There is, however, another side to the image. When US planes bombed Tripoli, Colonel Gadaffi called President Reagan a ‘dirty crusader’, reminding us that in the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Crusades have a very different image. The Crusades do not seem so romantic when we remember that, on capturing the Holy City of Jerusalem in 1099, the warriors of the First Crusade slaughtered all the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants they could lay their hands on.
But it’s not just between Christians and Muslims that we see different opinions of the Crusades. Historians and writers have argued about them for centuries. The great Georgian historian Edward Gibbon denounced them as a waste of life and resources, reflecting the Enlightenment opinion of the Middle Ages as backward and priest-ridden. The nineteenth century, however, took more of a romantic view of the Crusades. Writers like Walter Scott loved the glamour and chivalry of the medieval knight, and a mania for the Middle Ages really took off, as romantics dreamed nostalgically of an idealised pre-industrial past. Victorian empire-builders too could readily identify with their ancestors’ version of ‘muscular Christianity’, using religion to justify the conquest of ‘heathen’ peoples in Africa and Asia. In 1851, a statue of the crusader king Richard I, the ‘Lionheart’, was set up outside Parliament. No one seemed to think it inappropriate to use a French-speaking king, who spent only 9 months of his ten-year reign in England, to symbolise Britain!
Inevitably, a reaction to this idealised picture set in. The grim events of the twentieth century made the celebration of war and empire-building unpopular. The crusades were often viewed through an attitude of modernist rationalism, which saw them as motivated by base greed, under the cover of intolerant religion. As the eruption of a violent western warrior culture onto a more civilised Muslim world, they could even be presented as a continuation of the ‘Barbarian’ invasions that supposedly finished off the Roman Empire. Stephen Runciman’s classic history of the crusades concluded that they achieved nothing, and proved only that ‘faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing’!
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