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2008 •
Conventional wisdom maintains that the Islamic world and western Christendom held two very different views of the crusades. The image of warfare between Islam and Christendom has promoted the idea that the combative instincts aroused by this conflict somehow produced discordant views of the crusades. Yet the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources indicates otherwise. The self-view of the crusades presented by contemporary Muslim authors and the self-view of the crusades presented by crusading popes are not in opposition to each other but are in agreement with each other. Both interpretations place the onset of the crusades ahead of their accepted historical debut in 1095. Both interpretations point to the Norman conquest of Islamic Sicily (1060–91) as the start of the crusades. And both interpretations contend that by the end of the eleventh century the crusading enterprise was Mediterranean-wide in its scope. The Islamic view of the crusades is in fact the enantiomorph (mirror-image) of the Christian view of the crusades. This article makes a radical departure from contemporary scholarship on the early crusading enterprise because it is based on the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources. The direct evidence offers a way out of the impasse into which crusade history has fallen, and any attempt at determining the origin and nature of crusading without the support of the direct evidence is doomed to failure.
No cryptographer or symbologist is needed to unravel the Islamic interpretation of the Crusades. It is embedded in no secret code. The sources from which this interpretation can be reconstructed are widely known and readily accessible to scholars. A good number of the relevant Arabic texts have been translated into Western languages and have been available to researchers and to the general public for decades. Scholars – both in the West and in the Islamic world – have examined these texts repeatedly, yet they have brushed aside the Islamic interpretation of the Crusades as irrelevant – of no significance for understanding the actual phenomenon of crusading. Conceptual blinders have successfully prevented scholars from recognizing the Islamic interpretation of the Crusades for what it is: a coherent and historically verifiable explanation of the Crusades that can be validated by reference to eleventh-century Latin sources for the Crusades, although not by reference to the popular, and still entrenched scholarly, notion that the Crusades began in 1095.
Lecture delivered to the Plantagenet Society of Australia at Hornsby Library, 16 March
The Crusades: Historical Interpretations from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century2019 •
The Crusades are most often presented as religiously motivated wars between the Christian medieval powers, secular and ecclesiastical, and the Islamic world. The proximate cause of the First Crusade (1096-1099) included the defeat of the Byzantine Emperor Romanes IV Diogenes by the armies of the Seljuq Sultan Alp-Arslan at the Battle of Manzikert (26 August 1071), followed by the Seljuq conquest of Anatolia. Pope Urban II feared Constantinople might be conquered and preached the Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095. This tale is well-known; the Western occupation of the Middle East came to an end in 1291 when the final expulsion of Latin Christians from Syria occurred. However, there were Crusades in the Baltic States and north-eastern Europe, in which the military order the Teutonic Knights was prominent (compared to the Templars in the Holy Land). These began in 1193 when Pope Celestine III preached a Crusade against the Pagan Balts. The Teutonic Knights were active in Eastern Europe until the fifteenth century, building a huge Christian territory in Prussia and the Baltic region. This lecture looks at the critical lenses used to interpret the particular type of Holy War denoted by the term “Crusade” from the medieval era to the present.
International Journal of Military History and Historiography. Special Issue: “The Appropriation and Weaponisation of the Crusades in the Modern Era”, guest editor, Jason T. Roche, Volume 41(2): 187-207
The Appropriation and Weaponisation of the Crusades in the Modern Era (AAM version)2021 •
The introductory article proposes the hypothesis, which informed the decision making and editorial work in the Special Issue, that appropriations and weaponisations of the crusades in the modern era rely on culturally embedded master narratives of the past that are often thought to encompass public or cultural memories. Crucially, medievalism, communicated through metonyms, metaphors, symbols and motifs frequently acts as a placeholder instead of the master narratives themselves. The article addresses differences between medievalists' and modernists' conceptions of crusades, especially highlighting how the very meaning of words - such as crusade - differ in the respective fields. But the matter at hand goes beyond semantics, for the notion that the act of crusading is a live and potent issue is hard to ignore. There exists a complex and multifaceted crusading present. That people can appeal to master narratives of the crusades via mutable medievalism, which embodies zero-sum, Manichaean-type "clash of civilisations" scenarios, helps explain the continued appeal of the crusades to those who seek to weaponise them. It is hoped that the contributions to the special issue, introduced towards the end of the article, further a better understanding of the ways this has happened in the modern era.
Review: In light of the violence perpetrated by radical Islamic jihadists against individuals and groups, particularly in the Middle East, on the basis of their religious or cultural identities, and the widespread Islamophobia triggered by the 9/11 events, as well as the corresponding reference to the medieval Crusades as rebuttal by Islamic groups against Christians who associate Islam with violence, there have been growing efforts to sanitize religious traditions by deliberately distancing them from culpability in the violent actions of believers in the course of history. This has precipitated a distortion or even denial of the truth of history. The state of denial notwithstanding, discussions on the Crusades, are direly needed today if only to set the records straight. In religious and political conflicts today, the rhetoric of the crusades is evident, yet the perceptions of these events held by Arab nationalists, pan-Islamists, and many in the West have been deeply distorted by the language and imagery of nineteenth-century European imperialism. There is no dearth of literature on the Crusades, however, history has been subjected to revisionist agendas, that it is increasingly becoming more and more difficult to find consensus among historians today on such medieval events as the Crusades. The various accounts that are extant today are interpretations laden with various political and religious language, such that it would require close reading to identify these nuances and make judgments that are as close to what is objective. One of the reasons I find this book The Crusades, Christianity and Islam by Jonathan Riley-Smith very educative and fascinating is that the author masterfully champions a return to the actual story of the Crusades as a corrective to contrived accounts embedded in popular thought. This book comes out of a series of Bampton Lectures given by the author, a renowned scholar on the crusades. In this work, the author presents a systematic, yet detailed account of the Crusades and Christian military expeditions from the 12 th to the late 18 th centuries. His intention is to present an account of the crusades that is not shaped by an anachronistic interpretation of historical events like Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven which portrayed these military expeditions as driven by avarice, greed and imperialism. Instead, he argues that they were motivated by piety, religious enthusiasm, a sense of duty, and a genuinely fervent desire to liberate the Holy Lands and return them to their original occupants – the Christians. This explains the sacrifice the Crusaders made, enduring hardship, personal impoverishment in pursuit of what they saw as the will of God in a " penitential warfare. " According to Riley-Smith, contemporary religious hostilities fueled by a misreading of the crusades using modern criteria, indicate the significance of separating fact from myth and to present a historically accurate account not motivated by contemporary interests. This is essential because we cannot confront our adversaries
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