Maurice Keen is one of my favourite medieval historians, not least because he takes the knightly class seriously. He is particularly good at building a picture by assembling a series of illustrative cases. Medieval history is somewhat less prone to some of the foibles of modern academic history, as medievalists are much more likely approach the ( Read more... )

Regine Pernoud’s The Crusades: the Struggle for the Holy Land was originally published in 1959 and was clearly mainly written for a lay audience, so does not represent the latest scholarship.

Pernoud happily sees Islam as retrograde compared to Christianity, but still manages to provide more details about the Muslims than, say Riley-Smith’s more ( Read more... )

Jonathon Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A Short History is a comprehensive history of the Crusading movement from Pope Urban II (successful) preaching in 1095 to Napoleon’s capture of Malta from the Knights of St John in 1798. The prose is matter-of-fact, the information content very high. Riley-Smith argues that it was the notion of a political ( Read more... )

Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes starts off with an Arab description of the barbarism and savagery of the high point of the Franj invasions (as the Muslims called the Crusades), the capture, sack and slaughter of Jerusalem. Precisely because it is from the Arab/Muslim perspective, it is a striking reminder of how savage the Western ( Read more... )

One of these passages was written in the C11th, one in the C21st. Can you tell which?

O God, raise the banner of Islam and its helper and refute polytheism by wounding its back and cutting its ropes. Help those who fight with jihad for your sake and who in obedience to you have sacrificed themselves and solder their souls to you … Because they ( Read more... )