1917: A Successful Crusade?- Guest Post by Susan Moisan
Today I’m pleased to welcome Susan Moisan as a guest for this post on the 1917 campaign in the Middle East. Susan has been a reader of history since childhood and took the decision as she approached forty to pursue a BA in History with the University of London – something she wished she’d done when her brain was twenty years younger. She has a particular love of medieval and Tudor periods and spends a lot of time walking around London trying to ignore the skyscrapers. Her real job is for a company that supplies antiques and furniture for film and TV advising set decorators and buyers on the correct items for period settings.
On 11th December 1917, General Edmund Allenby of Britain, Lieutenant-Colonel de Piepapé ofFrance, and Lieutenant-Colonel D’Agostino of Italy, walked into Jerusalem at the head of the Allied Forces after the Turkish surrender, and promised fair treatment and respect for all its citizens, faiths, and holy sites.
To many across the western world, however, Allenby had just successfully completed the work of Richard the Lionheart, Godfrey of Bouillon, Louis IX and all those who spent centuries attacking the Holy Land, and its holiest of cities in the name of Christianity.
The Crusades had finally succeeded.
For a Christian society, educated not only on Bible tales, but on the supremacy of white Christianity and popular Victorian medievalism, including the novels of Walter Scott, Digby and Tasso and tales of chivalry, this event was thrilling.
Part of their satisfaction was owing to the terrible humiliation that the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem had suffered in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, when Saladin, and his newly united Muslim forces, took Jerusalem and virtually destroyed the Frankish governing elite. The great Lionheart, despite his successes, was unable to win back the greatest prize of all.
Jerusalem was held briefly during the 13th century by a German crusading force, but since 1244, the Holy City had been in the hands of the ‘infidel’. Mosques and temples had been built on the sites of Christian and Jewish importance and to Christianity itself, this failure to win back its holiest of sites was a constant thorn in its side.
It was unsurprising then, that many clerics were tremendously excited at the news from the Palestine front in 1917 and the British, American, and particularly the French press, went wild over the idea of restoring the losses of the past and the return of Christianity as the ruler of the Holy Land.
For the wider public, it was a way in which they could actively see and feel a link to not only the Bible stories they heard at Sunday School, but their own heroic past. They could follow in the very footsteps of Richard the Lionheart.
Punch, the infamous satirical magazine, published an illustration of Richard the Lionheart gazing across to Jerusalem as the Allied Forces completed his work proclaiming: ‘My Dream Comes True!’
However, Punch was, of course, a satire, and it was deliberately flouting a direct order from the Department of Information for the British press to very specifically not in any way refer to the Palestine campaign as a Crusade.
Despite popular use of the Crusades as a recruiting tool during the early war, a few ill-advised comments in the press and in the clergy had shown the War Cabinet that many were viewing the Palestine campaign as a Christian conquest. For wartime propagandists, this was a potential disaster.
The last time the British and French had taken Jerusalem had resulted in the town being sacked and its streets running with blood, later crusades had involved massacres and looting of holy sites. The Lionheart himself committed one of the most infamous slaughters of innocents following the siege of Acre.
This was an image Britain could not afford as now the Arab Muslims were their allies against a powerful Turkish-German alliance, and their help could turn the entire course of a world war.
The War Cabinet worked closely with the Department of Information and with Allenby himself to choreograph a takeover that displayed humility and reverence. Allenby and the other leaders entered on foot in the manner of pilgrims, no flags were flown over the city and the Proclamation of Martial Law spoke of respect and cooperation with the Muslim inhabitants and special care taken over their religious sites.
It was also particularly important to contrast with the imperial visit by Kaiser Wilhelm in 1898 which was loaded with pomp and prestige, and at which he paid special reverence to the tomb of Saladin, presenting him with a golden wreath. The Kaiser had also suggested supporting a jihad against the Christian west in 1914.
The stakes were indeed then, very high.
Only a few publications in Britain succumbed to temptation, most stuck to the brief or published a pictorial history of the region in general.
The French and American press both fully employed the power of the imagery, and both had strong reasons for doing so. The French desperately wanted Syria and played on their long history and Frankish heritage in the region, and America was keen to back the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s promise of a home for the Jews in Palestine, to the detriment of its Muslim citizens.
The soldiers themselves couldn’t resist the connection with their boyhood heroes and penned memoirs and novels with titles such as ‘Khaki Crusaders’, ‘With Allenby’s Crusaders’ and ‘The Romance of the Last Crusade’.
With the winning back of Crusader territory being freely bandied about in the worldwide press, Britain accepted it was too powerful an image to ignore.
They created what became known as the Homesick Crusader. The victorious soldiers occupying Jerusalem became mere boys, humbled by their experiences, Protestant enough to not be carried away by Catholic medieval superstition but be equally stunned to reverent silence in the face of the Holy Places; respectful of the local people but ultimately, weary, sunburnt, plagued by flies, and longing for the verdant green fields of England and the embrace of their mothers.
However, while Britain was denying any form of Christian conquest or territorial ambition, it was freely planning the carve-up of all the land that included Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia (Iraq).
It had not only promised land to the widespread Jewish diaspora in order to gain allies in Russia and America, but it had also promised territory along with Arab independence to Sherif Hussein for his support against the Turks, and a division of territory between themselves and the French in order to keep that fragile alliance alive long enough to win the war.
What they didn’t bargain for was the sheer determination of all three parties to have those promises honoured and the problems that would cause.
Crusading as propaganda, as a pious ideal, as a pilgrimage, as a romantic chivalric goal, as a link to a glorious past, as a framework for an inglorious conflict, even as part of the vernacular was far too powerful to be ignored.
By distancing itself from its crusading past, Britain was trying to rehabilitate itself as a new type of Empire that protected small nations, freedom of worship and displaced peoples. To view the Palestine campaign as a Crusade would be to undermine everything they were claiming and would confirm the world’s opinion of them as an all-conquering imperial powerhouse.
However, it was precisely this mindset, so deeply entrenched, that gave the decision-makers the conviction that they had to right to give away someone else’s land to whomever they chose – but critically that they were the only ones that should.
And it was equally this mindset that led Britain to fail the people of the region and to this day to still have its crusading and imperial past weaponised against it.
Sources
‘1917 Daily Sketch Front Page Reporting General Allenby Enters Jerusalem.’ Alamy, <https://www.alamy.com/1917-daily-sketch-front-page-reporting-general-allenby-enters-jerusalem-image257326215.html> [accessed 22 January 2024]
‘Jerusalem is Rescued By British After 673 Years of Moslem Rule’, New York Herald: Part Two, 11th Dec. 1917, p.1
‘La nuit de Noël à Bethléem’, Nouvelle de France, 10 Jan. 1918, p.29-31
Punch July-Dec. 1917: Vol 153. (Punch Publications Limited, 1917), <https://archive.org/details/sim_punch_july-december-1917_153/page/414/mode/2up> , p.415
‘Proclamation of Martial Law in Jerusalem’, 1917, Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem, PHPS\1340030
‘General Allenby’s Entry Into Jerusalem.’ Imperial War Museums, (1918), <https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060008299>
‘The New Crusaders: With the British Forces on the Palestine Front’, Imperial War Museums, (1918) <https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060008175>
Bar-Yosef, Eitan. ‘The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18,’ Journal of Contemporary History, (2001), 36.1: pp.87–109 <https://doi.org/10.1177/002200940103600104>
Gilbert, Vivian. The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem (USA, W. B. Feakins, 1923)
Siberry, Elizabeth. The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Ashgate, 2000)
Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents, 10th edn. (New York, Bedford/Saint Martin’s, 2020)
Tanenbaum, Jan Karl. ‘France and the Arab Middle East, 1914-1920,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, (1978), 68.7: pp.1–50
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