Holy Warriors (56 page)

One visitor to these latter rooms gave voice to this sense of continuity: “We there find again, after an interval of 500 years, the French nation fertilising with its blood the burning plains studded with the tents of Islam. These are the heirs of Charles Martel, Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert Guiscard and Philip Augustus, resuming the unfinished labours of their ancestors. Missionaries and warriors, they every day extend the boundaries of Christendom.”
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The rooms also displayed the coats of arms of families with crusading ancestors. When the gallery opened 316 arms were shown, but so great was the perceived importance of such a heritage that protests from
families not included caused it to close within a year. People “found” documents attesting to their lineage and in 1843 the rooms reopened with a further sixty-two families represented. In fact, a trio of master forgers had set up a lucrative business to generate fully convincing “medieval” charters, often complete with seals, to sate the demands of those desperate to be honored. The full extent of these forgeries was only revealed in 1956, understandably a matter of genuine dismay to some of the surviving families.
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While the July Monarchy fell in 1848, the impetus provided by Louis-Philippe and his Bourbonist predecessor, Charles X, caused crusading to remain prominent in the mind-set of French efforts overseas for decades to come.

As the Ottoman Empire slid into decay during the nineteenth century, so French involvement in the Middle East intensified; one consequence of this was an increased standing for the various Christian communities across the region, a change in the status quo that provoked serious discontent among the Muslims.
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In the summer of 1860 violence engulfed eastern Lebanon and an estimated eleven thousand Christians were killed. By July the trouble had extended to Damascus and a mob tore through the Christian quarter pillaging, raping, and killing the inhabitants. One eyewitness wrote of seeing hundreds of dogs who had died of a surfeit of human flesh; the district, which included churches, a monastery, and consulates, was utterly devastated. A writer in
Le Correspondant
suggested that this had been part of a Muslim conspiracy that planned to “exterminate all Christians” and that it was necessary for “a new crusade of Christendom and civilisation” (by which he largely meant the French) to set up an independent Christian state in the region; a proposal that bears an uncanny resemblance to the boundaries of the modern state of the Lebanon.
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Napoleon III dispatched a French fleet to fight the Ottomans and as they set out he urged the men to prove themselves “worthy descendants of those heroes who had gloriously carried the banner of Christ to those lands.”
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Several pamphlets connected the medieval and modern periods; one compared the current pope, Pius IX, to Urban II and another called for a new crusade.
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While little came of this “crusade,” Ottoman rule in Syria finally collapsed in 1918. The next two years saw a short-lived Arab government before the League of Nations mandated French rule. Paul Pic, professor of law at the University of Lyons, regarded Syria as “a natural extension of France,” a view shared by many of his countrymen.
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Historians enthusiastically reinforced
this sense of national pride and placed the contemporary occupation of the area in a continuum with their medieval territories in the Levant; in 1929 the historian Jean Longnon wrote that “The name of Frank has remained a symbol of nobility, courage and generosity . . . and if our country has been called on to receive the protectorate of Syria, it is the result of that influence.”
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This proud memory of the medieval past effectively reinforced and recapitulated the essence of mid-nineteenth-century nationalist rhetoric to produce a positive perception of the crusading period.

At the same time as the French invasions of Algeria the notion of crusading became visible in another nationalist movement, although on this occasion the focus was inward-looking: namely the effort to create a united Italy. A leading figure among the democratic patriots was Giuseppe Mazzini, who derived huge inspiration from Francesco Hayez’s painting
Peter the Hermit Preaches the Crusade
, first exhibited to great acclaim in 1829.
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Mazzini was attracted to the alluring combination of religion and politics represented by crusading and he used it as a symbol or concept to draw people together in his bid for progress. He wrote that the picture showed everyone “driven on by a single, true and binding force, the thought that pervades each mind: ‘God wills it, God wills it.’ . . . Unity is felt here without being seen.”
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His Young Italy group, a secret society (albeit one with fifty thousand members), had an overt religious dimension: God desired Italy to become unified and independent, and if believers had to sacrifice their lives in the holy struggle, then so be it. This cause would have a national, ethical faith, rather than a religion channeled through the papacy—a particularly radical concept in the homeland of Saint Peter’s Church.
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Mazzini’s planned insurrections failed miserably and in 1837 he was forced to go into exile in London; eventually, however, he returned to Italy to play a part in the unification process and he continued to use the image of the crusade in his calls for liberty, nationalism, and, eventually, internationalism.
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Mazzini was not the only nationalist to invoke the medieval past in Italy. In 1848, during an attempt to drive out the ruling Austrians and to secure the liberation of Italy, King Carlo Alberto launched a halfhearted invasion of Lombardy. Other Italian rulers joined his campaign and Pope Pius IX, who had been reluctant to fight another Catholic country, dispatched an expeditionary force led by General Giovanni Durando. In his determination to push Pius into outright support for the nationalist cause, Durando hoped to convince the public that his undertaking had complete papal—
and therefore divine—sanction. His men advanced dressed as crusaders, complete with crosses sewn on their uniforms; he also issued a strident press release: “Soldiers! . . . The Holy Father has blessed your swords, which, united now with those of Carlo Alberto, must move in concord to annihilate the enemies of God, the enemies of Italy, and those who have insulted Pius IX . . . such a war of civilisation against barbarism is accordingly not just a national war but also a supremely Christian one. . . . Let our battle cry be: God wills it!” Pius was, predictably, furious at this arrogation of his authority; he promptly repudiated the war and reminded everyone that he was the head of all Christendom and not just Italy alone.
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In this century of the birth of nations another new arrival, in 1831, was the state of Belgium. Ideas of crusading played little part in its actual formation but as the Belgians began to establish a sense of the past they seized upon Godfrey of Bouillon, the first ruler of Jerusalem, and a man whose family hailed from the Ardennes region (although some believe that he was born in Boulogne, which means that he can be a French hero as well). Godfrey was also pious (and Catholic, of course), fearless and successful, and his fame as the conqueror of Jerusalem had assured him of a place in history and literature throughout the ages; the huge equestrian statue standing in the Place de Brussels demonstrates Godfrey’s centrality to this nineteenth-century sense of self.
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As we saw earlier, the Iberian Peninsula had a long and ultimately successful history of crusading. This, coupled with the immense residual authority of the Catholic Church, meant crusading ideas were often revived at times of turbulence and crisis. Napoleon’s invasion of 1808 and his subsequent disestablishment of the Catholic Church provoked huge resistance from traditionalists.
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One royal polemicist compared Napoleon to Sultan Mehmet II and some pressmen claimed that the war with the French was as holy as the struggle against the Prophet Muhammad. Ironically, therefore, the French, the nation with the greatest crusading heritage, became equivalent to Muslims in the developing struggle to preserve Spanish identity.

Later in the century the restored monarchy under Don Carlos emphasized the country’s Catholic past and laid heavy stress upon the
reconquista
. The eleventh-century warrior El Cid was frequently invoked as a defender of Spain and Christianity. The fact that El Cid was a hired hand who sometimes fought for Muslim paymasters and that Christian Spain had several rival monarchs during his lifetime was irrelevant. From the early twelfth
century the legend of El Cid had developed to satisfy the need for a national Christian hero.
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In 1859–60 the Spanish attempted to emulate the French by conquering part of North Africa, in this case, Morocco. While some disliked giving the campaign a religious edge, many pressmen enthusiastically revived past glories and called upon the spirit of their ancestors who had made “the Moorish multitude bow before the sacred sign of the cross and bite the dust.” Several poets and dramatists also made explicit references to earlier crusaders. The Spaniards’ heavy losses in Morocco and the subsequent decline of their overseas empire began to limit their enthusiasm for crusading imagery, but in 1921 the clergy described the war in North Africa as a crusade and two years later, King Alfonso XIII made a speech at the Vatican in which he offered to lead a new crusade if the pope was to call one.
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These were, however, relatively isolated instances of such language and ideology but, as the tensions between traditionalists and the modern world reached breaking point, the early twentieth century saw one further opportunity to recall the medieval age.

In 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out and in their struggle against the Republican government the Catholic Church soon found common ground with the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco. As the conflict intensified the Catholic hierarchy formed a vital pillar in the rise and legitimization—at home and abroad—of Francoism. While his ideological appeal had many different dimensions there is little doubt that he enthusiastically engaged with the Church’s representation of himself and his cause as a holy crusade.
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In August 1936 a canon of Salamanca Cathedral gave a radio broadcast titled “The Lawfulness of the Armed Rising,” which concluded with a stirring call to arms: “Our war is holy. Our battle-cry that of the crusades: God wills it. Long live Catholic Spain.”
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On September 30 the bishop of Salamanca built upon a recently issued papal endorsement for the nationalists and published a text—approved by Franco himself—that presented the rebel cause as “a crusade against communism to save religion, the fatherland and the family.”
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Within weeks the archbishop of Toledo had made the same point, again calling the war a crusade and providing a further moral buttress for Franco’s party. Republican attacks on religious institutions gave the idea of fighting to save the Church a special currency because crusading tapped into a deep well of historical memory as well as giving a moral imperative to the rebels’ actions. Unlike a medieval crusade, spiritual rewards were not on offer simply for participation, although death
in the Nationalist army was treated as martyrdom and the fallen were often memorialized as crusaders.

Franco was careful—in contrast to his German and Italian allies—not to submit the Church to the authority of the state and thereby to jeopardize the backing of an institution so valuable to his fight and so vital to his self-image. In November 1937 he spoke to a French journalist about contemporary matters: “our war is not a civil war . . . but a crusade . . . we who fight, whether Christian or Muslim, are soldiers of God.”
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The caveat about Christians and Muslims is an interesting point. In spite of his identification as a crusader Franco saw no irony in employing thousands of Moroccan Muslims in his forces and it was these men who perpetrated many of the worst excesses of the war. The next month, the ceremonial swearing in of the first Consejo Nacional was an occasion heavy with historical symbolism.
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The venue was the medieval monastery of Santa María de Real de las Huelgas, near Burgos. The fifty incoming committee members swore loyalty to Franco in front of a statue of Christ and the battle standard from Las Navas de Tolosa—an immensely potent symbol of Spanish crusading success—which, as we saw earlier, had proved a seminal moment in the advance of medieval Spain.

In April 1940, arguably at the height of his powers, and in celebration of the first anniversary of his victory in the Civil War, Franco presided over the construction of a colossal monument to dead Nationalists: the
Valley of the Fallen
. Once again his words reveal religious and moral justification as being at, or near, the top of his thoughts: “The dimension of our Crusade, the heroic sacrifices involved in the victory and the far-reaching significance this epic has for the future of Spain cannot be commemorated by a simple monument.”
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The general himself was also depicted as a crusader in a mural entitled
Franco: Victor of the Crusade
placed in the Military Historical Archive in Madrid.

In the aftermath of World War II Franco’s ambitions had to be less grandiose although in 1955, as he unveiled a statue of El Cid at Burgos (the region where El Cid had grown up and where his tomb lies), he reflected on his own achievements and his place in history. He argued that “the great service of our Crusade, the virtue of our
movimiento
is to have awakened an awareness of what we were, of what we are and what we can be.” He presented El Cid as the symbol of a new Spain: “in him is enshrined all the mystery
of the great Spanish epics: service in noble undertakings; duty as a norm; struggle in the service of the true God.” Thus, implicitly, he set out both his own definition of a crusade and offered himself as the modern-day Cid.
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