[By 1240] crusading had become a system for teaching ideological war and intolerance.
(Crusades page 181)
Terry Jones is of course one of the famous Monty Python team, he has scripted and appeared in TV comedy, directed their feature films as well as written numerous children’s books and poetry. He has always been interested in history and has also written a number of books about the Middle Ages, about Chaucer’s knight and about Vikings, as well as hosting several light-hearted TV series about The Ancient World, Medieval Lives, Barbarians and so on.
Crusades
Crusades was published in 1994 ‘to accompany the acclaimed BBC television series’. It is a relatively short book (196 pages of text) in which to tell such a long complex story. I wouldn’t really recommend it as an introduction let alone a serious overview of the subject because:
1. Its brevity makes it quite confusing. Some characters appear only once or twice: you can tell they’re quite important but are skimmed over very briefly, which makes it hard to remember who’s who.
2. Thus the most vivid section is two-thirds through, about Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, but even this felt rushed – I bet there are scads of better books about both men.
3. Throughout it is marked by snappy sentences, comic insights and sarcastic asides which probably work when delivered on camera, but sit dead on the page.
In September the French raided the suburbs of Nicaea, treating the Christians of the region with legendary nastiness: burning babies on spits, that sort of thing. They returned to camp very pleased with themselves and their booty. (p.23)
4. This facetiousness feels inappropriate. Lots of sentences end in exclamation marks to emphasise the wacky grin they’re being delivered with! But there are only so many times you can point out that the crusaders turned out to be mercenary and forget all about religion! Or that the Arabs could have expelled the Christians from Jerusalem at any point if only they stopped fighting among themselves!
5. The most vivid, that is, until the end of the book when Terry lets rip with his criticism of the Fourth Crusade, whose main achievement was sacking Constantinople, accompanied by a three-day orgy of murder and looting. From this point onwards Terry’s anger becomes more obvious and the book becomes easier to read because, instead of blizzards of new hard-to-remember Arab names on each page, Terry makes more general points:
- by combining Christianity with a mass movement, the Crusades invented ‘Ideology’
- for the popes the Crusades were never about seizing Jerusalem from the infidel; they were about regaining total control of Christendom, crushing the Eastern Orthodox church
- more, in the hands of Innocent III, the crusade was the first totalitarian movement, dedicated to stripping every citizen of all relationships with anyone except the Pope-Führer who could deploy armies of fanatics against anyone who opposed his complete domination
These Big Ideas are enjoyable and memorable because they are so simple. Who knows whether they stand up to scrutiny, you’d need to read a more thoughtful and detailed account to test them…
Meanwhile, on almost every page and whenever he made another sarcastic remark about how the oh-so-holy crusaders set about besieging another Christian town, or allying with Muslims against other Christian rulers, I couldn’t help wondering: If Terry loathes the Crusaders for being the violent and stupid psychopaths he makes them out to be – why has he researche them so lovingly and why is he bothering to write about them?
In the end, more sober, considered histories of terrible events are more telling because they don’t flatter, patronise, speak down, ironise, ridicule or dress up the story: the more seriously they take terrible events, the more seriously the reader is obliged to enter into full understanding of them, the more scathed and appalled we are in our imaginations.
This book would have benefited hugely from a chronology or timeline. I’ve tried to create one in another blog post:
Consequences
The crusades:
1. Reopened the Mediterranean to commerce and travel, enabling Genoa and Venice to flourish.
2. Helped create a centralised Catholic Church under strong papal leadership, identifying the Pope as a powerful political leader in his own right, often in open armed conflict with other European rulers. But which also spawned criticism, rebel movements and theology, seeking to escape Rome’s totalitarian, rich and corrupt practices. Leading, after several false starts, to the Reformation in the 1520s.
3. Poisoned relations between the Roman and Eastern churches down to this day.
4. The fourth Crusade, by sacking Constantinople, severely weakened the Eastern Empire contributing (arguably) to its fall to the Turks in 1453.
5. Poisoned relations with the Muslim world. To this day invoking the Crusades calls up images of barbarian brutality, bloodshed and infidel arrogance.
6. Badly affected relations with Jews. The Rhineland Massacres of 1096 were the first outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in Europe and were still being cited by Zionists in the 19th century as showing the need for an independent Jewish state.
7. And they were the source of centuries of literature, history, poems, plays and operas about ‘heroism’ and ‘chivalry’ and ‘nobility’ and ‘duty’ for centuries afterwards.
Crusader words
Crusade comes from the French croisade i.e. derives from the Latin words for cross, croix, crux.
Before the 16th century the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ were rarely used by Europeans, who commonly wrote about Saracens, a word derived via French from an obscure Arabic origin.
Outremer From the French: outre-mer, meaning over-seas – the name given to the Crusader states established after the First Crusade viz. the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Saladin Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb in Arabic and Selahedînê Eyûbî in Kurdish, because he was actually a Muslim of Kurdish origin.
Books & Boots 