Apartheid

crusaders destroyed, plundered and conquered whole towns, cities and countries, including
Ma’ara in Syria. After a protracted siege of their town, around 10,000 Arab and Turkish
inhabitants were massacred by the crusaders, despite previous assurances that their lives
would be spared. The Christian soldiers then proceeded to eat human meat, i.e. Muslim men,
women and children. Men and women were boiled. Children were barbequed on spits. It is
unknown if this was done only due to food shortage, but it appears that it was not. Ethnic
hatred also played a considerable role, so much so that one of the crusaders who participated
in the carnage, Albert d’Aix, a historian, implied that eating Arabs and Turks was in any event
preferable to eating dogs. Similarly, when the crusaders first conquered Jerusalem in 1099,
they killed every single Muslim and every single Jew in the city. Though they might have
been exaggerating slightly with the description, contemporary sources stated that there was no
street in the city in which one did not wade ankle-deep in blood, guts, hacked-off heads, limbs
and other body-parts after that conquest. (On this particular occasion Palestinian Christians
were spared, yet probably only inadvertently, as the Muslim and Jewish defenders had
expelled the indigenous Christians prior to the crusader onslaught, fearing that they might
betray their Arab brethren. There were no Christian Palestinians in the city for the crusaders to
massacre on this occasion.) 47
After the massacre, Muslims and Jews were legally forbidden from entering
Jerusalem. The Al-Aqsa Mosque; Islam’s third holiest site, was turned into a church and
warehouse for the Templars. Things stayed this way until Saladin’s forces liberated Jerusalem
88 years later. By 1243, fourteen years after having retaken the holy city, the Europeans
appear to have become more civilized, as they expelled all the Muslims from Jerusalem rather
than killing them all. However, they still expelled the Muslims in breach of the very treaty by
which they had regained the city from Muslim rule. 48
In fact they did something very similar to what Israel is doing in the same city today: a
slow but relentless, mainly bureaucratic, kind of ethnic cleansing. Again, Muslims are the
main victims, but Palestinian Christians and other non-Jews are also now being targeted.
The crusaders’ conquest of Bilbeis in Egypt in 1168 was followed by another
wholesale massacre of Muslim and Christian men, women and children, for no known reason.
Usually communities that put up resistance were massacred by the crusaders, but Bilbeis had
surrendered without a fight. Similarly, when the crusaders reconquered the Palestinian city of
Nablus in 1242, they killed many of the inhabitants, Muslim and Christian alike. The historian
of the Templars, Piers Paul Read, refers to James of Vitry, the Bishop of Acre, who reported
to the Pope that ‘…the indigenous Christians so loathed the Latins [the western Europeans in
Outremer] that they would rather be ruled by Muslims.’ Ethnicity thus seems to have been the
priority with regard to victimization, not religion. James, who was one of very few
missionaries among the crusaders, nevertheless wanted the crusade to continue. The reason
that there were so few missionaries seems to have been that Turks, Kurds and Arabs, whether
Muslims or Christians, as well as Jews, were mostly or always seen by the crusaders as
47 Maalouf: Der Heilige Krieg der Barbaren: Die Kreuzzüge aus der Sicht der Araber, 3 2003 (1983): 54f; 66ff.
One possible attempt at an excuse for the cannibalism would be that the crusaders might have heard from
Muslims that dogs are unclean, i.e. unedible to them like pigs, and believed them. But it seems a bit contrived to
me. Since the crusaders hated the Muslims so much, it appears far-fetched to assume that they would trust
Muslims as to what meat is edible. Secondly, Muslims would hardly have told them that human meat was fit for
consumtion.
48 Read: The Templars, 1999: 218. That civilizing process (in the most basic meaning of the term) had no doubt
been initiated by Saladin, the liberator of Jerusalem, who spared all the city’s inhabitants – even letting many of
them go rather than enslaving them – when he conquered it from Latin rule in 1187, after a bloody siege.
Furthermore, during Jerusalem’s second term as capital of a Roman Catholic kingdom, it was under conditions
by treaty between the Latins and the Muslims. Those conditions, previously demanded by Muslim negotiators,
included tolerance of Muslims and Jews. During this era, Cairo and Baghdad were the economic, financial, trade,
political, technological, cultural, and spiritual centers of the so-called ‘old’ world, and Europe was only part of
the periphery. As such, it received more from the center in terms of culture and technology than it gave back.
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