God's War: A New History of the Crusades

By forcing an otherwise improbably intimate contact with western Asia through centuries of contest over the Christian Holy Places in Palestine, the crusades encouraged European inquiry and experience beyond traditional horizons. One path to the thought-world of Christopher Columbus stretched back to Pope Urban II’s first call to arms for the Christian reconquest of Jerusalem in 1095. The moral certainties fostered by crusading left physical or cultural monuments and scars from the Arctic Circle to the Nile, from the synagogues of the Rhineland to the mosques of Andalusia, from the vocabulary of value to the awkward hinterland of historic Christian pride, guilt and responsibility. Whether admired, with a contemporary of the First Crusade in the 1090s, as ‘the greatest event since the Resurrection’, or mocked, with Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, as a ‘rendezvous of cracked brains that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat’, or condemned, with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, as ‘the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’, the crusades remain one of the great subjects of European history.

A familiar but baneful response to history is to configure the past as comfortingly different from the present day. Previous societies are caricatured as less sophisticated, more primitive, cruder, alien. Such attitudes reveal nothing so much as a collective desire to reassure the modern observer by demeaning the experience of the past. Within the cultural traditions of Europe and western Asia, since the sixteenth century the crusades have regularly attracted precisely such condescension from hostile religious, cultural or ideological partisans. The crusades have been dismissed as a symptom of a credulous, superstitious and backward civilization in order openly or covertly to elevate a supposedly more advanced and enlightened modern society. Yet this hardly helps understanding of past events. Another contrary vision, no less distorted, regards the past as a mirror to the present. Thus the battles of the cross are held to presage the conflicts of European imperialism, colonialism and western cultural supremacism. Yet many of the supposed links between past events and current problems are modern, not historical, constructs, invented to lend spurious legitimacy to wholly unconnected current political, social, economic and religious problems. So the crusades have been presented as symbols both of the past’s inferiority and relevance. It is, by contrast, perhaps worthwhile to attempt to explore the phenomenon as far as possible on its own terms. That is the purpose of what follows.

More than half a century ago, Steven Runciman, with typical style and false modesty, imperishably pitted his pen against the ‘massed typewriters of the United States’. He won. His History of the Crusades, published in three volumes between 1951 and 1954, became the classic twentieth-century account of the subject and remains a remarkable work of literature as much as history. It would be folly and hubris to pretend to compete, to match, as it were, my clunking computer keyboard with his pen, at once a rapier and a paintbrush; to pit one volume, however substantial, with the breadth, scope and elegance of his three. Yet scholarship and the world have moved since 1954: the former in part directly due to Runciman’s inspiration; the latter in contradiction to the civilized and humane principles of faith and reason that shine from his great work. The crusades are no longer understood in quite the way they were in the 1950s either by scholars, informed by the new insights of research, or a wider public who imagine a largely spurious relevance to the twenty-first century. On these grounds, an attempt to describe again what is now perhaps the most familiar, if misunderstood, of all medieval phenomena may be justified.