Rethinking the Crusades

Rethinking the Crusades | Jonathan Riley-Smith | The Preface to the fourth edition of What Were the Crusades? (Ignatius Press, 2009)

It is 30 years since the first edition of this short book appeared. The earlier prefaces give an account of the subject's progress from my point of view, but they also expose how slow one can be when it comes to recognizing new developments. Writing the preface to the third edition six years ago, I was conscious that the nineteenth century had come into view, but I was still sure that crusading was moribund after 1800. Now I am not so certain.

During the last 30 years a historical vision, which prevailed for nearly two centuries and still informs popular understanding, has been challenged. The vision originated in the writings of two early nineteenth-century authors, the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott and the French historian Joseph-Francois Michaud. Between 1819 and 1831 Scott published four novels in which crusaders played significant parts. For him, a child of the Enlightenment who had been influenced by the philosopher-historian William Robertson, the crusades were the incursions of glamorous but uneducated westerners, childish and destructive, into a civilization superior to their own.

For Michaud, whose Histoire des croisades appeared between 1812 and 1822, and for those writers who followed him, the crusades were glorious instruments of nationalism and proto-imperialism. These views of the past must have seemed irreconcilable—indeed the only thing on which they were in agreement was that a crusade was to be defined by its opposition to Islam—but they began to merge with one another in the 1920s, when crusading, stripped of its ethic, was being interpreted in social and economic terms by Liberal economic historians, who had inherited from imperialism, and took for granted, the assumption that crusading was an early example of colonialism. Scott's Enlightenment image of representatives of an inferior culture barging their way into a more sophisticated one coalesced with the Michaudist Romantic conviction that their motivation had been proto-colonialist and the amalgam gave birth to a neo-imperialistic and materialistic orthodoxy which is still a feature of popular perceptions.

No one had even half-proved this interpretation by research, but by the 1950s it had gained general currency. The consensus prevailing at that time can be summarized as follows.

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Comments

[Thomas]

I have Riley-Smith's THE CRUSADES which is substantially longer than his WHAT WERE THE CRUSADES. Is it worth getting the latter, too, or is it covered in his larger volume?

In short, what's the difference?

[Mark Brumley]

WHAT WERE THE CRUSADES is shorter, more distilled, more recent. Punchier, in my opinion.