Seven Myths of the Crusades ed. by Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt (review)

Modern democratization of information has not been accompanied by an equivalent extension of learning. That, at least, is the implied premise of this book, which takes as its target the contrast between popular perception and academic understanding of the nature and significance of medieval crusades. Given the active and potentially toxic recruitment of the crusades in current international public and political debate, the peddling of myth and untruth may appear to possess more serious consequences than the ruffled egos of the ignored professoriat.

The stated aim of this collection of essays is to correct seven prominent popular misconceptions: that the First Crusade (1095–99) was unprovoked, the first military conflict between Christendom and Islam (Paul Crawford); that crusading demonstrated a form of irrational religious madness (James Muldoon); that the crusades initiated and defined European anti-Judaism (Daniel Franke); that crusaders were proto-colonists, motivated by material greed (Corliss Slack); that the Children’s Crusade of 1212 was a genuine story of corrupted innocence (David Sheffler); that there is any connection at all between Freemasonry and the military order of the Templars (Jace Stuckey); that the crusades have been a constant historic source of Muslim grievance (Mona Hammad and Edward Peters). The aim may seem laudable enough. However, despite its solid scholarly virtues and intellectual caliber, it is hard to see how the book serves its purpose. On the one hand, most contributions are to varying degrees self-referentially academic, weighted with long (and, for the insider, very useful) footnotes that will hardly attract the uninitiated. Most spend time, much of it repetitive, detailing current historio-graphical matters perhaps of interest to fellow historians but of no interest for an audience from the misinformed public. Perhaps the idea is for the book to be used like a thirteenth-century preacher’s manual, to help fellow professionals trounce the distortions of the ignorant. Professional solipsism pervades the de haut en bas editorial identification of wisdom in “the mainstream of today’s scholarly interpretation—a general consensus built upon decades of research, reflection and debate” (p. viii). Such ex cathedra pronouncements insisting on the primacy of the “mainstream” and “consensus” should alarm self-respecting critical historians. As is later conceded, skepticism and doubt lie at the center of any attempt to make sense of the evidence from the past. Acknowledgment of complexity is precisely what alienates promoters of meretricious untruths based on seductive symmetry and bogus clarity of definition. If Seven Myths is intended to provide dinner table, seminar room, or soapbox ammunition, rather than to appeal directly to a supposed general readership, this explains why much of the material is very familiar to anyone working in this historical area. The nature of the project constrains fresh insight, although some contributors appear to be implicitly defending the reputation of the crusades, thus falling into the same unhistorical trap in which they rightly locate those they seek to refute. Particular icons of myth get repeated bashing such as Terry Jones’s TV documentary (2006) and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), even though the former has been forgotten in its country of origin (the United Kingdom), whereas the latter, dire as it is as drama, is just fiction. As such, Scott legitimately can do what he likes with plot and character. It is not historical error that needs to be asserted here but genre category confusion. Occasionally, myth intrudes, as in Crawford’s undifferentiated typology of “Muslim” political power and his apparent assumption that frontier conflicts were ipso facto religious—another oversimplified, Manichean falsehood inviting challenge. Apart from the lucid introduction, the best contribution is that by Hammad and Peters on the development of the crusades as a totem of insult and oppression across what they call the Islamicate, a term embracing the religious, geographic, political, chronological, and cultural diversity of Islamic societies...