Book Time #21: The Crusades
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land, Thomas Asbridge
Historians are often desperate to convince you their work is relevant no matter how distant or disconnected from the modern world it may seem. There’s nothing wrong with this. I merely point this out to marvel at the fact Thomas Asbridge did the exact opposite.
This book was published in 2010. In the decade leading up to it, invoking the Crusades as a timeless and ongoing struggle between Christianity and Islam was in vogue. Both George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden did it, for basically the same reason, but with two different interpretations. Asbridge, a lifelong scholar of the Crusades, was sick of it. The particulars aside, it’s amusing to reach the end of a 700-page book only to have the author say the historian equivalent of don’t talk to me or my son ever again. The Crusades must be “placed where they belong,” Asbridge wrote, “In the past.”
The Crusades were not a demonstration of the irreconcilable differences between two world religions. It was not the first chapter of a war that has raged on for millenia. Not only that, but the common usage of the verb “crusade” today generally comes with a positive connotation. We use it, by and large, for endeavors worth undertaking. This is an historical oxymoron, akin to referring to impregnable military defenses as “Maginots.” Asbridge dates all of this back to lazy, ideological 19th Century “historians” who made shit up.
In any event, unlike the Crusades themselves, this 700-page epic is an endeavor well worth the effort. It is, in fact, one of the finest history books I have ever read. It is filled with folly, lunacy, fanaticism, and heinous acts of cruelty, but also genius, bravery, heroism, restraint, and even the occasional bout of common sense. There are some sections on regency secession crises in both the Christian and Islamic world I could have done with abridged versions of, but the narratives of the various crusades are told with fluidity and tension without lacking in detail and deftness. I appreciate this book all the more with every successive tome I tackle that fails to match its narrative and intellectual heft.
Most importantly, Asbridge never wavers in the face of historical ambiguity. He’s not only willing but eager to tell the reader what we don’t know about the past. This not only gave me a deeper appreciation for Asbridge’s accomplishment but reminded me we’re talking about events that happened almost a thousand years ago. It is difficult enough to construct a defensible narrative for events that occurred last week, much less last millennium. Even the most carefully constructed histories are like astronomers gazing deep into a distant galaxy, telling grand stories from the fragments of light that manage to shine through the ages. That we can see with so little clarity is no shortcoming. The wonder is that we can see anything at all. And the shame is that we so often listen to people who don’t bother to look.