, not by religion. In fact, when these mercenaries were not paid on time (which happened a lot as the war progressed because states grew increasingly unable to pay their war expenses), they would rove about the countryside pillaging and burning villages while raping, assaulting, and/or murdering civilians with little care or concern for whether the people they tortured were Protestant or Catholic. That violence/destruction was so bad, in fact, that some historians argue it set back central Europe for a century. Third, the British got involved in the war at one point because they held a true desire to defend Protestantism but also because they had a rich trading relationship with the Dutch that they were dedicated to protecting. Still, they eventually withdrew from the war, despite the mediocre standing of the Protestant cause at the time, because they realized it was a financial and political quagmire (not because they developed some emergent ambivalence towards Protestantism). And finally, the French (a Catholic state only second to the Spanish in their adherence to Catholic doctrine) largely fought with the Protestants against the Catholic coalition, not because they wanted to support Protestantism but because they wanted to undercut the power, prestige, and wealth of the Spanish monarchy. In this they succeeded.

The Crusades were complex in the exact same manner: the Byzantines were often involved in the Crusades for political and military reasons, yet religion wasn't a strong motivator in most instances because their empire was already ethnically and religiously diverse. In more than one instance, the European Crusaders even accused the Byzantines of working with, or at least parlaying with, different Islamic forces in the Levant region. Sometimes they actually were.

But at the same time, in 1095 the Byzantines appealed to the Catholic Church for assistance against encroachments into their territory in Asia Minor despite the worsening relationship between the Eastern and Western Christians at the time. Although ties between the two sects were rather problematic by the end of the 11th century, the Byzantines used their religious unity (such as it was) to ask for help. Pope Urban II then appealed to Europeans to get involved in the Crusades on almost entirely religious grounds, sparking a widespread swelling of support even the Vatican did not expect or anticipate. An entire army of peasants then went on Crusade in the name of God and the Christian Church to "liberate" the Holy Land, however poorly this turned out, and then were followed by European nobles motivated in part by religion as well.

Yet some members of the "Prince's" Crusading army were Normans, and to say the least, the relationship between Normans and the Byzantines was quite poor at the time; violently fighting over southern Italy and Sicily for decades before Urban's call to arms might have had something to do with that. This is to say nothing of how the various Crusading armies, both peasant and prince, raided the lands around Constantinople when they showed up to move on to Asia Minor, which it can easily be said Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos was not happy about. This is definitely why, once the Crusading army pushed the city of Nicaea in Asia Minor to surrender in June 1097, the Byzantines secretly worked around their "allies" to take possession of the city instead, thereby "betraying" the Crusaders (at least in their eyes). It's no coincidence that this betrayal was mentioned more than once when Europeans besieged and then sacked Constantinople on the Fourth Crusade (1202 - 1204).

Fast forward through the months of factional infighting, violence, high casualties, deprivation, starvation, and perhaps even cannibalism that characterized the time between the Crusading army leaving Constantinople by the spring of 1097 and the European capturing Jerusalem in July 1099, none of that would have ended with the establishment of the Latin States in the eastern Mediterranean without true ideological/religious belief. These mixed motivations continued on through to the end of the Crusading era, giving us historical figures like King Philip II of France, who was clearly motivated to go on Crusade by personal gain; King Richard I of England, who was clearly motivated to go on Crusade at least in large part by the promise of military glory; and King Louis IX of France, who was so strongly motivated by religious devotion and the dream of regaining the Holy Land that he went on both the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, died while on crusade, and was venerated as a saint thereafter.

None of this even covers the various Islamic forces involved in the Crusades, who were far more often than not during the Crusading era not united against the Christian threat they faced. Many historians even argue that at least to some degree, this is why the Crusader states existed as long as they did. For example, when the Crusading army reached the Levant region into 1098, the Shia Islamic Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt hoped strongly that the Crusaders would wipe out the Sunni Islamic Seljuks. They even reached out to the Crusading army and offered an alliance to do just that. If that wasn't enough, one of the greatest Islamic leaders in the Crusading era, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, aka Saladin, began his rise through the Fatimid political system to achieve political power, only undergoing a religious conversion once he began taking on Crusader armies head to head. Meanwhile, local Islamic inhabitants of the Crusader states interacted with Christians every day: they farmed land controlled by Christian lords; they owned markets or stores Christian inhabitants and pilgrims alike shopped at; they bought trade goods imported into the region by Christian traders; they sometimes served as paid soldiers for Crusading military orders (called turcopoles); and some even intermarried with Christian families (although how often that happened is a matter of debate). Thus the Crusades from the Islamic perspective were at times political, at times economic, and at times religious with all of those overlapping as much as they didn't.

Overall then, like the 30 Years War, there were indeed complex non-religious reasons that people engaged in the Crusades. But there were also complex and intense religious motivations as well; one does not negate the other. So while we may not like the idea that Christians waged at times very violent warfare in the past in the name of Christianity, and we certainly might not support that manner of religious belief today, the records are clear on this point. Wanting that not to be the case doesn't make it not so.

It's likewise clear that cleanly classifying wars as religiously or conversely not religiously motivated is a gross oversimplification of history. Humans just aren't that simple and neither are the wars they fight. The number of wars that have been started because of and then fought entirely due to religious conflict between the belligerents mostly irrespective of other motivations is likely fairly small. But the number of wars that have been fought where religious identity has been a factor, whether big or small, in the complex dynamic between the belligerents, is likely quite large. After all, at the core of all wars are people and an indelible aspects of human identity is religion; even the rejection of religion by some in the modern world is a religion in a way, and also a function of religion's role in shaping human identity. Thus religious motivations for war and/or in war cannot be cleanly and neatly parsed from politics, economics, society, or culture any more than war can be separated from the people who have waged it.