The Crusades have been a topic of intense scholarly investigation for the last forty years. Some of the best historians in the world have focused their efforts on learning how the Crusade movement, unique in human history, could have developed and flourished in medieval Europe. In thousands of journal articles and scholarly monographs Christianity’s holy wars have been probed, analyzed, and debated. Much still remains to be done, but the fruits of all of this research cannot be denied. We now know much more than ever before about the Crusades.
Unfortunately, little of this has reached a general audience—leaving the field to novelists, journalists, or anyone else with a desire to sell books. And make no mistake: The Crusades have always been of interest to readers, and since the attacks of September 11, histories of the Crusades have been in very high demand. For instance, Karen Armstrong—an ex-nun who reissues her book Holy War whenever trouble is brewing in the Middle East—wasted no time adding a new introduction and getting the book back into bookstores within months of the attacks. Innumerable other popular books were quickly cobbled together, mostly cribbed from Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades—a beautifully written book, but one that is now more than fifty years old and thus does not take account of more recent scholarship. Runciman delivers the expected story: The Crusades were a series of brutal wars of intolerance in which the cynical, voracious, superstitious, and gullible waged insensible war against a peaceful, sophisticated Muslim world, crushing the opulent Byzantine Empire in the bargain.
