“faith lies at the heart of holy war”

Apropos of the book Holy Warriors (one of the two reviewed in the article quoted in the post below this one), I found another review in the NY Times, by Eric Ormsby.

llustration by Stephen Savage
HOLY WARRIORS
A Modern History of the Crusades
By Jonathan Phillips
Illustrated. 434 pp. Random House. $30


Excerpt: ‘Holy Warriors’


March 14, 2010
Butchers and Saints
By ERIC ORMSBY

The villains of history seem relatively easy to understand; however awful their deeds, their motives remain recognizable. But the good guys, those their contemporaries saw as heroes or saints, often puzzle and appall. They did the cruelest things for the loftiest of motives; they sang hymns as they waded through blood. Nowhere, perhaps, is this contradiction more apparent than in the history of the Crusades. When the victorious knights of the First Crusade finally stood in Jerusalem, on July 15, 1099, they were, in the words of the chronicler William of Tyre, “dripping with blood from head to foot.” They had massacred the populace. But in the same breath, William praised the “pious devotion . . . with which the pilgrims drew near to the holy places, the exultation of heart and happiness of spirit with which they kissed the memorials of the Lord’s sojourn on earth.”

It’s tempting to dismiss the crusaders’ piety as sheer hypocrisy. In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery. As Jonathan Phillips observes in his excellent new history — in case we needed reminding at this late date — “faith lies at the heart of holy war.” For some, of course, this will be proof that something irremediably lethal lies at the heart of all religious belief. But the same fervor that led to horrific butchery, on both the Christian and the Muslim sides, also inspired extraordinary efforts of self-sacrifice, of genuine heroism and even, at rare moments, of simple human kindness. Phillips, professor of crusading history at the University of London, doesn’t try to reconcile these extremes; he presents them in all their baffling disparity. This approach gives a cool, almost documentary power to his narrative.

professor of crusading history.

At the same time, “Holy Warriors” is what Phillips calls a “character driven” account. The book is alive with extravagantly varied figures, from popes both dithering and decisive to vociferous abbots and conniving kings; saints rub shoulders with “flea pickers.” If Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saladin dominate the account, perhaps unavoidably, there are also vivid cameos of such lesser-known personalities as the formidable Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and her rebellious sister Alice of Antioch. Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, is glimpsed in an embarrassing moment when a brazen messenger announces to the assembled high court where he sits in session that his mistress, Pasque, has just given birth to a daughter.

Oops.

Phillips is especially good portraying 12th-century Muslim personalities — from Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, a preacher of jihad, whose fiery exhortations sound alarmingly familiar, to the refined Usama ibn Munqidh, poet and man of letters, and the grumpy but astute Ibn Jubayr, a sharp-eyed traveler through Crusader territories. “Holy Warriors” brings these otherwise exotic figures thumpingly back to life. About the assimilation of the Franks, many of whom chose to settle in the Holy Land, Usama could write, “He who was born a stran­ger is now as one born here; he who was born an alien has become a native.” The battle lines were sharply drawn, the campaigns were pitiless, each side had contempt for the others’ beliefs; and yet, somehow, on the margins of hostility, a grudging accommodation, if not friendship, sometimes developed.

Phillips concentrates on the seven “official” crusades, from 1095 to the final disastrous campaigns of Louis IX (St. Louis) of France in 1248-54 and 1270, but he also describes the fiasco of the so-called Children’s Crusade as well as the horrifying Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southwest France. As he notes, “holy war” was as often as not waged against coreligionists: Catholics against Cathars, Sunnis against Shiites. In the rigid, polarized mentality of the holy warrior, any deviation can signify a dangerous otherness. This is the best recent history of the Crusades; it is also an astute depiction of a frightening cast of mind.

Eric Ormsby’s new collection of essays, “Fine Incisions,” will be published next fall.

Rescuers, Not Invaders

The strange history of failed attempts to resist Islam's spread

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.

The Crusades
By Thomas Asbridge
Ecco, 767 pages, $34.99

• Excerpt

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, $30

• Excerpt

One 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.