The Crusades: An Epitome is a sweeping and succinct new survey that introduces readers to the history of the crusades from the eleventh to the twenty-first century. By considering the most recent scholarship and synthesizing a variety of historical perspectives, the book deliberately locates crusading in the broader history of the Mediterranean, moving away from approaches primarily focused on narrating the deeds of a small section of the European Christian elite to explore the rich and contested complexity of crusade history.

This excerpt is the conclusion of the book and considers the provocative question, “have the crusades ended?” By outlining how selective and incomplete ideas of the crusades have functioned in modern geopolitical debates right up until the present moment, I show both the connection and the disjunction between past and present, between the history of the crusades and their modern depiction. Ultimately, I suggest, both past and present urge us to acknowledge the complexity of human relationships and the danger of simplistic “us v. them” ideologies of violence.

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Conclusion: Have the Crusades Ended?

“‘Crusade’ even in its most apparently benign usage divides the world into black and white […] it effaces the nuance, the grey, in both our modern world and the medieval one it purports to represent.”[1]

Crusading influenced European national identities and European interactions with the rest of the world in the early modern and modern eras. This lasting impression is visible in not only the material cultures of Europe and in a legacy of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim ideologies and actions, but in European philosophy and history. In eighteenth-century Europe, historians like David Hume and Edward Gibbon disparaged the crusades as the opposite of the rational “Enlightenment” they themselves hoped to promote. This disparagement created an image of the crusades that has persisted to the present, namely, that of barbaric wars fueled by greed and religious fanaticism. From this perspective, these unholy wars serve as the mascot for a murky Middle Ages, a veritable Dark Age. In creating this image of the crusades, eighteenth-century historians pulled on medieval sources selectively, making use of those that supported their perspective and ignoring—or unaware of—counterevidence.

In contrast, nineteenth-century romanticism and nationalism ushered in an era of increased positive attention to the crusades in Europe. Romantic writers like Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth simultaneously glorified both the crusades and Salah al-Din, whom they depicted as culturally and morally sophisticated. Historians like Joseph Michaud used the crusades to bolster contemporary national identity and kindle nationalistic fervor. The great edited compilations of crusading primary sources were constructed at the same time as the great edited compilations of “national” primary sources from the Middle Ages, and some imperialists explicitly linked their enterprises to earlier centuries of crusading. For example, L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara, a new military order, was briefly created to promote Franco-Catholic interests in Africa, while in England, Sir William Hillary called for a new crusade to seize Acre from the Ottomans and establish a new order-state centered on Jerusalem.

Unsurprisingly, then, in the nineteenth-century the English word “crusade” acquired the broader, romanticized meaning of a righteous pursuit of justice. The romantic nationalists had generated a second image of the crusades that has also persisted to the present. Thus, in European history and memory, the eighteenth-century image of unholy holy wars rubbed shoulders with the nineteenth-century image of honorable, glorious, and self-sacrificing quests to build a better world by using force to smite the evildoer, defend the good, and liberate the oppressed. In creating this nineteenth-century image of the crusades, European historians, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, used medieval sources selectively.

The crusades continued to be invoked as an historical example for imperialist and other national or “Western” military endeavors in the twentieth century. Jonathan Riley-Smith has asserted that it was in the aftermath of World War I that European nations and the United States of America drew back from explicit comparison between modern warfare and the crusades.[2] However, such comparisons actually carried on later into the twentieth century; examples are as readily available as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1948 memoir of World War II, titled Crusade in Europe.[3] Indeed, in the early twenty-first century American politicians on both right and left have continued to discuss “crusading” either to support or criticize American aggression.[4] Meanwhile, as Andrew Elliott has demonstrated, the crusades are heavily invoked and reimagined by white nationalists across mass media platforms.[5]

In Islamicate spheres, the crusades have also been remembered in different ways and used to support different contemporary agendas. Memories of the crusades and of Salah al-Din in particular, as well as “fears of renewed attack,” remained present in Islamic popular and historical literature.[6] These memories were influenced—though not caused—by European cultural trends in the nineteenth century; the romanticized vision of bold yet culturally unsophisticated crusaders encountering a superior and chivalric Salah al-Din was particularly in line with existing trends in Islamic historiography.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I gave rise to both Arab Nationalism and Pan-Islamism,  which each remembered and reimagined the crusades. Both Arab Nationalists and Pan-Islamists oppose American and European imperialism in its political and cultural dimensions and both movements seek to build a unified state in west Asia. Both also believe that such a state would reflect the history of the region accurately. In other words, from their perspective, such a state would constitute a return to a better model rather than an entirely unprecedented challenge to the imperialist status quo. However, at the risk of overgeneralizing, while Arab Nationalists seek to build a unified Arab nation, Pan-Islamists seek to build a unified Islamic nation, i.e., a theocracy. In the later twentieth century, speaking again in broad terms, Arab Nationalism lost ground to Pan-Islamism.

Both Arab Nationalists and Pan-Islamists have constructed and made use of their own images of the crusades. For mid-twentieth-century thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, the crusades were an ominous history, the victories of Salah al-Din notwithstanding. Western imperialism/intervention in majority Muslim regions—including, after World War II, the existence of the state of Israel—appeared as the latest manifestation of “Crusading Spirit.”[7] Thus the crusades became both an inspirational example from the past and an ongoing and oppressive reality to fight in the present. Political leaders, perhaps most notably Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, President of Egypt (1956–70), and Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq (1979–2003), used words, art, and in the case of al-Nasir, film to depict themselves as modern Salah al-Dins. While twenty-first-century militant groups like al Qaeda and IS do not share all the same goals and ideals, they do share anti-crusading rhetoric and imagery. Furthermore, they have effectively used references to crusading in American and European political discourse to bolster their claim that the crusades are indeed ongoing and require armed resistance.[8]

In summary, then, there are a number of modern actors worldwide who maintain that the crusades are ongoing today, even if they disagree on whether that is a reason to rejoice or an injustice to protest. Whether rejoicing or protesting, these modern actors often see the continuation of crusading as a reason to take up arms and commit violence. And strictly speaking, these actors are not completely fabricating the history of the crusades, but rather—not unlike European historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—they are seizing upon the evidence they want to see and disregarding the rest.

One might hope that a historian’s perspective would be clearer, but even as a historian, it is difficult to establish a precise date at which the crusades can indeed be said to have ended. If we apply pluralist criteria, it appears that crusading ended in 1645. But the persistence of Hospitaller Malta into the eighteenth century and the nineteenth-century example of L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara make it difficult to fix a concrete end date. Faced with this problem, Jonathan Riley-Smith suggested two analytical categories for modern phenomena: “para-crusading” (containing some “authentic elements”) and “pseudo-crusading” (containing no “authentic elements,” just borrowed rhetoric and imagery).[9] According to these categories, L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara was paracrusading, while Eisenhower’s choice of book title was pseudocrusading.

This analytical model is quite unwieldy but that very unwieldiness is illuminating. Clearly, even if we conclude that the crusades ended in the mid-seventeenth century, the legacy of crusading continues to unfold. As a result, crusading cannot be decisively locked into the box of the Middle Ages and the key thrown away; neither can modern violence, rhetorical or physical, be neatly detached from the premodern past. We are unavoidably challenged to contend with complex and contested ideas about the past alongside ongoing and horribly real violence in the present.

I hope to have shown in this book that the complicated nature of the crusades—the extreme multivalence of crusading—long predates the modern era’s use of the term and the history. Crusading emerged from a long tradition of Christian violence and warfare, as well as within a dynamic Mediterranean world. Crusading was always viewed differently by different observers and participants, and even in the Middle Ages, its history was often linked to one political agenda or another. Those Latin Christians who supported crusading utilized a wide and variable set of ideas and cultural practices to do so. Those outside the cultural boundaries of Latin Christendom not only viewed the crusades in different ways, but viewed them in ways that shifted over time, as they variously found themselves allies or enemies of crusaders. On all sides, some deliberately presented and may well have fully believed in the crusading enterprise as a categorical civilizational conflict. Yet given the ways in which Latin Christians used crusading to further their own political, economic, and social causes, including against each other, and given the wide range of people who participated in crusading, it is impossible to claim that the crusades actually were categorical civilizational conflicts, or even that all of those involved believed them to be so. It is also impossible to claim that all the targets of crusading violence necessarily interpreted every assault they suffered as religious or cultural violence, as opposed to violence motivated by political or economic concerns. To emphatically quote historian Brian Catlos, “we should not expect the people of the past to be any more coherent, consistent, or comprehensible than those of today.”[10]

When today the crusades are invoked in twenty-first-century geopolitics, they are usually invoked, in the words of Umej Bhatia, as a “poster-child of civilizational conflict.” To depict crusading in this way does draw upon some historical evidence—namely, the evidence that presents the crusades in that way—but simultaneously ignores the evidence for a much more complex and interconnected past. These depictions also draw upon all the images of crusading generated in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In other words, when we look at how the crusades are used in contemporary geopolitics, we see both the influence of an incomplete interpretation of the medieval past and the influence of modern histories, ideologies, priorities, and practices. Historians can counter the selective interpretation of the past by providing a broader perspective, as this book has sought to do, but that broader perspective will remain full of complexity and ambiguity.

While recognizing that complexity and ambiguity can be frustrating, these characteristics of the history of the crusades may be uniquely valuable. Given the effectiveness of ‘us vs. them’ rhetorics of religious violence in the past and in the present, complexity and ambiguity seem particularly constructive. They encourage us to continue to ask questions, consider alternatives, rethink conclusions, and acknowledge complications. The very desire many clearly feel for crystalline clarity on the question of “the crusades”—at its most extreme, a desire for an ‘us vs. them’ past to support an ‘us vs. them’ present—should urge us to recognize the variety of ways in which history has been and still is mobilized for polemical purposes and to incite violence. I hope that this book leads you, the reader, to do all of these things as you continue to explore the history of crusading for yourself.

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^[1]      Matthew Gabriele, “Debating the ‘Crusade’ in Contemporary America,” The Medieval Journal 6: 1 (2016): 84.

^[2]      Riley-Smith, Crusades, 344.

^[3]      See also, particularly, Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

^[4]      Gabriele, “Debating the ‘Crusade’.”

^[5]      Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media. Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). See especially Chapters 4, 6, and 7.

^[6]      Diana Abouali, “Saladin’s Legacy in the Middle East,” Crusades 10 (2011): 175–85, at 180. See also Konrad Hirschler, “The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative,” Crusades 13 (2014), 37–76.

^[7]      Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, 269.

^[8]      Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media, especially Chapters 5 and 8.

^[9]      Riley-Smith, Crusades, 333–36.

^[10]    Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 520.

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Susanna Throop is Associate Professor of History at Ursinus college. She studies the cultural history of Christian religious violence, particularly in the context of the crusades. Her current scholarly projects include a chapter on crusading violence for the forthcoming Cambridge World History of Violence, co-authoring the fourth edition of The Crusades: A History by Jonathan Riley-Smith, and new work on the role of the crucifixion in crusading culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She is General Co-Editor of the book series Christianities Before Modernity.

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Copyright © 2018 Susanna A. Throop / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0