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.
Continue reading....
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?
Posted by: Thomas | Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 07:52 PM
WHAT WERE THE CRUSADES is shorter, more distilled, more recent. Punchier, in my opinion.
Posted by: Mark Brumley | Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 08:38 AM