Crusades Imagery and White Nationalism

by Brian Dunning
March 11, 2025

If there was a parade of Neo-Nazis or some other white nationalist extremists marching down the street — exercising their First Amendment rights, of course — what kinds of symbols would you expect to see on their banners and tattoos and shields? Swastikas, obviously; Confederate flags, of course; but from there the symbology of hate groups gets less familiar. There is the blood drop cross of the Ku Klux Klan. There is the Celtic cross; the double-bolt Sig rune worn by the Nazi SS; the Triple Seven Triskelion, representing South African Neo-Nazis; and of course countless more whose meaning is sometimes understood only to the symbologists who study these things — and often not very well understood by the people wearing them.

And this is where Skeptoid enters into this topic, under the heading of history vs. pseudohistory. For the latest genre of extremist symbolism is one that has a specific subculture of historians outraged and up in arms: historians of the medieval period.

Over the recent decade, we've increasingly noticed white nationalists flaunting crosses from the Crusaders and other medieval imagery. Universally, when questioned about the meaning of some motto or cross tattoo, they will give an answer of the form "It represents my Christian faith" …which is very nice. But when we see a parade of Neo-Nazis marching down the street shouting, waving tiki torches, and emphasizing those very same mottos and crosses, it becomes a little harder to accept that it's nothing more than an expression of Christian faith.

In recent years, medieval historians have published quite a few academic papers discussing the way white nationalists have co-opted medieval symbols. The extremists misunderstand and misrepresent those symbols, using them as tokens of racial superiority; wrongly presenting a fictional narrative of the Crusades as historical justification for their racism.

In the eyes of today's white nationalists, the Crusades were symbolic of a victory of white Europeans over the brown Muslims, the Jews, and other religious minorities. But in point of fact, that's actually almost the exact opposite of how the Crusades went down; which is why historians of the medieval period are so incensed by the white nationalist appropriation of these ancient symbols. Here is what the Crusades actually symbolized.

By the end of the 11th century, Christendom was rent in twain. The Pope in Rome presided over western European Christians, while the Eastern Orthodox Christians were centered in the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. East of that was Turkey, and south of Turkey was the Holy Land, long and firmly held by Muslims. When the Byzantine Emperor asked the Pope for military assistance defending against skirmishes with the Turks, both eastern and western Christians saw this combined force as an opportunity to plow all the way through Turkey and reclaim the Holy Land for the Christians.

The First Crusade launched in 1095 with this goal. Christian leadership saw it as an opportunity to put nearly all of the Eastern Mediterranean under Christian control. But many of the 60,000 knights, soldiers, and commoners who followed them saw it as a religious duty, an opportunity to acquire land and wealth, or it was a feudal obligation. These were not all knights in shining armor. Most Crusaders were poorly armed, poorly trained, and were often used as a defensive first line in battle and took heavy casualties.

But ultimately, with its large force, this First Crusade accomplished all of its goals, but at a tremendous cost of blood and lives. Jews fought alongside Muslims in a forlorn attempt to defend the Holy Land from the Christians, who captured it, plundered it, and killed every defender they could. Along the Rhine and the Danube, Crusaders attacked Jewish communities in what are called the Rhineland massacres. So if today's white nationalists want to use the Crusades as their guiding ideology, well, the First Crusade was probably the best representative.

The problem with that idea is that many of the symbols the white nationalists use today did not exist until after the First Crusade; and once they came into being, all of the Crusades that followed for the next 200 years constituted one great failure; not only was it a loss of all the First Crusade had gained, they lost considerably more.

Securing the Holy Land after they'd seized it was going to be a problem. It was far away from Europe. So the Pope authorized the knights to form monastic orders charged with defending the four new Crusader States that covered the Holy Lands. These orders — which included the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, the Teutonic Order, the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, and lots of others — are where today's white nationalist medieval symbols came from. So, in effect, the banners waved by many white nationalists represent a decline into military defeat and a loss of territory to Muslims. Although the subsequent Crusades saw losses and gains by both sides, including at least two that were completely disastrous and resulted in the deaths of nearly all participating Christians, by 1453 the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire conquered and captured Constantinople, marking the end of the Byzantine Empire, and effectively the 1500-year reign of the Roman Empire as well. Taken as a whole, the Crusades resulted in a massive loss of territory and power by white Christians to the Ottoman Turks. If today's extremists had studied it more before getting it tattooed all over themselves, they might have been better advised to have regarded the Crusades as something they'd prefer to forget, not to memorialize.

And here's another point that might be a nice exclamation mark on this fundamental error made by today's white nationalists: The victorious Ottomans were a racially and ethnically diverse culture, including Turks, Albanians, Slavs, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, and more. In fact, the Ottomans codified their nation's diversity with a system called millets, giving each ethnic community self-governance and more. Historians often point to the Ottomans' embrace of diversity, and the way they used it to their advantage, as one of the keys to their empire's great longevity and strength.

So when you see a white nationalist with a great big Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his chest, that tattoo might as well say "I was conquered by the power of diversity." There are lessons to be learned from history — but generally those lessons are only known to those who read books, not to those who ban them.

Following the 2017 "Unite the Right" white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, leaders of 29 societies of some 5,000 Medieval historians all around the world published and signed an open letter on The Medieval Academy Blog. It said, in part:

As scholars of the medieval world we are disturbed by the use of a nostalgic but inaccurate myth of the Middle Ages by racist movements in the United States. By using imagined medieval symbols, or names drawn from medieval terminology, they create a fantasy of a pure, white Europe that bears no relationship to reality. This fantasy not only hurts people in the present, it also distorts the past. Medieval Europe was diverse religiously, culturally, and ethnically, and medieval Europe was not the entire medieval world. Scholars disagree about the motivations of the Crusades — or, indeed, whether the idea of "crusade" is a medieval one or came later — but it is clear that racial purity was not primary among them.

But it's not just that it's wrong; it's sometimes comically wrong. Among the white supremacists at Charlottesville was a man carrying a round plywood shield emblazoned with the symbol of a black spread eagle, its head turned to the side; if you saw it you'd recognize having seen it before. One of the co-authors of that open letter, Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis of the Medieval Academy of America, told NPR's All Things Considered who the original bearer of that standard was:

...It's kind of ironic. He's an African saint who carries that standard. And I suspect the gentleman carrying the shield didn't realize that.

Saint Maurice was born in Egypt in the third century, and is usually depicted as a Black man. He is the patron saint of a number of things, including the German town of Coburg, where he is called the Coburg Moor.

While it's true that all the notable leaders of the Crusades were from European backgrounds (they were mostly French and German), it was quite a different story among the ranks. They included Jews (who mostly kept their background a secret), Arabs, and a substantial number of Armenians. In 2019, genetic studies were done on 16 of the 25 individuals found buried in what's been named the "Crusader's pit" in southern Lebanon. Radiocarbon dating established them as having died during the Crusades. These people had all been killed by violent injuries, and had sufficient coins and buckles and other artifacts to identify them as Crusades soldiers. Only a minority of them were white Europeans. The rest were either Lebanese, genetically indistinguishable from modern Lebanese; or were the offspring of Europeans and local people along the way (recall the Crusades were very much a multigenerational conflict). The notion that the Crusades were emblematic of a victory of whites over non-whites is, as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli said, so wrong that it's not even wrong.

So the bottom line today is that if you see a person brandishing a tattoo, an emblem on a flag or a shield, a helmet or anywhere else, that shows any kind of cross or other Medieval symbol; and they are doing it in the context of some kind of personal statement; chances are high that that person is a white nationalist. And the chances are even higher that that person lacks sufficient basic reasoning skills to have bothered to learn anything at all about the symbol before having it tattooed on his body.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning