Book review essay writtn by Robert Louis Wilken (WSJ, 13 March 2010).
The recorded past and the remembered past are seldom the same. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Crusades. The Crusades were a belated counter-offensive of Western Christians to come to the aid of Christians of the East in defending their lands against the further expansion of Islam and to free the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim rule. In the year 600 most of the Middle East, from present-day Turkey to Iraq, including Egypt and the southern Mediterranean coast, was Christian, and its principal cities— including Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus and Jerusalem—were vibrant centers of Christian life and culture. Within a century the entire region came under Muslim rule. The Byzantine Empire, which had reached from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Persian frontier, was reduced to a Greek state in Asia Minor, Greece and the Balkans.
Scala/Art Resource, NY - An undated illustration of the taking of Antioch, in present-day Turkey, during the First Crusade
The first great expansion of Islam came to an end in the middle of the eighth century, but with the conversion of the Seljuk Turks from Central Asia, Islam resumed its relentless drive westward. In 1071, the Byzantines suffered a disastrous defeat by the Turks at Manzikert in eastern Asia Minor. By posing a grave threat to overrun Asia Minor and eventually capture Constantinople, the Turks impelled the Christian West to mount a defense. But the First Crusade was not an isolated undertaking; it was part of a larger effort to cast off the yoke of Islam. In Spain, for example, the Christian north had begun to regain territory— including Toledo, a major Christian city in the center of the country— that had been lost to the Muslims in the eighth century.
The Crusades were a series of large and complex events, of shifting motives and ambitions, of alliances between Muslims and Christians as well as battles, victories and defeats, of diplomacy as well as of bloodshed. The story is told anew by Jonathan Phillips in "Holy Warriors" and by Thomas Asbridge in "The Crusades." But there is more here than a historical account. Both books tell another, no less interesting, story as well: how the memory of the Crusades was formed in modern times.
For a time the Crusaders were successful, and in the wake of their victories they established Christian kingdoms, one of which was centered in Jerusalem. In the end, however, they were vanquished. In less than two centuries all the lands in the Middle East and Africa, except Ethiopia, came again under Muslim control and remain so to this day. The inescapable fact is that the Crusades—there were eight to the Holy Land in the course of two centuries—ended in failure, and Muslims during the Middle Ages took little interest in these incursions from the West. The Crusades had minimal impact on the Muslim attitude toward Christianity. If anything, they led to the increased understanding that comes with trade: As a result of Christian settlements in the Middle East, commerce flourished with mercantile European cities such as Venice and Genoa.
But the question, as Mr. Phillips puts it in his introduction to "Holy Warriors," is this: Why does something that happened 900 years ago, and that ended "ignominiously," "resonate so powerfully across the modern world"?
Ask the Serbians about the Battle of Kosovo.
Holy Warriors
By Jonathan Phillips
Random House, 434 pages, $30One answer is that the Crusades offer a cornucopia of anecdotes and images—of bravery and cruelty, honor and duplicity—that can be used to serve different ends. But there is more to the matter than that. The great merit of "Holy Warriors" and "The Crusades" is that they give full accounts of key events and figures in one volume: e.g., the capture of Jerusalem by the Franks in 1099, the retaking of the city by the Muslims after the Battle of Hattin in 1187, and the Fourth Crusade on Constantinople; the personalities of Richard the Lionhearted, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and Saladin, the Muslim leader.
What comes through clearly is that the "remembered" history of the Crusades might better be called an imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades "have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion." Mr. Phillips, a professor of history at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only "shadows of the crusades, not true shapes."
In medieval Muslim chronicles of the Crusades, the Crusaders were simply called "Franks." But in the 19th century, as French works on the Crusades were translated into Arabic, Muslims adopted the French word Croisades (from croix), and the wars of the Franks became the "wars of the Cross." As the European version of the Crusades took root in the Muslim world, it seemed that the imposition of Western hegemony on the Muslim Middle East was a modern-day equivalent of the Crusades. And the introduction of Israel into the picture, a country founded by immigrants from the West, made the new latter-day "memory" of the Crusades even more toxic.
Mr. Asbridge's term for the modern construction of the Crusades is "Crusader parallelism." So deep is the new paradigm—the Crusades as Western Christian aggression, not a defensive movement of Christian piety—that the writings of mere historians can do little to undo the damage. Jonathan Riley Smith, a distinguished historian of the Crusades, once said that he had given up hope that scholarly writing could make a difference.
Still, it is good to have these two books. Messrs. Phillips and Asbridge are abreast of recent scholarship, they draw extensively on Muslim sources, and they know how to tell a story. Each author also realizes that, in the present climate, more is needed than a balanced account of what took place centuries ago. The historical narrative cannot stand alone; it must be set against the "remembered" history of modern times.
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