by Thomas F. Madden

n November 7, former president Bill Clinton discussed the September 11 terrorist attacks during a speech to students at Georgetown University. His remarks caused a considerable controversy by seeming to imply that America was "paying a price" for its legacy of slavery and treatment of Native Americans. During the speech, Clinton also made the following misleading statement:

Terror-the killing of noncombatants for economic, political, or religious reasons-has a very long history, as long as organized combat itself. . . . Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with three hundred Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it.

In addition to the fashionable but nonetheless contemptible assertion that people today ("those of us who come from various European lineages") are responsible for what other people did in the distant past, there is little basis for Clinton's statement. The episode Clinton described may or may not have happened. There is no way to know for sure, because, contrary to what the former president implied, we have no firsthand account of the events. But even if it did happen, there is much more to the story. It is important to see the Crusades in their proper historical context, and to understand that willful misinterpretations of that period have long been used as a means of fueling animosity toward the United States and Europe in the Middle East.

The story of the burning of the synagogue does not come from an eyewitness, but it does appear in a variety of Byzantine, Frankish, Arab, and Jewish sources written within twenty years of the event. (And why Muslim terrorists would be angry about the burning of a synogogue is another thing the ex-president left unexplained.) Most medieval reports of atrocities in Jerusalem after its fall in July 1099 derive from the account of Fulcher of Chartres. Fulcher was a cleric who participated in the First Crusade, but he was not at Jerusalem when it fell. In fact, he did not arrive until five months later. His account, therefore, is hearsay. It was meant to demonstrate to his readers the "purification" of Jerusalem, which means that he had good reason to exaggerate the extent of the slaughter. In fact, Fulcher clearly was exaggerating: he describes the streets of Jerusalem filled with blood to ankle-depth-something physically impossible given the population of the city, or even all of Palestine for that matter. Later authors used Fulcher as a model, in some cases exaggerating the story even further. Those accounts are what Clinton (or his speechwriter) relied on. Note that Clinton decided to exaggerate the medieval exaggeration even further-stating that the crusaders waded in blood up to their knees. This is a good example of how these stories began and then grew in the telling during the Middle Ages.

Joshua Prawer, one of the leading authorities on the Jews of the crusader period, believes that the burning of the synagogue did happen. He argues that the Jews in question were defenders on the walls, who fled to the synagogue when the crusaders took the city. They did so, he says, not for protection but because they knew that by the laws of war their lives were forfeit, and they wished to die in their holy place. Prawer also notes that a great many Jews in Jerusalem were not killed. Many were ransomed to other Jews in Ascalon and Alexandria, and still others were released without ransom.

The fact is that many people were killed in Jerusalem after it fell. That, however, should not be a surprise. It was the accepted practice for millennia, not only among Christians but also Muslims, that a city which resisted capture was utterly forfeit. In other words, the property and lives of the citizens belonged to the victorious forces. That is why all cities had to consider whether they believed they could withstand a siege or should surrender. In the case of the First Crusade, all cities that surrendered to the Christian forces were entered peacefully, and the Muslims and Jews living there were left unmolested and allowed to worship freely. Jerusalem, by contrast, resisted quite strenuously. Therefore, the crusaders would have been justified by the morality of their time in killing everyone in the city if they wished. Recent scholarship has shown, however, that they did not do that. Many were killed, but, as noted earlier, many others were ransomed or allowed to purchase their freedom.

Clinton was surely right to point out that the story he recounted is still told in the Middle East and plays a part in anti-Americanism and anti-Western hatred among the populace, but that does not make it true. Interestingly, equally popular in the Middle East are the memories of the Egyptian rulers Baybars and Kalavun, who were responsible for ultimately defeating the Christians and removing them from the region. Both of them often accepted surrenders from Christian cities or citadels after promising to spare the lives of the inhabitants, and then massacred them all. For example, when Baybars captured Christian Antioch in 1268, he had the doors of the city closed and then killed every man, woman, and child in the city. He then wrote a letter to the absent lord of the city describing in gruesome detail what he had missed. His actions are still recounted in the Middle East, although I doubt that Mr. Clinton will be making any speeches about them soon.

There is no denying that many people were killed in Jerusalem after the city fell during the First Crusade. That, however, was the universally accepted practice at the time. We would surely be appalled by such a massacre today, but in truth we kill far more people-including women and children-in modern wars. We simply call it collateral damage.

Thomas F. Madden is chair of the department of history at Saint Louis University. His most recent book is A Concise History of the Crusades (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).

Click here to view a full list of American Outlook Magazine Issues