The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (review)

252 Reviews 'Imagining Absence: Chaucer's Griselda and Walter without Petrarch', is its tendency to emphasise things, as if we might not otherwise follow what he is saying: he does so at least 73 times (including in the title). Schildgen uses poor grammar and syntax to make very dubious and oversimplified claims. The result is nothing much more than an argument that Boccaccio and Chaucer think storytelling is a good thing. As is often the case with such collections, this is uneven. Then again, so too are the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: perhaps, then, this very divergence of approaches and quality can be seen as a tribute to a topic that will retain our interest so long as w e enjoy storytelling. Lawrence Warner Australian Academy of the Humanities Laiou, Angeliki E. and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, eds., The Crusades from the Perspective ofByzantium and the Muslim World, Washington, D C , Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001; cloth; pp. viii, 297; 35 b/w plates, 1 b/w map, 3 b/w illustrations; R R P US$48.00; ISBN 0884022773. The 15 studies in this collection began as presentations at a 1997 Dumbarton Oaks symposium. At a time when many conferences were examining the nine hundredth anniversary of crusading from a western perspective, this particular conference concentrated on the Byzantine and Muslim experiences of crusade. The volume begins with an historiographical survey. Here Giles Constable provides a helpful breakdown of trends in crusading interpretations, from 1095 to the present. Strangely, given that the premise of the collection is non-western experiences of crusade, the essay concentrates on western scholarship only. While the essay is certainly no less useful for that, the disjunction between the content ofthe individual essay and the volume's overall guiding principle is a noticeable one. C o m m o n to many collections of ex-conference papers, this volume is more a collection of separate ideas than it is one cohesive idea, question, or approach. Thefirstsection focuses on holy war. Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid survey the Islamic idea ofjihad before the crusades, tracing how various legal ideas became more normative over time. George T. Dennis examines what Byzantine writers meant by the term 'holy war', concluding that wars were importantfirstof all because they were imperial wars, and only secondly because they were religious. Reviews 253 The second section concentrates on perceptions and literary representations . M. C. Lyons begins with a fairly general study ofh o w Arabian hero cycles represented Europe and Europeans. To a reader unfamiliar with the Arabic sources, such as myself, this essay needed to spend much more time establishing the background and context of the literature under investigation. This goes to a larger point- surely, ifwestern-focussed scholars are to have a better appreciation ofMuslim experiences of crusade, thenfrillintroductions to the relevant primary sources are essential. In the following essay Nadia Maria El-Cheikh discusses Muslim representations of Byzantium in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, pointing out that early slurs against Byzantines were no longer current by the end of the period since these same slurs were n o w levied against western crusaders. Robert W . Thomson then investigates Armenian perceptions of crusaders. He concludes that there was not as much attention to the crusaders as one might imagine; when there was attention if was mainly to incorporate the crusaders into the long tradition ofArmenian history and literature, and to present crusaders as fulfilments ofearlier prophecies. Here Thomson makes an important point - when non-western authors discussed westerners, they were first and foremost describing, defining, and indeed constituting their o w n identities and cultures. Western crusaders were used and put to the service of an agenda totally separate from the agenda ofthe crusades. The next essay is Alexander Kazhdan's study of western-Byzantine relations in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Arguing that scholars have over-emphasised the effects of the so-called schism of 1054, Kazhdan reminds us that there were m a n y examples of western particularly Norman Frankish) influence in Byzantine politics and military affairs. Following this Elizabeth Jeffreys and Michael Jeffreys discuss two poems from their forthcoming edition ofthe corpus...