[SCA-AS] [Fwd: TMR 07.10.31 Madden, New Concise History of the Crusades (Khanmohamadi)]

Tue Oct 30 08:46:47 CDT 2007

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: TMR 07.10.31 Madden, New Concise History of the Crusades
(Khanmohamadi)
From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
Date:    Mon, October 29, 2007 9:09 am
To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
         bmr-l at brynmawr.edu
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Madden, Thomas F. The New Concise History of the Crusades:
Updated Student
Edition. Oxford, UK and Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2006. Pp. xi, 261. $23.95 (pb). ISBN-13: 978-0742538221.

    Reviewed by Shirin A. Khanmohamadi
         San Francisco State University
         shirin1 at sfsu.edu

If recent years reflect a boom in specialized scholarly treatments of
the
European Crusades, such specialized studies are matched by a parallel
boom in
narrative introductions to the Crusades aimed at the general reader.
Having
written two scholarly monographs on the Fourth Crusade, Thomas F.
Madden turns
his attention to more popular readerly interests in his The New
Concise
History of the Crusades: Updated Student Edition (2006), updated
from its
first edition in 1999. By Madden's account, "the heightened public
interest in
the crusades since 9/11 has created a market for popular histories"
but "an
interested person who simply strolls into a bookstore looking for a
history of
the crusades is much more likely to walk out with a book written by a
novelist,
journalist, or ex-nun than one written by a professional historian
and based on
the best research available" (viii). As is made clear in his preface
and his
final chapter, "The Legacy of the Crusades," Madden has a post-9/11
general
audience in mind even as his book announces itself as an Updated Student
Edition; the possible contradiction or divergent needs of these dual
audiences
is not addressed.

Structured chronologically according to the "numbered" Crusades,
The New
Concise History of the Crusades follows a mainly traditionalist
account of
the crusades, i.e. of the crusades as being tied to Jerusalem as
destination,
though his added chapters on "Crusading at Home" (chapter 5) and his
chapter on
crusades post-1291, "The Later Crusades" (chapter 9), revise and
expand this
traditional account along the lines of new "pluralist" approaches
defining the
crusades more broadly as penitential war irrespective of theater. In
the main
body of the text, Madden, a historian in command of the major
scholarship in
the field, offers coherent, clear and economical prose that is rich with
historical detail.

Students and general readers interested in further reading are
provided a good
bibliographic survey in the "Select Bibliography" at the end of the
book, as
well as a useful selection of "Sources in Translation" on each of the
major
crusades treated in the book. These critical apparatuses, appearing
along with
a Glossary and set of "Discussion Questions" at the book's end, lend
the book
utility as the "student edition" it aims to be.  Unfortunately, as is
too often
the case with text-book style histories, in the narrative body
chapters few
citations direct interested students to primary sources, and even
fewer direct
quotations are offered from these inimitably complex medieval voices.

More bibliographic citation is particularly needful when Madden is
treating an
especially controversial topic in broad strokes, as when he writes
about the
massacre of the local population of Jerusalem upon its conquest in
1099. The
historiography of this event is highly divergent, and readers
interested in its
treatment may consult Benjamin Kedar's "The Jerusalem massacre of
1099 in the
western historiography of the crusades," Crusades 3 (2004):
15-75. Here
Madden alludes to reports of whole-scale massacre of the citizens
thus: "By the
standards of the time, adhered to by both Christians and Muslims, the
crusaders
would have been justified in putting the entire population of
Jerusalem to the
sword. Despite later highly exaggerated reports, however, that is
not what
happened... Later stories of the streets of Jerusalem coursing with
knee-high
rivers of blood were never meant to be taken seriously. Medieval
people knew
such a thing to be an impossibility. Modern people, unfortunately,
do not"
(34). Madden thus seems to put the controversy to rest, without
providing the
reader access to any of the documentary evidence from the many available
First Crusade sources in translation, Christian and Muslim. By
admonishing
interpretation to the contrary as misguidedly "modern," Madden does not
encourage investigation into the subject.

Other lively scholarly debates, such as the question of the
motivations of the
Crusaders, are similarly put to rest: Madden adheres to the theory
of the
pious idealism of most crusader participants--"Christians saw
crusades to the
east as acts of love and charity" (222)--and dismisses economic
theories of
motivations as deriving from a "post-Enlightenment" view of
religiosity (11).
(For a survey of recent theories of crusader motivations, see Giles
Constable,
"The Historiography of the Crusades," in The Crusades from the
Perspective
of the Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. A Laiou and R.
Mottahadeh,
Dumbarton Oaks, 2001, pp. 17-19). Such defense of crusader
motivations and
war-time behavior fits within the polemical frame of The New
Concise History
of the Crusades, whose jacket cover promises answers to the
question, "How
have the crusades contributed to Islamist rage and terrorism today?"
Madden
addresses the question most directly in his final chapter, "The
Legacy of the
Crusades," in which in the course of reviewing Crusader
historiography, he
defends the Crusades against their misappropriation equally by
European and
Arabs for various anti-colonialist, nationalist, and, more recently,
Islamist
arguments.

The polemical defense of the crusading endeavor is not confined to
the final
chapter of The New Concise History, parts of which operate
within an
identifiably contemporary, post-9/11 view of east-west rivalry if not
the
outright "clash of civilizations." In his discussion of the origins
of holy
war, for instance, Madden begins by noting that, "Unlike Islam,
Christianity
had no well-defined concept of holy war before the middle ages" (1), an
unlikely comparative assertion given Islam's origins in the medieval
period.
Although Madden notes that it is in western Europe rather than
Byzantium that
"the concept of Christian holy war took root and grew" (4), most of
Madden's
discussion of Christian holy war is in fact devoted to the rise of
Islam rather
than to the usual discussion of developments within western
Christianity that
led to the striking notion of penitential war in the crusader period
(the Peace
of God movement; previous papal sanctions of campaigns; the Battle of
Manzikert, etc). Though Madden stops short of causality--"It would
be too
strong to say that it was the idea of jihad that later led to
Christianity's
own concept of holy war" (3)--his text yokes the hot-button terms
together
without elucidating their relationship or interaction.

As scholars of the crusades from the Islamic perspective like Carol
Hillenbrand, whom Madden cites, have shown, Muslim jihad or religious
struggle,
far from being a perennial motivating force in the Muslim Middle
East, waxes
and wanes in the medieval period, experiencing a downturn after the
initial
Islamic conquests, then a gradual resurgence with the Second Crusade and
Salahadin's rise, another dying down in the post-Salahadin Ayyubid
period, and
a final rise from 1260 on in the Mamluk period (The Crusades: Islamic
Perspective, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999, pp.
89-255 and
especially 246-250). The long periods between jihadist revivals,
including the
first 50 years of the Latin Kingdom and the some 70 years between
Salahadin's
death and the rise of the Mamluks--much of the duration of the Latin
Kingdom,
then--detente, realpolitik, local alliances and unsteady coexistence
characterized the complex relations between the Latin East and local
Levantine
Muslims, Jews and Christians. These alliances are of course glimpsed
equally
in the western sources, and in Madden's account of them, including
Richard I's
treaty arrangements with Salahadin at the close of the 3rd Crusade,
Frederick
II's negotiation of a ten-year leased return of Jerusalem, and King
Louis'
complex post-crusade negotiations at the end of the 7th Crusade.

Such treaties and alliances in effect constitute another way of
telling the
story of the Latin East and the crusades themselves, one highlighting
the
reality of frequent coalitions across religious lines when necessity or
expedience required it; a less ideological and triumphalist, more
gritty and
gray, story to be sure.  This is certainly the pious King Louis'
experience in
the Levant: the king, having begun his crusade by refusing to
negotiate for
Jerusalem with "the enemy" Ayyubids, ends by negotiating with the much
harder-line Mamluks.  King Louis' example shows the room for
realpolitik in
orthodox medieval minds; Frederick II's example is one of a medieval
secularism.  The notion of a single "medieval" religious perspective or
approach to the East, then, something that Madden at times upholds,
risks
reducing the complexity of the historical record.

In summary, while The New Concise History of the Crusades
tells the
story of the crusades as concisely as it promises and in admirable
depth and
detail, its overall objectivity and scholarly tone is offset by a
self-ascribed
goal of defending the holy wars from their would-be detractors, past and
present. Madden closes his book by warning against the projection of
modern
values--by which he means Enlightenment, secular, Marxist, pluralist,
or anti-
imperialist values--upon the medieval actors and events of the
crusades. But
each age must guard against the danger of its own projections, and
perhaps in
our current cultural climate crusades historians find themselves in a
position
to guard against the attractions of a neo-"medieval" anti-modernism.

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net