"CRUSADERS"
I've been reading a history of the Crusades lately, and one passage struck me as having reverberations of relevance:

The disillusion in Europe that followed the fiasco of the Second Crusade obliged the Latins in the Holy Land to reach the kind of accommodation with the infidel that would have seemed sacrilegious to the previous generation of crusaders. This was also the consequence of a process of cultural acclimatisation that had occurred over half a century of living in the East. The early crusaders had expected to encounter wild savages and depraved pagans in Syria and Palestine: but those who had remained in the Middle East had been obliged to recognise that the culture of Arab Palestine-- Muslim, Christian and Jewish-- was more evolved and sophisticated than at home.

Some had quickly adopted Eastern customs. Baldwin of Le Bourg, having married an Armenian wife, took to wearing an Eastern kaftan and dined squatting on a carpet; while the coins minted by Tancred showed him with the head-dress of an Arab...

Not only were the Franks softened by the style of life they encountered in Syria and Palestine; they were also obliged to reach a modus vivendi with the Muslims who remained a majority of the population. As long as they paid their taxes, the Frankish overlords were prepared to permit the Muslim communities to choose their own administration. As in the reconquered territories in Spain, there were insufficient Christian immigrants to replace the Muslims; it was therefore important for the fief-holders to persuade them to stay. A baron's wealth depended upon their prosperity. Nor did his principal revenue come from the land, as in Europe. 'The Holy Land was an urbanised area par excellence' and a baron's income came from rents on properties, tolls, licenses for public baths, oven and markets, port dues and levies on goods.

By the standards of the day-- and even by those of today-- these charges and exactions were not severe: the tax on a peasant's produce (terrage) was fixed at around one-third. Although the Muslims' first loyalty was always to Islam, there is evidence that they were not dissatisfied with Latin rule. The rule of Frankish overlords was in fact lighter than in the former period of Muslim domination. The Franks' respect for feudal law contrasted favorably with the capricious demands of Muslim princes. Certainly, Muslims were second-class citizens; they were forbidden to wear Frankish dress; but they had their own courts and officials. Conversion to Christianity brought with it full civil rights and led to assimilation into the Christian Syrian population. Among the Franks themselves there were no serfs, a fact that distinguished it from the feudal societies in western Europe. (Piers Paul Read, The Templars, Da Capo Press 1999, p. 128-9)

Though the analogy is sometimes made, the American war in Iraq is very different from the Crusades. The Crusaders' objective was to occupy the land (to protect their holy sites and win salvation), or perhaps to convert the locals to Christianity, which they did not want; we don't want the land (our intention to leave, and soon, has always been clear) and we're trying to convert them to democracy, which they do want. I have no intention to whitewash the Crusades, by the way: though there are many noble and chivalrous episodes in the history of the Crusades (Richard the Lionheart was recognized as an admirable specimen of the Crusader species even by his enemy Saladin), there are too many cases of indiscriminate slaughter, from the massacre of the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem when they first took Jerusalem on 13 July 1099, to the gory sack of fellow-Christian Byzantium during the Fourth Crusade of 1204. And yet the Crusades were a mind-opening experience for the Europeans. Iraq has broadened the horizons of a lot of Americans, particularly but not only those who fought in Iraq, and will continue to be a fruitful source of inspiring stories, stimulus to difficult and fascinating thoughts, and window on a different world-- provided we draw the right conclusions.

By the way, given my evangelical enthusiasm for Operation Iraqi Freedom, some may be wanting to ask: "Why don't you join the army yourself, if you love it so much?" The answer: I want to. And I went in and talked to Sargeant Pressley of the DC Office about joining the Reserves last spring. But then the World Bank sent me on a mission to Africa, which served as an opportunity to invite my (Russian) ex-fiancee to visit and give her the second chance she had asked me for. We're getting married now, and I figure she should have a say in it. So I've promised not to join the Reserves without her permission... and in the meantime, to "keep begging." (If Kerry's elected, though, my freedom-fighting zeal will start to seem a bit obsolete...)