War and Religion: Europe and the Mediterranean from the First through the Twenty-First Centuries by Arnaud Blin (review)

What preconceptions and resources undergird a survey of the intimate intersections between two such vast topics over the past 2,000 years by an American-educated Frenchman? A little history proves helpful. In 2007, the same academic press translated Blin's jointly authored examination, in French, of terrorism's long and complex history, beginning with the Jewish Zealots—The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al-Qaeda. Twelve years later, in this sequel, which needs no translator, Gérard Chaliand, Blin's former senior co-editor, copiously thanked in the acknowledgements, reappears on the back-cover blurb, and the Zealots again dominate the first chapter.

This time, religion rather than terrorism drives the narrative; the usual "big three" Abrahamic monotheistic suspects hold center stage. Buddhism gets passing mention for its "penetrating discussion of the ethics of war" in the Bhagavad Gita (18). Meanwhile, the 20 percent of humanity living in the Chinese Middle Kingdom, where "religious identity has been much less robust" (18), saw plenty of armed conflict but seem to have been exempt from the horrors of religious warfare—until a Chinese Christian who failed his civil-service exam reinvented himself as Jesus' younger brother and launched the Taiping Rebellion of 1852–1864, "one of the most devastating wars of all time, leaving at least twenty million dead" (281–83).

Blin observes that Judaism's scriptural canon is far more violent than those of their successors; its God of War even commands ethnic cleansing (46). It contrasts vividly with the almost unrelieved pacifism of the Christian New Testament, seeming even more consistently bellicose than the "vague and often conflicting passages on war and jihad" in the Koran (47–48). Nevertheless, Judaism disappears from this account after Masada, although "religion remained inescapable along the fault lines where the [other] great monotheistic religions repeatedly clashed" (23). Considering what Christians did, despite their pacifist New Testament, after taking over the Roman Empire, and the amazing military record of Islam in its first century, we can only be relieved that a dispersed Judaism lacked armies for almost nineteen centuries after Masada.

Blin's survey is unusual in its emphasis on the remote rather than recent history of this "Clash of Civilizations" (Chapter 4) centered in the Mediterranean. His central fulcrum—covered earlier by Henri Pirenne's classic Mohammed and Charlemagne (London, 1954) (still in print after 80 years!)—is the Christian crusades and the Muslim response to it, mainly by Saladin, its major protagonist, to whom Blin gives admiring attention (167–178). Blin's account features a peculiar mixture of Christian justifications for warfare and descriptions of military tactics, paying less attention to the major schism in Christianity of 1054 a.d., which permanently separated those whom Muslim sources call "Franks" from the "Romans" of Byzantium, than to the ongoing Sunni–Shiite schism in Islamic domains.

Frictions within the Abode of Islam pale alongside the frictions within Christianity. Twenty years before the first Crusade, the "Frankish" Pope Gregory VII proposed an armed "pilgrimage" to Jerusalem in order to protect Byzantium and its rival Patriarch (146). However, cooperation proved elusive. Fewer than twenty years after Saladin's truce with the "Romans" helped him to recapture Jerusalem, the fourth papally instigated "armed pilgrimage" preferred to conquer and plunder Constantinople rather than reconquer Jerusalem (178–180). Not for another 250 years did a Muslim ruler conquer Constantinople. At that point, Mehmed II retained the city's Christian Patriarch while making himself a Muslim Caliph, a major development that is overlooked in Blin's account.

A long detour from the Mediterranean basin follows, as Blin meanders through the numerous military conflicts among the Latin "Franks" starting in 1524. His final chapter, "Religious Violence in a Secular World," contrasts the great-power diplomatic comedy that officially provoked the Crimean War with the pragmatic local arrangements in Jerusalem. In it, Blin notes the war's effect...