9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
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Handbook of the Crusades
Gerusalamme Liberata, Torquato Tasso, translated by Anthony M Esolen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. pp491
In a well-publicised slip of the tongue last fall, George W Bush declared a crusade against Osama bin Laden. On Sunday, 16 September, speaking from Camp David, the presidential retreat, he declared: "We will rid the world of the evildoers," and warned the American people that: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." The liberal media in Europe were understandably horrified, and piously suggested that Mr Bush's history was faulty and that his vocabulary was in bad taste; within 48 hours, Bush had retracted the statement and publicly apologised.
Bush wasn't alone in his sentiments. The Los Angeles Times on Friday 14 September had insisted, "The United States must respond to Tuesday's evil not with one-time retaliatory actions but with a sustained, long-term crusade against terrorism." This moral vocabulary of "evil" and "crusade" is the common currency of America's response; it is also shared with Osama bin Laden himself, who issued a statement through the Al-Jazeera television network on Monday 24 September mocking "the new Christian-Jewish crusade led by the big crusader Bush under the flag of the cross" and replying, "We are steadfast on the path of jihad for the sake of Allah."
Why is this one word so pointed, so problematic? American daily life is filled with Christian reference. Since 1955, "In God We Trust" has been printed on all American currency, and American schoolchildren start their day by reciting the pledge of allegiance, which invokes "one nation under God." But the president and the liberal consensus shied away from the term crusade like it was an obscenity. The spectre that the phrase conjures is of course western Christianity's 11th and 12th-century attempts to reconquer the Holy Land; and the classic poetic account of that crusade, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, has recently been retranslated by an American academic press. Tasso's epic poem is the handbook of Christian crusade, and Anthony Esolen's wonderful new translation is not ashamed of the awful weight that word still carries.
Tasso completed the epic poem in 1575. At a time when European Christianity was torn apart by fighting between rival denominations -- Catholic, Huguenot, Anglican -- Gerusalemme Liberata describes a strong, unified Christian army; even as the Ottoman Empire was encroaching on the borders of the Europe -- the Turks had taken Constantinople in 1453, and were to besiege Vienna in 1683 -- the poem imagines a mighty victory over the Muslim infidel.
Christianity, in Tasso's telling, is an unstoppable force. The poem opens in 1098, as the Christian crusaders have conquered Nicea and Antioch; Tripoli surrendered without a battle.
No army mustered by the pagan foe, no fortress wall engirt with deepest trench, no racing river or mountain capped with snow, no woods can halt their ever advancing march.
So too at times the king of rivers, Po,beyond all moderation swells so large he sweeps his banks and in destruction flows -- a flood so great that nothing dare oppose.
The Capture of Jerusalem in 1099
(Source: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)
The crusaders are, like the river, a force of nature; or rather, a force of God, for God underpins their successes. These soldiers are pilgrims, "pious ministers," and the victory is not their own doing. As the general, Godfrey of Bouillon, tells his men:
God's hand it was that led us to this place, snatched us from each entanglement and danger, laid mountains low and made the rivers dry, relieved the heat of summer, the ice of winter; that soothed the stormy billows of the sea and held a careful rein upon the weather; and thus we burnt the walls and breached the towers and slew and scattered all our enemies' powers.
Like all good epics, Gerusalemme Liberata begins in media res, in the middle of the crusade already under way; but the true starting point is the arrival of the archangel Gabriel, sent by God to tell Godfrey to move on to Jerusalem: "Godfrey, behold!" he declares. "This is the day,/ the time for waging war is opportune/ why should you tolerate the least delay/ to liberate Jerusalem cast down?"
With God behind them, these crusaders have no fear of death. "Which one of us would be reluctant to/ lie buried where the limbs of God have lain?" Godfrey asks his men: "We will die, envying no living man;/ we will die, but we shall not die in vain". A battle later, over the body of Dudon who was killed by the Muslim forces, he gives a brief funeral sermon: "In life you were a soldier, Christian, holy;/ so too in death. Now feast your eyes full of/ the God you hungered for, O happy soul;/ your good works seize the crown, and win the goal". In holy war, death is victory.
With this love of death comes a disregard for worldly prudence. Rinaldo, one of the Christian princes, tells his men as they arrive at the final battle: "Any risk is a sure thing to the brave!" The internal dynamics of crusade leave no space for worldly care: "One man proceeds with seasoned, slow advice;/ in us such prudence would be cowardice," the crusaders tell themselves. Before the walls of Jerusalem, Alete the Egyptian ambassador tells Godfrey and his men that the Egyptian army is on its way, and counsels the Christians to withdraw:
You are now at the peak of your ascent. Henceforth you should shy away from the chance of war, for if you win, your state gains in extent, true, but your glory can advance no more, while if you lose, you lose that government and all the honour that was yours before.
Only a fool would risk the great and sure to win the little and the insecure.
But Godfrey ignores his advice: the Christian soldiers know that there is no "chance of war" when the cause is divine, and when you are fighting for faith. Crusade is a zero-sum game, between perfection and prudence. Death and victory are both perfect, and morally equivalent.
This is the absolute logic of crusade. Holy war is unstoppable, certain, and sure of itself. It is also -- in Anthony Esolen's gripping translation -- deeply sexy. One of the many subplots and digressions which puncture Tasso's narrative is the relationship between Tancred, the Christ-like Italian prince, and the Persian warrioress Clorinda. At their first meeting he -- desperate with love -- offers his life to her: "now take your chance to kill me, take it!" he begs. "You want it easier still? I'll strip the restū / tear off this mail, and you can kill me naked". But Tancred is rescued, and survives to encounter her again later, when he fails to recognise her in her armour and kills her in a duel:
Into her lovely breast he thrusts the blade, drowns it, eagerly drinks her blood. Her stole beneath the cuirass, sweetly lined with gold, that held her breasts with light and tender pull, now fills with a warm stream.
War may be sexy, but sex and love are certainly not warlike; for crusade is a masculine occupation. Love interferes: "loving slavery", Tasso calls it, "intoxicating to the sense". "a pretty face and an insidious lie". In the fourth canto, Satan calls a council of hell which decides to send Armida -- "Her shapely breasts showed the uncovered snow/ that stirs and nourishes the fire of love" -- to seduce the Christians.
Holy war is unstoppable, certain, and sure of itself. Holy war is also bloody, and Esolen's descriptions of battle -- arms cut off, heads split open, streets filled with blood -- are never shy. In battle, "the blood ran and mingled with rain and hail/ and flowed in streams and made the road blush red"; later:
Horror and cruelty and struggle and fear ran wild. In various images you could see the true victor, Death, roam everywhere; and a lake welling up with dead men's blood.
In Jerusalem, "blood pools and swirls in a riverbed/ of bodies of the dying and the dead". Tasso is always aware of the loss and the bloodshed of war.
But the violence is given justification. When the Christians finally enter Jerusalem they embark on a terrible killing spree, culminating in the infamous massacre at the Temple of Solomon:
The town was now one general massacre, heaps and mountains of corpses...
There they make of the great house that was the house of God a bitter slaughter, bloody, miserable.
Justice of heaven! the more delayed, the heavier on that wicked race you fall!
From the depths of your providence you made sternness and wrath awake in the merciful, and the blasphemous pagan washed in his blood's rain the very temple he had made profane.
Its justification is not only theological, but also aesthetic. According to the logic of crusade, in the cause of God bloodshed is beautiful: "Amid this beauty horror is/ beautiful, and with fear comes a delight,/ and to the ear the sound is glad and fierce/ from the terrifying trumpets blaring bright". The bloodiness of holy war leads us directly to God.
The dynamic of crusade rests upon this odd dialectic between the worldly and the divine. War can be represented as sexy; but sex itself is a diversion, a distraction, and a weakness. Holy war takes place in the world, but it always refers outwards and upwards, to God. Esolen's gift to the poem is to capture this delicate negotiation: his language is bloody when it needs to be, but at other times it sings with the crisp certainty of faith. Even as it is bloody, martyrdom is relentlessly ascetic: "For all cities must die, kingdoms must die,/ and pomp be leveled to the grassy plain./ And we men take it ill that we must die,/ our minds are so insatiable and vain!" As the Christian crusaders enter Jerusalem, they look upwards and see the angels above them. Holy war is an act of piety. Outside Jerusalem, Peter the Hermit preaches to Godfrey:
Begin with heaven, let heaven direct your course, and first let your devotion publicly invoke the angels militant, and the saints, that by their aid we gain the victory. Let the priests go in holy robes, and sing suppliant prayers in pious harmony; instruct the common soldiers to bow low, you leaders, by the piety you show.
As an act of piety, war has its own moral and aesthetic rules. So even as the poem makes clear its rejection of Islamic doctrine -- "pagan faith is dubious and light,/ a fickle pledge" -- the Circassian warrior Argante is honoured for his valour in battle. Even as Tasso records how Tancred abuses the Muslim warriors as animals -- "You were brought up in a thieving Arab horde/ or some such other barbarous crew. Go flee/ the light, go to the woods to find your lair/ and with the other beasts be cruel there!" -- he also includes a description of the improper conduct of the French crusaders after battle: "They strip off sword and shield/ in their arrogant holiday". Tasso's sympathies are of course Christian, and the poem stands as an absolute statement of the crusading orthodoxy; but at the same time, its true subject is crusade. Gerusalemme Liberata lays out an anatomy of the internal dynamics of holy war.
Tasso reminds us that there is an awful, bloody honour in war. Had we forgotten? These days, martyrdom is back in vogue. In the last months, the Holy Land has again been the site of martyrdom as Palestinians -- women, children -- strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up in supermarkets and restaurants. The holy warriors who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center were acting on the same relentless logic of crusade as Tasso's Christian soldiers.
The west, with its post-Enlightenment exchange of liberal for religious principles, has forgotten this absolute logic. George W Bush invoked the rhetoric of crusade, but America's jihad is a weak version of its historical precedents and contemporary counterparts. When American newspapers call for a war on evil, and when America's prisoners are locked in cages like animals, that is the logic of crusade. But when US foreign policy is obsessed with exit strategies, and insists that no American soldier can be killed so military engagement is restricted to dropping bombs on farms and mosques, we are far from the ordered universe of Tasso, and Osama bin Laden.
Tasso presents a magical world, where right is divinely sanctioned Right, wrong is damned, and men can be heroes. In Esolen's translation, it's also a thrilling read. Of course, in truth the crusades were a catalogue of barbaric slaughter and failure. Godfrey was not only responsible for the massacre of almost the whole population of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, but also the deaths of thousands of Jews in the Rhineland at the start of his journey. The Christian victory was short-lived, as Tasso knew: in the late 12th century, a Muslim jihad under Saladin pushed the Christians out of the Holy Land. On 2 October 1187, after the battle of Hattin -- where the Christians, "with fires burning around them, perished, falling one after another from the hill", according to Tasso's Muslim counterpart, the 14th century historian al-Safadi -- Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin, who left all its inhabitants unharmed.
As always, the story reads better than the truth. Gerusalemme Liberata sets out the poetics of martyrdom, and its pious aesthetics are irresistible. The relentless logic of crusade elicits our emotional enthusiasm for causes we intellectually do not support. And for the story, Osama Bin Laden's crusading charisma is far more exciting than George W. Bush's pragmatic war on terror. No wonder Bush tried to call a crusade of his own.
Reviewed by Daniel Swift & Turi Munthe
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