Contesting the Crusades (review)

Contesting the Crusades is without question the best introduction on the market to the modern historiography of the crusades, although Norman Housley, who is more interested in them than in the settlements established in the Levant, does not include developments in the history of the Latin East. His analyses of recent treatments of the First Crusade and of the historiography of crusading in the later Middle Ages, a relatively new field which is very much his own, are brilliant. He writes perceptive guides to publications on crusading in the central Middle Ages as an idea and an institution and on its manifestation in many different theaters-of-war. In a survey of writings on inter-faith relations, he makes the often neglected point that crusading cannot be defined solely in terms of opposition to Islam, since it was directed against many other enemies as well.

The last suggestion depends, of course, on the premise that operations in theaters other than the Levant and Iberia were themselves crusades. Contesting the Crusades opens with a chapter on this controversial topic. Most historians, for whom Housley himself invented the title of Pluralists, now maintain that authentic crusades were fought not only against Muslims for the recovery of Jerusalem or in its defense, but also against many different enemies on different fronts. A feature of Pluralism has been the degree to which its advocates, among them Housley himself, have been prepared to argue their case publicly. Although a few scholars, notably Ernst-Dieter Hehl, Christopher Tyerman, and Giles Constable, have defended other positions or have questioned elements in Pluralism, James Brundage has pointed out that most "adherents to the other viewpoints . . . seem not to have been moved to produce a similar coherent and systematic theoretical justification for their approach to the subject." A really valuable feature of Contesting the Crusades is that Housley articulates clearly and fairly the ideas of this muffled opposition.

Paradoxically, one has to look to the ranks of the Pluralists themselves to find any extended critique of their own position. In a thoughtful discussion Housley expresses doubts whether Pluralism is the panacea we once thought it to be, but although he recognizes that exceptions to any general rule will always be found he still seems to be searching for some all-embracing definition.

Elsewhere in the book he introduces his readers to another controversial topic, the "spectrum of goals, hopes, beliefs and fears that first impelled people to take the cross and later sustained them while they were on crusade." Everyone accepts that motivation was multifaceted and that it cannot be understood without a thorough knowledge of the context in which people took the cross and a recognition of the triggers that would galvanize them into action, including those intangible ones which Marcus Bull, who with Housley is a leading light in a group of British-trained scholars involved in the new research, has described as being the "the underlying assumptions and instincts which up to then may not have found any dedicated outlet but could now assume a central importance." It is not surprising that there is a division of opinion between those who are convinced that the appeal of crusading was largely charismatic and those who are still drawn to materialist explanations. Housley very fairly summarizes the arguments of both sides.

The subject of the crusades has been so transformed in the last few decades that those brought up on the histories of Runciman or Setton will find it nearly unrecognizable. Contesting the Crusades is by far the most informative and intelligent introduction so far written to the way it is developing.