Writing about a new history of the crusades, a reviewer for the Financial Times of London noted that "histories of the crusades have usually reflected the era in which they were written."[1] -- They have been represented as "the noblest enterprise of their time" as well as "everthing that was rotten about the papacy and barony," Simon Montefiore said. -- During the Enlightenment the crusader was seen as a freebooter, during the Romantic period as a Christian adventurer, and in the mid-20th century as a sort of touriste engagé. -- And in the Middle East, Westerners on a mission tend to be "fused with crusaders." -- But all of these views are "absurd distortions," and the best historians view the crusades as "a blend of religion, chivalry, honour, baronial power, and adventure that is impossible to understand without acknowledging how seriously the Europeans took their faith." -- Popular today is "the modern myth that the Islamic world was highly cultured compared to the oafish crusaders" (a myth that is encouraged in David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible (2008), the book under discussion this week at UFPPC's Digging Deeper). -- Montefiore endorses Jonathan Phillips *Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades* as "an excellent, compelling, flamboyant, and refreshing history of the crusades." -- Phillips book will be released in the U.S. in a Random House edition in March 2010; it has been available in the U.K. since October. -- BACKGROUND: Montefiore forgets to mention that Jonathan Phillips is a Reader in Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, whose scholarly contributions to the crusades include other books as well: Defenders of the Holy Land: Relations Between the Latin East and West, 1119-1187, The Crusades, 1095-1197, and most recently, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. -- For more on Dr. Jonathan Phillips, see here. -- In September 2001, Phillips published a piece entitled "Why a Crusade Will Lead to Jihad" in the London Independent. He wrote: "The West's apparent lack of regret for the crusades, the close identification of Israel with the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem and the memory of the atrocities committed against the Muslims of the Levant fan the flames of the jihad today." ...
1.
Books
Non-Fiction
HOLY WARRIORS
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Financial Times (London)
December 12, 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ea3433e6-e515-11de-9a25-00144feab49a.html
[Review of Jonathan Phillips, Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (The Bodley Head, 2009). £20. 448 pages.]
The crusades have everything a historian could want: slaughter, conquest, hubris, faith, folly, greed, heroes, and villains. But histories of the crusades have usually reflected the era in which they were written.
At their height, the crusades were seen as the noblest enterprise of their time; after their downfall, the crusaders seemed to represent everything that was rotten about the papacy and barony. By the time of the Enlightenment, the crusaders were no more than murderous freebooters. Walter Scott’s novels restored their glamour and they enjoyed a renaissance as dashing Christian soldiers, a view shared by the French and British statesmen and soldiers who reconquered the Middle East in 1917-1918. Sir Steven Runciman’s history (1951-1954) treated the story as a colourful drama. To al-Qaeda and enemies of Israel, the Israelis are merely new crusaders. After 9/11 and George W. Bush’s clumsy reference to the war on terror as a crusade, the Americans became fused with crusaders, whose reputation again hit rock bottom as ignorant, greedy Western colonialists.
The best academic historians have always eschewed these absurd distortions. In Holy Warriors, Jonathan Phillips delivers a history that brings the concept of the crusades up to the present, with both academic analysis and elegant storytelling.
All historians now regard the crusades as much more than just the conquest of Palestine and the downfall of the crusader kingdoms: they have to be seen in the wider context of the reconquest of Spain and Sicily from the Muslims, and later the savage campaigns against the heretical Cathars in France and the pagan Lithuanians in the north, as well as wars against the pope’s rivals in Europe. But what is most striking about the first crusade is that the ideology was new. Phillips shows how Islam had possessed a concept of holy war from the beginning, while Christianity only invented its own version in the late 11th century with the first crusade. The modern myth that the entire crusades were an aggrandizing plunder expedition is disproved by the obvious fact that vast fortunes were sunk and lost in the Middle East without any payback. The crusade was a blend of religion, chivalry, honour, baronial power and adventure that is impossible to understand without acknowledging how seriously the Europeans took their faith.
Equally misleading is the modern myth that the Islamic world was highly cultured compared to the oafish crusaders. There had, indeed, been a period of sophisticated Arab culture, with translations of the Greek scientific and philosophic classics being made while the Christian west stumbled blearily out of the dark ages. But by 1099, the Arab world had fragmented into a perpetual civil war, divided into fiefdoms ruled by coarse Turkish warlords -- a situation not dissimilar to that of the crusaders themselves. In both cultures, high artistry and elegant literature coexisted with astonishing brutality and religious rigidity.
In 1099, the crusaders finally reached Jerusalem, encouraged along the way by visions and miracles, and slaughtered much of the population. Godfrey de Bouillon became advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, followed by his brother Baldwin, who became king of Jerusalem. Phillips tells how at first the Islamic leadership scarcely reacted to the fall of Jerusalem: it took almost half a century for the success of the crusader kingdoms to produce the political necessity of an Islamic holy war. Its creator was a Turkish warlord named Zengi who slaughtered whole cities, scalped, crucified, and tortured at every opportunity.
By the late 1170s, that fascinating figure Saladin, who was brutal in his rise to power but an unusually attractive ruler once he got there, had united Syria and Egypt against Jerusalem. Even he, however, considered slaughtering the Christians, only dissuaded by the crusader threat to destroy the Dome of the Rock. Richard the Lionheart almost won back Jerusalem but, while he was a soldier of genius fighting a statesman of genius, both he and Saladin were stretched to extremes by a war that neither could win. Once Jerusalem had fallen and Saladin had died, his heirs wound down their holy war, fighting off a series of aggressive crusade attacks on Egypt and even negotiating a division of Jerusalem itself with the extraordinary Arab[ic]-speaking cosmopolitan Emperor Frederick II. But the result was the fall of the Saladin dynasty and the rise of a series of even more blood-spattered warlords of jihad. Sultan Baibars, born a slave, rose to become king of the Mamluk empire and scourge of the crusaders, another fearsome sadistic conqueror like Zengi before him and very far from the Walter Scott image of chivalrous Saladin with his scimitar.
Phillips delivers an excellent, compelling, flamboyant, and refreshing history of the crusades with wonderful character sketches, the thunder of knights charging and the flash of broadswords in the Syrian sun, but also the analysis and perspective of the best academic history at its most readable. While not allowing modern history to distort the 12th century, he shows how the peace deal that Saladin and Richard Lionheart tried to negotiate was amazingly similar to the negotiations over Jerusalem today.
--Simon Sebag Montefiore is writing a history of Jerusalem.
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