Pope Francis’ recent words about atheists stand in stark contrast to the encyclical (1009) that Pope Serguis IV issued to remedy the Muslim destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (966):

Let all Christians know that news has come from the east to the seat of the apostles that the church of the Holy Sepulchre has been destroyed from roof to foundations by the impious hands of the pagans. This destruction has plunged the entire church and the city of Rome into deep grief and distress. The whole world is in morning and the people tremble, breading deep sighs. . . .

With the Lord’s help we intend to kill all these enemies and restore the Redeemer’s Holy Sepulchre. Nor, my sons, are you to fear the sea’s turbulence, nor dred the fury of war, for God has promised that whoever loses the present life for the sake of Christ will gain another life which he will never lose. For this is not a battle for an earthly kingdom, but for the eternal Lord. (Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam, 159)

Wheatcroft does not use this encyclical to show up the fanaticism or intolerance of medieval Christianity or the Vatican. His aim is much more complicated and the history he tells is a complex affair of how both sides demonized the other, and how both Christians and Muslims were responsible for perpetuating myths about the other that would have resonances in the memories of the West and the East all the way down to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and responses to 9/11. In other words, the language of crusade and jihad played off each other for the better part of a millennium (and it looks like the Christian West and Islamic East have still not recovered):

The theory of jihad was drawn from a few occurrences of the word in the Qur’an and more fully in the juristic commentary and oral traditions (hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed. These statements often required considerable interpretation to mold them to events. In theory, for Islam as for Christendom, war was an evil. For battle and killing to be sanctified it had to be a struggle in a good and godly cause. Over time, therefore, both communities evolved superficially quite similar ideas for a just war in a good cause. But there were differences between the parallel but separate processes of evolution. In Christendom, the doctrine of holy war was hotly debated and transmuted over time into many different ideological strands, mostly in response to social and political change. The terminology of “Crusade” was highly mutable: “pilgrimage,” “journey,” “signed by the cross,” and so on, were the ways of describing it. In Islam, there were two commonly used – jihad, and ghaza in Ottoman Turkish – and there could be little debate about the meaning of these terms, and little theoretical investigation of their limits and boundaries.

When the organized forces of “Crusade” and jihad confronted each other directly on the battlefield, the contrast between them was immediately apparent. Visually speaking, the dominant motif of the Western Christian side overwhelmed all others. The Muslim banners carried many different emblems and texts, mostly the names and qualities of God and other suitable verses. . . But on the Christian side the single image of the cross was dominant. From the first contact the defining characteristic of the Crusade was the symbol of the crucified Christ. (177)

Wheatcroft goes on to describe the how the Crusaders violated Islamic and even Byzantine sensibilities that distinguished the private and holy realm from the public and common.

For [Muslims], the concept of Christ on the cross transgressed a wide range of taboos. God made flesh was unthinkable, and even more so a God who experienced a physical birth. In Islam God was transcendent, while the Western Christians proclaimed his materiality. The Crusaders’ capacity to pollute seemed limitless. They had, unwittingly or deliberately, defiled the holy site in Jerusalem . . . from the first moments of their occupation. They had killed thousands within the holy precinct. . . . Another Muslim traveler was shocked when he climbed up to the holy sites. “I entered Jerusalem and I saw monks and priests in charge of the Sacred Rock . . I saw upon it bottles of win for the ceremony of the mass. I entered the Aqsa mosque and in it a bell was suspended. The most manifest evidence of this desecration of Muslim eyes was the large gold cross that had been placed on the highest point of the Dome of the Rock. (180)

Though perceptions of Christians and Muslims had already been shaped by life together in Spain some three centuries earlier, the Crusades established the pattern, according to Wheatcroft:

. . . during their confrontation in the East, Muslims and Western Christians developed much more complex and roughly symmetrical views of each other.. The degree to which each group produced reverse or mirror images is remarkable. Christians regarded Muslims as inherently cruel and violent; Muslims felt the same about Westerners. Christians developed wild imaginings about the sexual proclivities of Muslims. Muslims regarded the Franks, as Usamah made clear, as little better than animals in terms of sexual propriety. (189)

And now, one thousand years later, in some parts of that troubled world, Western tourists can enjoy an Efes and Turkey’s natural charms, and wonder why some Turks think they are living in a country the political equivalent of Syria.