The Montreal lawyer and director of Opus Dei’s Riverview Centre told a recent Theology on Tap session in Ottawa that while some of the stereotypes and generalizations are true, they are full of exaggerations, especially the idea the church condoned conversions by force.

“The church never condoned or authorized conversion by force,” Schratz told the more than 60 people jammed into an Ottawa tavern. “In that sense the Crusades and jihad are very different.”

Schratz noted that while Jews and Christians were allowed to practise their religion under Muslim domination, pagans were “forced to convert or die.”

Today the underlying piety of the crusaders is forgotten, Schratz said. Many of them were on a pilgrimage to pray in Jerusalem and take back the Holy Land from Muslim invaders.

Some of the impetus for the Crusades, however, arose internally from Christendom’s efforts to cope with recently converted Germanic tribes. Without an external enemy, they warred with their neighbours. In an effort to stop this fighting, the church enlisted knights in efforts to put under protection all unarmed people, such as travellers and pilgrims, giving rise to the notion of chivalry.

Then the church tried to limit the days wars could be fought. It prohibited fighting on Sundays, feast days and seasons such as Lent and Advent until there were only 80 days left for fighting in a year. “They still took advantage of those 80 days,” Schratz said.

Then Pope Urban II decided to have the fighters use their skills to win back the Holy Land for the church by launching the First Crusade in 1095. Schratz described it as a military expedition, authorized by the pope and accompanied by various spiritual indulgences.

After that first and most successful crusade, for the next 200 years, waves of knights and foot soldiers formed groups and went to the Holy Land in what amounted to eight or more crusades over that time period.

There were no nation states then, so the pope was both a political head and a spiritual head. “If the Muslims were to take over a territory, the spiritual welfare of his subjects could be in danger,” Schratz said.

Islam had inflicted massive defeats on Byzantium and the Eastern Emperor was calling for help. The Turks were harassing pilgrims, even robbing and killing them. The earliest churches in the Middle East had been taken by Muslims. Many of the lands under Muslim domination had majority Christian populations. The goal of the Crusades was to free them from the Muslim yoke.

Unfortunately, while on their way to Jerusalem, the first wave of rag tag soldiers attacked Jewish settlements. That is one of the sad but true facts of the Crusades, Schratz said. The numbers of people killed, however, has been greatly exaggerated. Some accounts say that up to 10,000 Jews were killed, but a Jewish historian who did a thorough study 15 years ago said the number was more likely in the several hundreds, Schratz said. The same soldiers who massacred the Jews were in turn quickly massacred by the Muslims. When the next wave of knights and foot soldiers came, they were able to take back several cities as well as Jerusalem.

Urban viewed the Crusades as a holy war, taking the concept beyond the just war tradition worked out by St. Augustine. In the just war model, war was still seen as tainted. The Crusades were viewed as a pilgrimage that included fighting to get to pray at the Holy Sepulchre. “It was a way to serve the church by striking a blow for Christendom.”

In addition to the pogroms against Jews, the Crusades dark episodes include the sacking of Jerusalem and Constantinople.

The sack of Jerusalem has been depicted as one of the history’s greatest massacres, but Schratz said the city had already been evacuated of its civilian population. The force attacking the city included about 1,200 knights and 10,000 foot soldiers. Schratz said there could not have been more than 4,000 soldiers defending the city. When cities were besieged, the inhabitants were offered a chance to surrender. If they refused, they were customarily slaughtered when the city fell because their defensive position gave them such a good opportunity to inflict casualties.

“It was violent and terrible, but it was one of the rules of war,” Schratz said, noting that all sides engaged in this practice.

The sack of Constantinople, however, was the big abuse of the Crusades, an atrocity that sealed the schism between the East and West. The sacking was not authorized by the church, however, but occurred because of political arrangements with the Venetians who had agreed to transport crusaders. “The Pope threatened to excommunicate them for fighting other Christians,” Schratz said.

Schratz said another false view of the Crusades is that mostly younger sons who weren’t going to inherit any land took part, and they did so mostly for the plunder. Schratz found just the opposite. Often it was older sons who went, even mortgaging their land to do so. Many lost their lives. Motives were mixed, but in most cases the primary motive was piety.

After the successful first crusade, subsequent efforts were “lamentable failures” because the Muslims were now united, Schratz said. The aim was not conversion of Muslims or their extermination, but to wrest political control of the territories from them.