Rodney Stark,
God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009),
276 pages.
We live in a day of significant historical revisionism, some of it warranted and supportable by evidence, some of it simply driven by the latest ideological winds. Of the various revisionist tracts that I have read or perused in recent days, none has struck me as forcefully as this one by Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion at Baylor University in Texas. It is a given in western society that the Crusades are a blot on our history, the first attempt at European colonization, comparable in the eyes of some to the Nazi Holocaust, definitely a source of tension between us occidentals and Muslims. In fact, when political correctness was recently in its heyday, the Crusader ranked second to the wicked Viking as persona non grata in the history of western culture.
Stark challenges this whole perspective, and argues cogently that the Crusades were a provoked attack. It seems to have escaped the perception of many that it was Islam’s invasion of the Christian lands of the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and even France and Italy that led to the retaliatory Crusades. Then, far from being a source of loot and land, as later European colonizing ventures were, the Crusades ended in the establishment of Crusader kingdoms in Palestine that proved to be a major financial drain upon the European monarchs that dispatched the Crusades in the first place. And as for them being a source of centuries-long tension between Europe and Islam, Stark argues that it was not until the twentieth century that the memory of the Crusades was really used by Muslims to exacerbate their differences with the West.
Even with the narrowing of his focus to those Crusades that were “true” Crusades—there were a number in the Middle Ages that were directed against various “heretical” groups in Europe—Stark has a large amount of territory to cover. His thesis is therefore on the order of a big brush-stroke argument, and doubtless one could find elements here and there where his argument simply does not hold. He also admits that this is a subject that has not been a specialty of his. He is writing, therefore, as a generalist, and one very dependent on the work of careful historians (p.9). But taken as a whole, his argument is persuasive at best, and at the least, a needed reminder that maybe our whole memory of these events needs to be reconsidered. And given the potential for the tension between the West and Islam to cause massive disruption in the modern world, it is a reconsideration that needs to take place sooner than later.
Michael A.G. Haykin
October, 2010.
