The First Crusade is, undoubtedly, one of the most influential and pivotal events to occur within recorded history. The effects it had and still has on society and culture can be seen even in modernity, one thousand years later, with tensions between the Catholics and Muslims still boiling. Since we are still living in a world that experiences the aftershocks of these dark days, it is important that we understand both what the crusades are, and what the crusades are not. After all, the way it was perceived by Muslims is, understandably, not comparable to the Catholics; it was not a matter of knights, valor, and kingship. For Islam, it was not a crusade. For Islam, it was war.

The First Crusade was a one-sided historical event. It exists, for the most part, in writings mainly from the perspective of the Catholics. Contemporary accounts are rather rare from a Muslim point of view. That being said, it is not as though we lack any resources whatsoever. Running alongside the quite famous and historic record of the First Crusade written by Fulcher de Chartres are the writings of Ibn Al-Athir, an Arabic historian of renown. This paper will begin, however, by looking at the former rather than the latter. After all, much of society is far more accustomed to the Westernized Christian view.

The early stages of Fulcher de Chartres accounting of this event, for the most part, set the stage. In other words, he provides us with ample historical context surrounding the council that Pope Urban II called for. In short, according to Fulcher, Muslims had invaded certain parts of the Eastern Christian, like modern-day Turkey, and were engaged in acts that involved those citizens being “tormented… secretly put to death” (Geary 353). Moreover, these Muslim forces also violated holy places, monasteries, and villas (353). This would serve as the impetus for Urban’s call to council, one where he gives a speech that denounces the Muslims and gives power to the Christians. In reading Fulcher’s account, it is rather plain to see that much of Urban’s words are an excuse to further Church power. This can be seen in lines such as “Keep the church in all its ranks, entirely free from secular power” (354). After establishing affirmations of Church rule Urban would go on to then affirm the First Crusade, saying: “you have promised Him to keep peace”, “If you allow them to continue much longer they will conquer God’s faithful…”, “[I] urge men of all ranks… to hasten to exterminate this vile race”, “For all those going thither there will be remission of sins”, and “what a disgrace if a race so despicable, degenerate, and enslaved by demons should thus overcome people endowed with faith in Almighty God” (354).

Between the way the First Crusade was framed, as given by Fulcher de Chartres’s account, the writer of The Song of Roland has a justifiable claim as to why his work romanticizes the crusades as it does. In fact, it is not surprising that all Christians thought the crusades were great — Pope Urban equipped civilians with rage-tinted glasses. This explains, therefore, the heroism and valor present throughout the entirety of The Song of Roland, even if the book is fiction. Fiction is inextricably linked to the nonfictional world around us and it often reflects personal views that can be seen in society. It is much easier to see the links between events when looking back upon the history of old, so qualifying The Song of Roland within its time period is a task as simple as saying “here is the context; the context gestated this book.” In other words, we can use Fulcher de Chartres’s writings on the speech given by Pope Urban as a peeping-hole into the zeitgeist of the time. That begs the question, though, of what that zeitgeist looked like from the other side. Sure, we have a product of this social change and the impetus for what brought it about, but how did that affect a world thousands of miles away?

Ibn Al-Athir, as mentioned, is perhaps the greatest pre-modern Muslim historian. In his prolific and much-cited text Al-Kamil fi’l-ta’rikh or, The Complete History, Al-Athir writes a sometimes humorous though otherwise serious account of these events. He discloses the fact that it was the Franks who broke their treaty with the lands of Ifriqiya, and that the siege on Konya lasted nine-months due to the clear-minded guidance of their leaders. This paints a different picture than what we might find in The Song of Roland, as in that text the Muslims are little more than mindless drones. Moreover, through the lens of Al-Athir we get told that the Franks pillaged their cities for weeks (372) and took many of their possessions. It is, in a sense, historically ironic that the very thing Pope Urban decried the Muslims for doing was undertaken by the Christians (though I would imagine him to have some twisted justification for it all). As the events of the First Crusade are accounted to us, we learn more about the social structure of the Muslims at the time and how various governmental factors led to the fall of Jerusalem.

Though Ibn Al-Athir’s historical account of the crusades does not run directly counter to Fulcher’s (as there was no way he could have read such a text), it does present a humanity inherent on the other side that Pope Urban conveniently left out. In relation to The Song of Roland, Al-Athir presents a world with valor from the Muslims. Again, discounting the notion that Muslims are just vicious barbarians. You could just as easily have told an epic story about a nomadic Bedouin knight from Jerusalem who defended against hordes of Christians. If nothing else, the takeaway from this analysis should be that history is never a unilateral undertaking. Things do not unfold with only one story to be told and multiple perspectives must be looked at before we can truly place history within its contextual locale.