The First Crusade (original) (raw)

The Crusades Christianity and Islam Book Review

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

Crusades and early Christian attitudes toward warfare

I prepared this as a "read ahead" for a seminar on crusades and holy war that I gave at the U.S. Naval Academy's Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership in fall 2014. It is based on teaching materials I prepared for my survey course on war in the middle ages and for seminars on the crusades

The Crusades: Historical Interpretations from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century

Lecture delivered to the Plantagenet Society of Australia at Hornsby Library, 16 March, 2019

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.