Intellectual revitalization is the real significance of the Crusades.

The Real Significance of the Crusades

by David Byrne

Sometimes the story goes like this: The Catholic Church attacked the Holy Land in 1095 and relations between Christians and Muslims have been poisoned ever since. This simplistic interpretation is not only false, it misses the real significance of the Crusades. They reacquainted Europe with her past, helped bring her out of the so-called Dark Ages and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history, the High Middle Ages, which laid the foundation for transforming epochs like the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. They also led to the thought of one of Catholicism’s greatest philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas.

It is well known in the seventh and eighth centuries Muslim armies swept across the Middle East, North Africa and even into Spain. By 750 AD, this Muslim empire replaced the Roman Empire as the dominant power in this region of the world. But what is less well-know is how the Muslims embraced the Greco-Roman culture they encountered. Conquest brings disparate civilizations together. Specifically, conquering Alexandria, Egypt, once the intellectual center of Hellenistic Greece, meant Muslim intellectuals had broad access to the greatest works of the classical world. They studied Hippocrates and Galen, translated them into Arabic, provoking advances in Muslin medicine. They translated Pythagoras and Euclid, leading to progress in Muslim math. Algebra and Algorithm are Muslim words, deriving from the titles of the works of one of Islam’s great mathematicians, Muhammad in Musa al-Khwarizmi, the greatest Muslim mathematician of the Middle Ages. They preserved the writings of Archimedes and Ptolemy, the father of map-making. The title of his famous work, The Almagest, comes from the Arabic word al-majesti.

The most important thinker Arabs encountered was Aristotle. Not all of Aristotle’s works were lost to the West after the fall of Rome, but many were. Most importantly his cosmology had fallen out of favor in the Christian West. Thanks to St. Augustine, Plato remained a highly reputable pagan philosopher, certainly more so in Church eyes than Aristotle because Plato believed in the immortality of the soul and posited the existence of an eternal, perfect realm, or idea. Aristotle loved the material world too much for most Church Fathers. He even believed in an infinite world without a creator. But he was beloved by Muslims, earning titles like The Wise Man and First Teacher. His scientific and empirical thought was transfused across the Muslim Empire in Arabic translations by Muslim philosophers like al-Kindi and al-Farabi, or as the Muslims called him, The Second Teacher. A Golden Age in Muslim intellectual history bloomed. By the turn of the first millennium, Muslim medicine, Muslim science and Muslim mathematics were the most advanced in the world.

The Crusades (and the accompanying Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula) changed all of this. For two hundred years, Christian soldiers voyaged eastward and into Spain, ostensibly attempting to free these areas from Muslim control, but in reality, opening Christian Europe to Muslim works. Or more precisely, they reacquainted Europe with her own culture heritage. After Muslim preservation, the works described above were translated from Arabic into the dominant European language, now Latin. Literally thousands of manuscripts appeared, quite an impressive number before the printing press. Abelard of Bath (b.1075), for example, completed translations of al-Khwarizmi and Euclid from Arabic into Latin. Gerard of Cremona (b.1114) translated dozens of works, including Ptolemy’sAlgamest. And Averroes (b. 1126) remains an important figure in the history of Western thought for his popularization of Aristotle. This was a turning point in Western intellectual history because it ignited what historians have labeled as a “Twelve Century Renaissance” during which time the works of the above authors were recovered, translated and studied. It may not be as famous as the subsequent fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance centered in Florence, Italy, but it laid the foundation for the latter. Europe was about to become a center for science, math and philosophy once again.

Specific examples include Robert Grosseteste (b.1175), Roger Bacon (b.1214) (not too be confused with Francis Bacon) and Leonardo Fibonacci (b.1170). Grosseteste was an Oxford don who trained Franciscans in the rigors of university theology. Deeply influenced by Aristotle, Grosseteste studied math, astronomy, and light. Furthermore, he may have been the first Christian European to engage in serious experimentation in six hundred years. His most famous disciple was Bacon, a Franciscan himself. He experimented with gunpowder, explained how it should be manufactured and noted its potential on the battlefield. Bacon believed knowledge of nature promoted technological development, five centuries before the Scientific and subsequent Industrial Revolution. He and Grosseteste are the fathers of the English scientific tradition that culminated in the works of Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

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