by Thomas F. Madden

n the wake of September 11, the medieval Christian Crusades have become breaking news—even appearing on the covers of national magazines such as U.S. News and World Report and National Review. Unfortunately, they remain poorly understood by most people today. Hundreds of books have been written on the Crusades in the last fifty years, but many only add to the confusion. I offer, then, a list that, in my judgment, collects some of the best and worst of the lot. (I will leave it to others to decide where my own books should fall.)

There is one book, though, that really belongs in both categories: Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 1953-57). It is no exaggeration to say that this epic history is the single most influential work ever written on the subject. In three volumes of beautiful and stirring prose, Runciman describes the Crusades based on the best research of the day and his own expertise in Byzantine history. His now-familiar conclusions are that the Crusades were one long act of barbarism and intolerance in the name of religion, and that the Crusaders were opportunistic adventurers, misguided simpletons, or avaricious thieves. The Muslims and Byzantines, on the other hand, he portrays as sophisticated, tolerant, and peaceful. In the last half century, scholars have learned that some of what Runciman wrote is simply wrong, including and especially his depiction of Crusaders and their motivations. Nevertheless, the popular media resolutely ignore more recent studies, relying almost exclusively on this highly dated work.

The Best

Hilaire Belloc, The Crusades: The World’s Debate (Bruce, 1937). Richly written, with lots of heroic flourishes. Many of Belloc’s conclusions are no longer tenable in light of modern research, but he understood that pious idealism was the central motivator for the Crusaders, decades before academic historians began to draw the same conclusion. Subsequent events have revealed the extraordinary prescience of his warning that Islamic jihads against the West were not extinct.

Malcolm Billings, The Crusades: Five Centuries of Holy Wars (Sterling, 1996). Excellent popular introduction based on the latest research. Engagingly written and richly illustrated.

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (Yale, 1990). A first-rate scholarly overview of the crusading movement. Riley-Smith is the most distinguished and influential historian of the Crusades alive today. In this book he restores pious idealism to the list of Crusader motivations, stressing the enormous expense and danger of the expeditions. He also expands the temporal scope of the Crusades, following them well into the sixteenth century. His earlier work, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Penn, 1986), is a stirring account of the origins of crusading and the grueling ordeal of the First Crusade (1095-99), which reconquered formerly Christian Nicaea, Antioch, and Jerusalem. And his What Were the Crusades? (Macmillan, 1977) is a fantastic little book that sums up in easy-to-understand prose just what the Crusades were and were not.

Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Routledge, 2000). By far the best treatment of the Muslim side of the Crusades. Beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched.

Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades second edition (Oxford, 1988). Classic history by one of the best scholars in the field, but can be a bit dense for nonspecialists. Focuses heavily on the Latin East, the narrative ending with the fall of the Crusader Kingdom in 1291. Likewise, Jean Richard’s The Crusades (Cambridge, 1996) is a wonderfully researched treatment of the eastern Crusades before 1291, but the casual reader will find it a bewildering forest of names, dates, and treaties. Every Crusade scholar should own this book, but others should approach it with caution.

The Worst

Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (Verso, 2002). A pitiful attempt to equate the Crusades with the centuries of jihads that caused them and the “cultural imperialism” of the United States.

Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (Anchor, 2001). Originally written in 1988, this book was rereleased in 1991 in the wake of the Gulf War and has now made another appearance since the September 11 attacks. Poorly researched and written, this book is largely an exercise in modern left-wing rhetoric about sensitivity, tolerance, and the evils of Western civilization. Her “triple vision” is blurred by a misguided approach to Islam and Judaism and outright hostility to Catholicism.

Evan S. Connell, Deus lo Volt!: Chronicle of the Crusades (Counterpoint, 2000). Not content with the medieval chronicles of the Crusades, this book simply makes one up. Connell attempts to fashion a fictitious source that purports to include the observations of numerous actual sources. The result is less than the sum of its parts. In typical anti-Western fashion, the Crusaders are portrayed as brutally savage and fanatically religious.

Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Crusades (Checkmark, 1995). Yes, that’s Terry Jones of Monty Pythonfame. This is the appropriately ghastly companion volume to the absolutely dreadful British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary of the same name. Here all medieval Europeans are cartoonish cutouts who blunder their way to the sophisticated and peace-loving East. Despite four centuries of jihads (which are conveniently ignored), Jones and Ereira insist that the Muslim world only learned to be warlike from the barbaric Christians who descended on them. A thoroughly condescending and frivolous treatment of a serious subject.

Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Schocken, 1989). This book is not really history so much as paraphrasing and selective quotations of various medieval Arab writers. As a result, it leaves the impression that these authors can be taken at face value when they are often reporting only rumors or popular legends. Maalouf makes no attempt to set the record straight. Not surprisingly, the Muslims in this book are portrayed in the most favorable light, while the “Franj” (the Muslim name for all Westerners) are an evil plague. Anyone truly interested in medieval Arab depictions of the Crusaders should skip Maalouf and go right to Francesco Gabrieli’s Arab Historians of the Crusades (Routledge, 1969), where they are translated in toto.

Peter Partner, God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and Islam (Princeton, 1997). This book has two central points: that Muslim jihad is no threat to the West, and that Christianity is militant to its core. Along the way, Partner gives the now-usual description of the medieval struggle between the two religions, in which the Crusaders are cynical and bloodthirsty while Muslim conquests of Christian lands are right and just.

Thomas F. Madden is chair of the department of history at Saint Louis University. His most recent book is A Concise History of the Crusades (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).

Click here to view a full list of American Outlook Magazine Issues