THE CRUSADES, A Very Short Introduction
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loginWhile the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Humethought the Crusades ‘the most signal and most durable monument ofhuman folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’, he admittedthey ‘engrossed the attention of Europe and have ever since engrossedthe curiosity of mankind’. The reasons for this are not hard to find. Thetwin themes of judgement on past violence and fascination with itscauses have ensured the survival of the Crusades as more than an inertsubject for antiquarians. Since Pope Urban II (1088–99) in 1095answered a call for military help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius IComnenus (1081–1118), by summoning a vast army to fight in the nameof God to liberate eastern Christianity and recover the Holy City ofJerusalem, there have been few periods when the consequences of thisact have not gripped minds and imaginations, primarily in westernsociety but increasingly, since the 19th century, among communitiesthat have seen themselves as heirs to the victims of this form of religiousviolence. With the history of the Crusades, modern interest iscompounded by spurious topicality and inescapable familiarity.Ideological warfare and the pathology of acceptable communal violenceare embedded in the historical experience of civilization. Justificationfor war and killing for a noble cause never cease to find modernmanifestations. The Crusades present a phenomenon so dramatic andextreme in aspiration and execution and yet so rebarbative to modernsensibilities, that they cannot fail to move both as a story and as anexpression of a society remote in time and attitudes yet apparently so abundantly recognizable. Spread over five hundred years and acrossthree continents, the Crusades may not have defined medieval ChristianEurope, yet they provide a most extraordinary feature that retains thepower to excite, appal, and disturb. They remain one of the greatsubjects of European history. What follows is an attempt to explain why.
