George Demacopoulos on Colonizing Crusaders

I had a very lovely breakfast with George Demacopolous in Romania in January at IOTA and so heard from him directly about his forthcoming book, which has just been published: Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (Fordham UP, 2019), 272pp.

Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about the book. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

GD: Methodologically, I am trained as a pre-modern historian, but I’ve spent a good deal of time among Religious Studies and Theology faculties so I suppose you could say that my interests lie in applying historical-critical methods to aspects of Church history that continue to resonate with modern believers.  In recent years, I’ve grown more appreciative of certain theoretical resources, such as discourse analysis and postcolonial critique, because I think that they offer fresh ways of interpreting pre-modern texts.

AD: This is a book that tackles three controversial things—the Crusades, colonialism, and competing Christian identities. Tell us a bit about how you came to see the connections between them, and perhaps especially how you found the critical scholarly literature on colonialism and post-colonialism to be helpful. 

GD: It all started when Aristotle Papanikolaou and I began to explore the negative reception of Augustine among modern Orthodox communities.  The more I read the various caricatures of Augustine that prevailed in Russian and Greek writing in the 19th and 20th century, the more it became apparent that there must be a “backstory” to modern Orthodox identity narration that functioned in negative juxtaposition to the West, especially Catholicism and its bogey men—Augustine, Aquinas, etc.

As it happened—and this was about 10 years ago--I was in a faculty “theory” group at Fordham at the same time and we spent a few years reading postcolonial theory.  The more I thought about modern Orthodox identity in light of the stages of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialsim, the more I became convinced that there were aspects of the Orthodox story that aligned with phenomena in other cultures and contexts.  While I found the work of many postcolonial theorists (e.g. Said, Bhabha, Young, etc.) to be enlightening and provocative for my thinking about modern Orthodox identity formation vis-à-vis the West, it was also clear to me that there were at least two really important differences from the historical setting that I was pursuing versus the ones that postcolonial theorists typically engage in Africa, India, and the Middle East.

First, whereas their stories typically involved Christianity as an important aspect of the hegemonic colonial force, the Orthodox Christian story is possibly the only one in history where a Christian community is the victim of colonization, rather than the aggressor.  I believe this has some important implications—not only for Orthodox identity but also for the ways in which it complicates our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and colonialism.  Second, unlike the vast majority of the colonial stories that animate postcolonial critics, the Orthodox experience of colonialism occurred in the Middle Ages (not the early modern period).  I’m convinced, in fact, that the Western European experience during the Crusading period served as an important reference point for subsequent colonial enterprises.

AD: Until his death a few years ago, the Cambridge Crusades scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith mentioned more than once his despair that no matter how this history is told, it will always be traduced and tendentiously misrepresented for present political purposes. Did you hesitate at all before wading into the histories of the Crusades? Did you despair at all after having done so?!

GD: Yes, Riley-Smith took the Crusaders at their word that they believed themselves to be doing the work of God, that their conquest of the Near East was an “act of love.”  I don’t think I ever hesitated to pursue this project along the lines Riley-Smith laments.  I suppose if there is one thing that I don’t want readers to do with my work it is to misread my goals for the project. When I draw attention to some of the terrible things that Western Crusaders did and the outlandish ways by which they justified them, I do not do so in order for us to dismiss Western Christianity or because I think that those people represent Western Christendom.

Rather, I draw attention to this history because it helps us to explain the political, cultural, and military context in which Eastern Christians first began to narrate an Orthodox identity that was decidedly framed by juxtaposition against the West.  My theological point of view (such as I have one) is that the breakdown of Christian unity in the thirteenth century has virtually nothing to do with theology—it was entirely born of political and cultural animus. Viewing the breakdown through the lens of a colonial encounter (supplemented by the insights of postcolonial critique) helps us to see this in ways that more traditional historical-critical methods can elide.

AD: You also suggest in your introduction that the Fourth Crusade is especially painful in the East for opening up “permanent fissures within the Orthodox community.” Tell us a bit more about that.

GD: More than anything else, the legacy of the Fourth Crusade is that Eastern Christians have become divided over the proper response to the West.  It was in the context of the Latin empire of Byzantium that some Eastern Christians began to say for the first time that Orthodox could not marry Latins and they could not receive the sacraments from Latins.  It is a common misconception that these things occurred with the Schism in 1054 (they did not).  It was also in the context of the Latin empire that some Eastern Christian began to say that other Eastern Christians who had various levels of association with Westerners could not be permitted to participate in Eastern Christian sacraments because they were tainted by the exposure to Latins.  To be clear, this was not the majority position—it was clearly a minority position—but it gave birth to a trajectory within Orthodoxy that would have profound and long-lasting implications.  In fact, I believe that every modern inner-Orthodox debate either explicitly or implicitly is concerned with the question of Western Christendom and what the proper response to it should be.

AD: Without naming him explicitly, Freud nonetheless seems to me to lurk in the background as you attempt to draw out the connections between sexuality, power, and colonialism. Messis and Said are some of your principal interlocutors here. Tell us a bit about what you found valuable in their works.

GD: Yes, I’ll admit that I was never really that enamored with employing psycho-analytic approaches to historical questions, but these methods are very important to many postcolonial theorists, especially someone like Homi Bhabha.  Moreover, Said and Robert Young are two postcolonial theorists to draw out the sexual dimensions of power relationships as well as issues of longing, fantasy, and repulsion.  I do believe that some of the pro-Crusader texts that I examine in the book give themselves easily to analysis from this perspective, even if I don’t explicitly pursue the psycho-analytic dimensions.

AD: You make it clear that Byzantium in the crusading period should not be regarded as uniformly “subaltern.” Would you elaborate a bit as to why this is an important clarification?

GD: To be “subaltern” is to have no access to power, to have no control whatsoever to one’s own discourse.  At the turn of the thirteenth century, Byzantium was, arguably, the most advanced and culturally sophisticated Christian society in the world.  So while I believe that it is very clear that the process of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialism helps us to understand Orthodox Christian history and culture from the Crusades to the present, I do not think that the situation is the identical to other regions of the globe where Western Europeans arrived and completely transformed indigenous societies.

AD: I’m especially struck by your third chapter on papal ambivalence, a phenomenon which is always so psychologically revealing. Here you discuss Pope Innocent III’s “double-bind” with the capture of Constantinople. Tell us a bit more about that bind. It seems clear that part of the bind (then as now) is that by calling Eastern Christians genuine Christians (with “valid orders” as Catholics might say today) in a real sacramental Church the pope appeared to undercut his own claim to being the fount of all validity and liceity in the Church?

The chapter argues that the unexpected capture of Constantinople in 1204 put Pope Innocent III into a rhetorical and practical double bind. On the one hand, the pontiff sternly criticized the crusaders for their brutality against fellow Christians and for compromising the larger military effort in the Holy Land.  On the other hand, Innocent saw the conquest of Constantinople as an opportunity to resolve the schism on his own terms and, at least initially, he hoped that the accrual of Byzantium to the crusaders’ Eastern network might be beneficial to his larger objectives.

But if Innocent was to capitalize on this, it meant that he would need to reformulate the very basis of crusading ideology so as to authorize the subjugation of a community that he had previously defined as Christian. Of course, one of the ways that Innocent does this is by asserting, all the more forcefully, the prerogatives of papal authority.  In the conclusion of the chapter, I assess this dimension of Innocent’s ambivalence and observe that:  “Innocent’s repeated acknowledgement that the Greeks do not accept papal rule exposes the inherent contradiction within the discourse of papal sovereignty.  Indeed, each papal recognition of Greek disobedience reveals a gap in the very premise of papal authority, whether the premise is constituted on the Petrine myth or some other foundation.  The dissonance of papal sovereignty is 'put on trial' by its every iteration."

If the bishop of Rome is truly and authentically the source of all hierarchic power and Christian teaching that its advocates claim it to be, then any acknowledgment from the bishop of Rome that there are “Christians” who do not accept such a principle undercuts all value in the claim of papal authority as a first principle.  In Bhabha’s terms, Innocent’s assertion of papal authority encodes its own inevitable undoing; its very iteration establishes an ambivalent situation that disrupts its claim to monolithic power.  As discourse, the Roman claim of papal sovereignty in the Church bears at one and the same time a striking ambivalence--both possibility and dis-possibility.

Thus, papal discourse vis-à-vis Greek Christians in this period implicitly dictates either (1) that Greeks are not Christians (because they fail to acknowledge papal authority, which is a measurement of authenticity imposed by the discourse) or (2) the recognition of papal authority is not a meaningful measurement or requirement of Christianity (because the discourse admits that no Greek acknowledges papal authority).  Either way, the assertion cannot withstand its own logical weight.

AD: As you are working towards your conclusion, you note that from this literature you review one can find clear evidence that neither Latin nor Greek views of the other were monolithic, and that the boundaries between each sacramental community were “extremely porous.” What lessons, if any, do these insights offer us today?

GD: This is an important question with broad implications.  In general terms, it teaches us is that history, even (if not especially) the history of the Church is far more complex and varied than we typically understand.  More specifically, it encourages us to see that there have always been multiple “authoritative” voices saying a variety of things about the boundaries of the Christian community and the standing of person on that borderland.  There was never a time when these questions were easy and, for me, that is a cause for hope because it means the cause of Christian unity has always been a challenge, even though the Scriptures themselves have made it a mandate.

AD: Having finished the book, what are you at work on now?

My next major project will look at the presentation of violence in late-ancient and medieval Greek hymnography.  What I’m particular interested to explore is the context in which Christians begin to ask God to destroy enemies.  It didn’t start that way.  I have a theory to explain what happened, but you’ll need to wait for the next book.

The Crusades, Part MMCCXVIII

The local Catholic radio station, Redeemer Radio, is interviewing me later this morning (tune in at 7am!) about my article last month in the Catholic Herald about ISIS propaganda and Crusades history.

So, for those who are seeking some places to begin in reading Crusades history, I suggest you start here with the works of Jonathan Riley-Smith, arguably the pioneer in contemporary Crusades scholarship until his death last year. Of his many books noted in that review essay, I would, if you pressed me to recommend only one, suggest--because it is both accessible and short, but with enough detail to point you onward to other sources if you wish--his The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, from 2008.

One of Riley-Smith's students, now teaching and well respected in North America, is Thomas Madden, and his book, The Concise History of the Crusades, noted here, is also a good place to begin, though it does not focus on the contemporary historiographical issues as much as Riley-Smith. Madden also authored this short but useful article.

For those wanting an introduction to Arab views of the Crusades, which are fascinating and highly counter-intuitive, go here. For more generally Islamic views of the Crusades, go here.

For much more specialized scholarship, follow the links here.

Finally, for those interested in the very challenging and ever-changing historiography of the Crusades, then Giles Constable's article is very valuable indeed.

15th Century Crusades

As I have been arguing on here, as well as here, and in other places for years now, the propaganda of ISIS about the Crusades traffics in, inter alia, general Western ignorance, and blatant Western political abuse of, Crusading history. A recently published collection, edited by a sometime student of Jonathan Riley-Smith, looks at The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures, ed. Norman Housley (Routledge, 2016), 220pp.

Housley is the author of a number of other studies on the Crusades, including Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land (2008) and Contesting the Crusades, which is a good place to begin for those new to Crusading history. 

About this new collection we are told:

Increasingly, historians acknowledge the significance of crusading activity in the fifteenth century, and they have started to explore the different ways in which it shaped contemporary European society. Just as important, however, was the range of interactions which took place between the three faith communities which were most affected by crusade, namely the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and the adherents of Islam. Discussion of these interactions forms the theme of this book. Two essays consider the impact of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 on the conquering Ottomans and the conquered Byzantines. The next group of essays reviews different aspects of the crusading response to the Turks, ranging from Emperor Sigismund to Papal legates. The third set of contributions considers diplomatic and cultural interactions between Islam and Christianity, including attempts made to forge alliances of Christian and Muslim powers against the Ottomans. Last, a set of essays looks at what was arguably the most complex region of all for inter-faith relations, the Balkans, exploring the influence of crusading ideas in the eastern Adriatic, Bosnia and Romania. Viewed overall, this collection of essays makes a powerful contribution to breaking down the old and discredited view of monolithic and mutually exclusive "fortresses of faith". Nobody would question the extent and intensity of religious violence in fifteenth-century Europe, but this volume demonstrates that it was played out within a setting of turbulent diversity. Religious and ethnic identities were volatile, allegiances negotiable, and diplomacy, ideological exchange and human contact were constantly in operation between the period's major religious groupings.

And we are given the Table of Contents:

List of figures and maps

List of abbreviations
Notes on contributors

Maps

Preface

1 Introduction: Norman Housley

Conquerors and conquered

2 Crusading in the fifteenth century and its relation to the development of Ottoman dynastic legitimacy, self-image, and the Ottoman consolidation of authority: Nikolay Antov

3 Byzantine refugees as crusade propagandists: the travels of Nicholas Agallon: Jonathan Harris

The crusading response: expressions, dynamics and constraints

4 Dances, dragons and a pagan queen: Sigismund of Luxemburg and the publicizing of the Ottoman Turkish threat: Mark Whelan

5 Alfonso V and the anti-Turkish crusade:Mark Aloisio

6 Papal legates and crusading activity in central Europe: the Hussites and the Ottoman Turks: Antonin Kalous

7 Switching the tracks: Baltic crusades against Russia in the fifteenth century: Anti Selart

Diplomatic and cultural interactions

8 Tīmūr and the ‘Frankish’ powers: Michele Bernardini

9 Venetian attempts at forging an alliance with Persia and the crusade in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries: Giorgio Rota

10 Quattrocento Genoa and the legacies of crusading: Steven Epstein

Frontier zones: the Balkans and the Adriatic

11 The key to the gate of Christendom? The strategic importance of Bosnia in the struggle against the Ottomans: Emir Filippović

12 Between two worlds or a world of its own? The eastern Adriatic in the fifteenth century: Oliver Jens Schmitt

13 The Romanian concept of crusade in the fifteenth century: Sergiu Iosipescu

14 Conclusion: transformations of crusading in the long fifteenth century: Alan V. Murray

Index

Housley, a busy man, has another even newer collection released just this spring: Reconfiguring the 15th-Century Crusade (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 344pp.

About this book we are told:

This collection of essays by eight leading scholars is a landmark event in the study of crusading in the late middle ages. It is the outcome of an international network funded by the Leverhulme Trust whose members examined the persistence of crusading activity in the fifteenth century from three viewpoints, goals, agencies and resonances. The crusading fronts considered include the conflict with the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean and western Balkans, the Teutonic Order’s activities in the Baltic region, and the Hussite crusades. The authors review criticism of crusading propaganda on behalf of the crusade, the influence on crusading of demands for Church reform, the impact of printing, expanding knowledge of the world beyond the Christian lands, and new sensibilities about the sufferings of non-combatants.

Eternal Memory to Jonathan Riley-Smith, Doyen of Crusades Scholars

I was saddened to learn of the recent death of the doyen of Crusades historians and scholars, Jonathan Riley-Smith of the University of Cambridge (into whose doctoral program I was admitted in 2000, before ultimately turning them down). Shortly before his appointment before the awesome tribunal of Christ, he penned this sagacious and moving reflection on the process of dying, which I commend to your attention. Until reading it, I was not aware of his being a Catholic, nor the depth of his faith.

It is, I think, a compelling testimony to his scholarship that in treating the Catholic Church's role in the Crusades he never once comes off as an apologist for his faith, of whose adoption you would not get any hints from reading him. He was a scholar of the old school, content to let the evidence take him where it did without imposing an ideological agenda upon it. In this regard, he avoided the temptation of what another great historian, Robert Taft, calls "confessional propaganda" offered in the place of genuine history.

I have relied on Riley-Smith's books in my classes for years, including as recently as this summer when I taught a course on ISIS and the Crusades, looking at the historiographical issues involved in the former's abuse of the latter to justify attacks on everybody from Japan to France and the United States.

For this latter purpose, I had my students read Riley-Smith's short but accessible work The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. Its power, especially in the era of ISIS, comes from the fact that he shows, calmly and clearly, how little Muslims cared about the Crusades--indeed, how very little they had even heard of the Crusades--until the turn of the last century when fatuous would-be Christians like the doltish Kaiser Wilhelm II started talking them up again carelessly in an effort to promote a more Christian martial spirit.

Unapologetic as I am about the use of maps to understand history and religious traditions, I have also found Riley-Smith's The Atlas of the Crusades to be enormously valuable. So too, but more widely, is his The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades.

Part of Riley-Smith's early research was the recognition that there were multiple forms of "Crusading," and multiple institutions involved, including military orders such as the Hospitallers: The History of the Order of St. John, first treated by him decades ago, and now in an updated Kindle version.


Before the Crusades were enacted, they first had to be thought, and part of Riley-Smith's early research that was especially valuable was his investigation into what the Cruaders themselves thought they were doing. These researches are especially important still today because they go a very long distance towards debunking the slanderous nonsense that Christians sat about thinking up bloodthirsty schemes by which--proto-colonialists or neo-imperialists that they were--they could steal land and life from poor besotted Muslims and Jews. Thus The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading goes a considerable distance into the minds of those doing the Crusading, and those involved on the peripheries of those, such as various popes.

Riley-Smith authored comprehensive surveys of the Crusades, and updated them regularly, as with his 2015 The Crusades: A History: Third Edition.

But he was also the author of many scholarly articles on individual aspects of the Cruades, and for those with access to such journals you will find many riches. To give just a taste: his 1980 article in History: The Journal of the Historical Association, gives us a perhaps characteristic approach: "Crusading as an Act of Love." The very title runs so profoundly counter to the usual portrayal of the Crusades but it was Riley-Smith's genuinely magisterial achievement serenely to disregard current fashions and nasty political orthodoxies and instead try to bring the past to life on its own terms, so far as possible, and let us get into the mind of those whose efforts we so facilely slander even before we have understood them.

Thus it was Riley-Smith's achievement (and later others) to show us that, indeed, the Crusaders--some of them--saw their actions as manifesting love for their own souls (Crusades as acts of penance), for their persecuted Eastern Christian brethren (Crusades as acts of liberation), and even in some cases for the Muslims who had to be brought to Christ (Crusades as acts of evangelization and conversion).

May his labors of scholarly love continue to bear fruit in the years ahead, and may Jonathan Riley-Smith's memory be eternal!

How Foreign a Country is the Past? How Can We Access it Without Abuse?

I have been having a lot of fun this summer doing a course with my students on ISIS and the Crusades. Those who read ISIS propaganda, especially their slick but tiresome magazine Dabiq, or watch their videos, as I have with studied if horrified fascination for several years now, will note how ritualistically, how constantly, and (of course) how tendentiously they invoke "the Crusades" or the "Crusaders" to justify their various atrocities--whether beheading Japanese hostages, immolating Jordanian pilots, or decapitating, drowning, or torturing many others whose background so obviously precludes them from ever having had any connection whatsoever to the Crusades as historical events rather than ciphers for current iniquities. So this has been a course in historiography as much as in studying the Crusades.

Along the way, my students have found enormously profitable the reading of two books that treat the uses and abuses of history in general, and then the uses and abuses of Crusade history in particular. In the first instance, we have Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, which is short and accessible, but full of the lucid erudition that marks MacMillan's other wonderful books, especially Paris 1919 and The War that Ended Peace: the Road to 1914.

Then we have turned our attention to the doyen of Crusades scholars, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and his short but equally accessible book The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. Re-reading this nearly a decade after it came out and before ISIS was really commanding the attention it does, is an interesting experience in itself, perhaps especially for Riley-Smith's last chapter in which he shows that a good deal of the responsibility for the problematic "re-remembering" of the "Crusades" by Muslims in the last several decades comes at the hands of Christians, especially French Catholics and German Lutherans, who wanted, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to revive the Crusades as examples of Christian glory in conquest. So by no means do Christians have clean hands in the competition to use and abuse history.

I find it striking, however, that the language of glory and conquest which many Christians used as recently as a century ago is now regarded by almost all Christians with abject horror. This was true not just in revisionist accounts of the Crusades, but in the rhetoric leading up to, and all throughout, the First World War. Philip Jenkins, as I noted on here a while ago, is especially useful in his book  The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade in showing how profoundly bloodthirsty Christian preachers were--whether in Westminster Abbey, First Presbyterian in Boston, Trinity Lutheran in Berlin, St. Basil's in the Kremlin, Notre Dame in Paris, or a thousand other pulpits of all traditions. Everybody was invoking God to crush their enemies, and using chilling rhetoric to demonize their (fellow Christian) enemies. Find me even three preachers today in an Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Orthodox pulpit who are willing to say such things even in the mildest terms--to suggest God wants them to smite their enemies. Indeed, for most Christians the language of enemies is itself reprobated and incomprehensible.

Instead, in 2016, we find discussions among Catholics and other Christians about even revising or eliminating altogether the tradition of a "just war," thereby testifying to how far Christians, in barely a century, have changed their assessments of the morality of violence, lethal force, and war. My operative assumption here is that a good deal of that re-assessment has had little if anything to do with theological considerations rationally worked out. Rather, most of it is a reaction-formation, steeped in guilt, to the horrors of the First and then the Second World Wars, and then a ritualized invocation of "War no more!" (as several popes have said at the UN in the last 50 years) which is little more than a species of wish-fulfillment.

All this leads me to mention a recently released revised edition of a book which, a quarter-century ago, became an almost instant classic: David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge UP, 2015), 676pp.

About this book we are told:

The past remains essential – and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

ISIS, the Crusades, and the Modern Middle East

If you were able yesterday to watch that gruesome video of ISIS burning alive the captured Jordanian pilot, and you watched it through to the end, he was in the fine print at the conclusion, after the immolation of his body, described as deserving his fate because he was a "crusader pilot." I am teaching a course on the Crusades this semester and so was especially struck by this use of the phrase to describe a pilot who was Jordanian and therefore presumably (a) Arab-speaking; and (b)  himself Muslim. But the fact he was flying raids over ISIS territories in conjunction with the Jordanian, American and other governments was enough to disqualify him apparently from membership in the umma and presumably to enroll him instead in the "crusading" enemies of Islam in the dar al-harb, thus making him fit for an exceptionally nasty execution.

ISIS of course is a uniquely demonic mixture of ancient barbarisms and modern technologies. But their invocation of the Crusades is especially modern, more than they or others likely realize. As Jonathan Riley-Smith, the doyen of Crusades scholars today, demonstrated in his short but illuminating book The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, the Crusades were not a prominent or common feature in Muslim political imagination until the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth when they were re-discovered not so much as evidence of Muslim suffering and Western wickedness--for most Muslims were entirely ignorant of the history of the Crusades, or to the extent they knew of them at all they regarded them as generally glorious victories for Islam in the main--but instead as tools by which to browbeat an increasingly guilt-ridden and self-loathing West into ever lower levels of auto-debasement, a process that has only accelerated since then. 

To understand the connections between the events of 2015 and the invocations of Crusades from a thousand years ago, a recent book is especially helpful, coming from the pen of North America's leading scholar of them, Thomas Madden, The Concise History of the Crusades (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 264pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

What is the relationship between the medieval crusades and the problems of the modern Middle East? Were the crusades the Christian equivalent of Muslim jihad? In this sweeping yet crisp history, Thomas F. Madden offers a brilliant and compelling narrative of the crusades and their contemporary relevance. Placing all of the major crusades within their social, economic, religious, and intellectual environments, Madden explores the uniquely medieval world that led untold thousands to leave their homes, families, and friends to march in Christ’s name to distant lands. From Palestine and Europe's farthest reaches, each crusade is recounted in a clear, concise narrative. The author gives special attention as well to the crusades’ effects on the Islamic world and the Christian Byzantine East.