Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust. [Islam: The Straight Path, p. 64]

Esposito is saying that, from the very start, Muslims and Christians had always lived in “peaceful coexistence,” until those vile European Christians decided to ruin it all with the First Crusade.

In reality, however, and as I discussed more thoroughly in that article, those “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” featured Islam violently conquering three-quarters of the Christian world, with all the usual massacres, mass enslavements, and the systematic destruction of churches — 30,000 of them in 1009 alone. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of Christians were slaughtered or enslaved by Muslims in the decades before Pope Urban II finally responded to cries for self-defense by launching the First Crusade.

Now, Esposito is offering even more outlandish lies.

Fresh Falsehoods

After mentioning how Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont, and how all the Christians in attendance eagerly embraced it, crying Deus Vult (meaning “God wills a crusade be launched”), Esposito writes,

This was ironic because, as one scholar has observed, “God may indeed have wished it, but there is certainly no evidence that the Christians of Jerusalem did, or that anything extraordinary was occurring to pilgrims there to prompt such a response at that moment in history.” (Islam: The Straight Path, p. 64).

The scholar that Esposito quotes is Francis E. Peters, from his essay, “Early Muslim Empires.” Clearly this academic is as delusional or dishonest as our Georgetown professor. To claim that “there is certainly no evidence that the Christians of Jerusalem” desired aid against their Muslim overlords who were terrorizing them, or that “nothing extraordinary was occurring to Christian pilgrims,” is itself extraordinary — extraordinarily fake.

Here, for example, is what William of Tyre (b. 1130), a contemporary chronicler, said of Christian experiences in Jerusalem right before the First Crusade:

[Jerusalem’s Christians] endured far greater troubles [under the Turks] so that they came to look back upon as light the woes which they had suffered under the yoke of the Egyptians and Persians …. Death threatened them every day and, what was worse than death, the fear of servitude, harsh and intolerable, ever lowered before them.

William is saying that, under the Turks, who conquered Jerusalem from the Egyptians in 1071, Christians suffered even worse abuses than under the Fatimids of Egypt and the Abbasids of Persia, which were bad enough. He proceeds to offer a typical example:

Even while the Christians were in the very act of celebrating the holy rites, the [Turkish] enemy would violently force an entrance into the churches which had been restored and preserved with such infinite difficulty [since being destroyed earlier under the Egyptians and Persians]. Utterly without reverence for the consecrated places, they sat upon the very altars and struck terror to the heart of the worshipers with their mad cries and whistlings. They overturned the chalices, trod underfoot the utensils devoted to the divine offices, broke the marble statues and showered blows and insults upon the clergy. The Lord Patriarch then in office was dragged from his seat by hair and beard and thrown to the ground … Again and again he was seized and thrust into prison without cause. Treatment fit only for the lowest slave was inflicted upon him in order to torture his people, who suffered with him as with a father.

Christians Felt Freed by Crusaders

As for European pilgrims to Jerusalem prior to the First Crusade, Michael the Syrian (b.1126) writes:

As the Turks were ruling the lands of Syria and Palestine, they inflicted injuries on Christians who went to pray in Jerusalem; they beat them, pillaged them, [and] levied the poll tax [jizya].” Moreover, “every time they saw a caravan of Christians, particularly of those from Rome and the lands of Italy, they made every effort to cause their death in diverse ways.

Such was the fate of one German pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1064. According to one of the pilgrims:

Accompanying this journey was a noble abbess [a head nun] of graceful body and of a religious outlook. Setting aside the cares of the sisters committed to her and against the advice of the wise, she undertook this great and dangerous pilgrimage. The pagans captured her, and in the sight of all, these shameless men gang-raped her until she breathed her last, to the dishonor of all Christians. Christ’s enemies performed such abuses and others like them on the Christians.

Then there is the fact that, whichever city the First Crusaders liberated on their long trek to Jerusalem, its indigenous Christians regularly hurled themselves at and kissed their feet in gratitude. According to Fulcher of Chartres (b. 1059), a participant and eyewitness of the First Crusade

When we passed by the villages of the Armenians [near Edessa], it was astonishing to see them advance toward us with crosses and standards, kissing our feet and garments most humbly for love of God, because they had heard that we would defend them from the Turks under whose yoke they had been oppressed for a long time.

In another instance, near Bethlehem, Fulcher writes, “when the Christians, evidently Greeks and Syrians [somewhere near Bethlehem]… found that the Franks had come, they were especially filled with great joy.”

Christians also turned on the Muslims and sided with the Franks on multiple occasions, most notably during the liberation of Edessa. This is further proof that they preferred to be ruled by these strange newcomers from the West rather than by the devil they knew.

A Millennium Later

But Esposito denies all of that by quoting, not eyewitnesses to and contemporary sources of those events, as I have been, but his own contemporary, the late Francis E. Peters, who only passed away in 2020. Peters sarcastically claims that,

God may indeed have wished it [the liberation of Jerusalem by the crusaders], but there is certainly no evidence that the Christians of Jerusalem did, or that anything extraordinary was occurring to pilgrims there to prompt such a response [meaning the First Crusade] at that moment in history.

Why all this lying? Simple: to “prove” that the Crusades were unprovoked and unjust wars (which, among other travesties, brought an end to “five centuries of peaceful coexistence”). Thus, in the very next sentence after quoting Peters’ absurd claim that nothing “extraordinary” was happening to the Holy Land’s Christians to justify a Crusade, Esposito makes his grand point:

In fact, Christian rulers, knights, and merchants were driven primarily by political and military ambitions and the promise of the economic and commercial (trade and banking) rewards that would accompany the establishment of a Latin kingdom in the Middle East.