The Last Crusade: A United Front Between Christian and Muslim

Orland Figes, a great historian of Russian history, has a new book (reviewed in The Economist) about the Crimean War subtitled 'The Last Crusade'.

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Just like the more famous Crusades, the tale entails armies on both sides moved by a religious zeal and a battle on territory and on which manner of divinity will rule a historic and momentous city.

But unlike the eastern Crusades, the tale is not centered around Jerusalem, nor is it simply Christianity v. Islam or is it eastern.

Instead the Crimean war takes place in eastern European (the birth place of Western civilization), the prize is Constantinople or Istanbul, and the war offers a amusing united front between Muslims and Christians on one hand against the Russians Orthodox Christians.

Russo-Turkish rivalry have a long history. But the Crimean war took on a larger front because Britain and France began to worry about Russian encroachment against the Ottoman Empire. The Tsars of Russian considered themselves the last remaining Christian empire and they practices a form of Christianity - Russian Orthodox - considered nearly pagan by the Anglican Church in England and heresy under French Catholicism. Both nations worried about Russian expansion into Europe and, in particular, a Russian takeover of the ancient capital of the Byzantine empire Constantinople. “The Russians shall not have Constantinople,” went an English song of the era.

Hence the alliance between the Islamic Ottoman empire and the British and French Christian nations was born. And all sides were motivated by religion:

How did the various players in this strange religious game explain themselves to their own pious subjects? For the theocracies of Russia and Turkey, and their God-fearing soldiers, things were fairly straightforward: they were fighting, respectively, for Christianity and Islam.

It was harder, you might think, for the Church of England and the Catholic establishment in France to explain their support of the caliphate. In fact, they found it easy enough to construct the necessary arguments. First, British and French clerics demonised Russian Orthodoxy as a semi-pagan creed. Second, they maintained that in some peculiar way the Ottoman empire was more friendly to its Christian subjects than the tsar was. (The Ottomans tolerated Protestant missionaries, so long as the evangelisers limited their search for souls to Orthodox Christians.)

In the spring of 1854, as the Crimean fighting began in earnest, an Anglican cleric declared that Russian Orthodoxy was as “impure, demoralising, and intolerant as popery itself”. What could be more natural, then, than to team up with Islam and popery to cleanse that terrible impurity? A French newspaper, meanwhile, gave warning that the Russians represented a special menace to all Catholics because “they hope to convert us to their heresy”.

The relationship was not always prefect after then, but as The Economist notes:

It is a complex tale, told vividly by Mr Figes. Perhaps it should serve as a healthy cold shower for any modern civilisational warrior who sets out to present the course of history as a simple tug-of-war between Christianity and Islam.