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Thomas F. Madden’s New Concise History of the Crusades
This is not a whitewash of the Crusades, but a well-researched and explained look at the successes, failures, and motivations of the Crusades from the intensely devotional to the mundane, being sure to examine the crusaders and their foes in the context of the times and culture they lived, not holding them to the standards of today or of our culture.
The book was updated after 9/11 to place the Crusades within the geopolitical context of today. The last chapter examines how the Crusades have been perceived since the seventeenth century and very relevantly among the Muslim people of today. You might be surprised (but then again you might not) that what you’ve been told in the media about Muslims nursing grudges against the West for the crusades for the past seven centuries is a lot of bunk. In his penultimate chapter, Madden concludes:
It is not the crusades, then, that led to the attacks of September 11, but the artificial memory of the crusades constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists. They stripped the medieval expeditions of every aspect of their age and dressed them up instead in the tattered rags of nineteenth-century imperialism. As such, they have become an icon for modern agendas that medieval Christians and Muslims could scarcely have understood, let alone condoned.
What could have been
The history of the Crusades fills me with sorrow because of the sorrow they wrought for all of Christendom. Along with many other failings during the Middle Ages—the political intrigues and ecclesiastical heterodoxy and more—the Crusades sapped the attention and resources of Europe as well as the prominence and esteem for the papacy and led to the Protestant Reformation as well as the so-called Enlightenment, which ended in the rejection of so much popular faith and devotion in the name of secularism.
Madden claims convincingly that Protestantism owes its existence to the threat of the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Turks:
The Protestants and the Turks had a mutually beneficial, although unintentional, relationship. The Turkish threat distracted the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor long enough for Luther to nurture his movement and secure his position. Because of his wars with the Turks and their allies, Charles V was unable to remove Protestants from his northern domains. As Kenneth Setton has noted, “without them [the Turks], Protestantism might conceivably have gone the way of Albigensianism.”
And yet if they had been successful in capturing the Holy Lands and beating back the armies that would have followed, including the Mongols and the various Turks and Tamerlane’s forces and what have you, would we be better off?
In his conclusion, Madden argues that for their failures the crusades also brought many ancillary successes: While the crusader states existed in the Holy Lands (and they did for a long time) the holy places were protected and many of the relics saved and brought to the West; Although Byzantium eventually fell, it cannot be said the crusades were the cause and in fact the crusades did distract Muslim armies from the Empire of the East for centuries; If not for the times when they were unified against a common foe, all those fighting men and all those martial resources would probably have been spent by European kings fighting each other even more, fracturing Christendom to an even greater extent than it was; the advance of Islam was undoubtedly slowed by centuries, at least until Western technology could reach a point at which the Islamic armies could be defeated at Vienna and Lepanto; the destabilizing influence of the crusader states also prevented the unification of Islam into a single unstoppable Caliphate.
Finally, Madden points out that the reconquista in Spain lasted longer than crusades anywhere else and created veterans of those wars who wold go on to become conquistadors in the New World. Those conquistadors would take their ethos as Christian warriors to the Americas where “Without hesitation, they raised their swords against the barbaric cruelties of Aztec human sacrifice, which, they were convinced, were Satanic in origin.”
What I like about Madden’s approach is his tone. Whatever his personal convictions, he handles Christianity and Islam on their own terms, as well as medieval Europeans and Middle Easterners. Unlike many modern historians who treat Christianity as a collection of medieval superstitions, Madden allows the crusaders and their enemies to come forward. St. Louis, King of France, for example, was filled with saintly zeal, while Emperor Frederick was filled with naked ambition. And crusaders in general were convinced that God wanted them to protect the places where Christ preached from defilement and to protect pilgrims from the depredation of those who saw Christians as infidels.
The only other history of the crusades I’d read before now was Hillaire Belloc’s “The Crusades: The World’s Debate”
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COMMENTS
Yes this is an excellent book. Both scholarly and highly readible. Crusades studies have been moving away from the polemic in the academic world, which is kind of surprising - but then again it is building on solid historical research.
Crusades had become just another black legend invented by Protestanism to disparage the Church instead of taking into account the good and bad that had happened. Though we won’t be seeing this on PBS, History Channel, etc on a screen near us anytime soon.
Posted by Jeff Miller on 06/15/08 at 09:46 AM This is the book I have been waiting for! I enjoy history and the crusades have always been something I wanted to understand better. Thankfully there is a book out there that is not full of modern political hype and prejudice. Thanks for the post!
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