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Fighting the Infidel
The East-West holy wars are not just history.
by Steven Ozment
6/25/2005 12:02:00 AM, Volume 010, Issue 40
Fighting for Christendom
Holy War and the Crusades
by Christopher Tyerman
Oxford, 247 pp., $26
OXFORD HISTORIAN CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN MAINTAINS that the four centuries of holy war known as the Crusades are both the best recognized and most distorted part of the Christian Middle Ages. He faults scholars, pundits, and laymen on both sides of the East-West divide for allowing the memory of the Crusades to be "woven into intractable modern political problems," where it "blurs fantasy and scholarship" and exacerbates present-day hatreds. He has in mind the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Western racism, anti-Semitism, and American-European imperialism.
A prolific expert on the history of Crusades, Tyerman offers a succinct summary of what they were and were not. An evenhanded critic, he levels his lance at both sides: the Islamic and Arab apologists who trace Western imperialism and cultural aggression back to the Crusades, and the "First World liberals and neoconservatives" who demonize a complex and diverse Islamic world with no more sophistication than the crusading polemicists of the 12th and 13th centuries.
As Tyerman persuasively describes them, the Crusades were neither an attempt at Western hegemony, nor a betrayal of Western Christian teaching and practice. When Pope Urban II invoked the First Crusade in 1095, he was belatedly fulfilling a request from Byzantine emperor Alexius I, who desperately needed Western knights to help him reestablish Eastern Christian control of the Middle East after the death of the Turkish Sultan of Baghdad. By sending such assistance, the pope projected the religious ideology and power of an ...
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