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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 114-116



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Book Review

Tolerance and Intolerance:
Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades


Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades. Edited by Michael Gervers and James M. Powell. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. 2001. Pp. xx, 191. $39.95 hardbound; $18.95 paperbound.)

Religious tolerance is not a characteristic that one tends to associate with medieval Christendom in general and with the era of the crusades in particular. The twelve essays that appear in this volume add some original, and occasionally unexpected nuances to this view.

The essays collected here began as papers in a session sponsored by the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East during the Eighteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences, which met at Montreal in 1995. The editors have grouped them in four thematic sections.

The opening section, "Confrontation, Captivity, and Redemption," contains four papers that deal with the consequences that defeated participants in military engagements might suffer. David Hay cautions in the first of these papers that historians must treat medieval accounts of massacres with considerable caution, since chroniclers whose sympathies lie with either side in the encounter are notoriously prone to exaggerate the numbers of those slain. Crusading chroniclers, he notes, tended to be ideologically driven, which led them to claim that their foes suffered huge, often totally unrealistic, casualties. Non-combatants in general, and women in particular, were less likely than men to be killed in the aftermath of battle. Since they were potentially valuable, women [End Page 114] were commonly taken prisoner as part of the spoils of war. The remaining essays in this section, by Yaacov Lev, Giulio Cipollone, and James W. Brodman, deal with what happened to prisoners of war. Lev deals with the treatment of POWs captured during wars between Muslims and Crusaders under Fatimid and Ayyubid rulers. In contrast to the common image of Saladin as a merciful victor, Lev characterizes his treatment of POWs as "callous." Giulio Cipollone next provides a brief overview of the religious foundations of intolerance in Islam and Christendom, while James W. Brodman closes this section with a discussion of the rhetoric that surrounded the ransom of captives taken during crusading expeditions in the Iberian peninsula.

In the following section, entitled "Cooperation, Conflict, and Issues of Identity," James D. Ryan provides an account of the changing relationships between the Latin and Armenian churches during the crusading period. Paul L. Sidelko follows with an essay on the taxation of the Muslim population in the crusader states, while Reuven Amitai examines the unsuccessful attempt of Edward I of England to establish an alliance with the Mongol ruler of Iran, Ilkhan Abagha against the Mamluks. Adam Knobler closes this group of papers with an intriguing essay on series of attempts between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries to use Jews as instruments in Christian holy wars against Islam.

Two papers, one by Annetta Ilieva, the other by Andrew Jotischky, comprise the third part of the collection. Ilieva examines the accounts of relations between Latin and Eastern Orthodox Christians in Cyprus, while Jotischky deals with the evidence for the growing hostility between the Latin and Greek churches in the crusader states that appears in a treatise by Gerard of Nazareth on St. Mary Magdalene.

The book closes with two final papers that consider two different perspectives on the themes of tolerance and intolerance that medieval intellectuals provided. James Muldoon looks at the distinctions that medieval canon lawyers drew between different types of religious toleration. Forced baptism and conversion, the canonists agreed, were inadmissible in law, although authorities were within their rights not only to provide opportunities for Christian missionaries to preach to their Jewish and Muslim subjects, but even to require those subjects to attend their sermons. The religious toleration of the canon law was, however, asymmetrical: Christian rulers were not obliged to permit non-Christian missionaries to seek converts among their subjects. The canonists also maintained that nonbelievers should not be forcibly expelled...

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