Crusading Historians

There were gallant, pure-hearted Crusading knights -- where? In people's imaginations. 

 Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, severely disturbs this view of things, all the more so because it is so well-written and thoroughly researched that few of Gibbon's critics have even tried to say that it is not. Instead, the typical attack on Gibbon begins with some variation of "Gibbon's monumental work is masterfully written and exhaustively researched. But ..." and then goes on to claim that, despite the mastery and thoroughness, Gibbon got it all wrong.

For a while, Gibbon's negative view of the Crusades was contained to a relatively small academic readership by the means of abridged editions which ended around the time of the fall of the Western Empire in AD 476, so that many readers were eventually surprised to learn that Gibbon carried the story down past the fall of the Eastern (sometimes called the Byzantine) empire in AD 1453 and very close to his own time. Including a very large portion devoted to the Crusades, which portrayed the Crusaders in a much less flattering light that had been usual in the West. 

Flash-forward to the mid-20th century, when some readers of Steven Runciman's 3 volume History of the Crusades, published 1951-54, were startled to read Runciman's assertion, right there on the first page of the preface of the first volume, that Gibbon's chapters on the Crusades still "well deserve study." It seemed that this Runciman person, whom many were lauding as the greatest 20th century historian from England, referred to Gibbon as England's greatest historian, ever, as if there were not much debate about it. 

And then the attacks on Runciman began to pour in, so similar to the attacks on Gibbon that it's really difficult not to notice: Runciman's opponents acknowledge that he writes well and researches thoroughly, but...

And just as in Gibbon's case, the attacks come from those who feel that Runciman has been unfair to the Crusaders. 

It could be that the most highly regarded historian of the Crusaders since Runciman Is Jonathan Riley-Smith. I say it could be, because those who admire Runciman, and Gibbon, might well see much to criticize in Riley-Smith, and vice-versa. Some colleagues would call Riley-Smith the best historian of the Crusades since Runciman. I think some would call him something else, although they might manage to be more polite about it than I.

Just in case in it's not already clear: I'm on Gibbon's and Runciman's side. Furthermore: I don't think Riley-Smith is even a particularly good historian, let alone among the greatest scholars of his time.

Let's take his own stated aim, to examine the motivations of those Westerners who participated in the first Crusade. First of all, it implies that others, most certainly including Gibbon and Runciman, have failed to examine those motives. Further, it gives Riley-Smith great room to be imaginative. He's trying to restore the image of the gallant Crusaders on white horses.

For example, he rejects the very notion that any Crusaders went to war against the eastern infidels out of motives of personal gain, because, in fact, and nevermind those few who gained actual kingdoms or counties in the East, most of them ended up losing money on the enterprise.

Using this sort of thinking, we could say that most of the people who go to Las Vegas to gamble are not hoping for personal gain. It's a fact that almost all of the gamblers in Vegas lose money.

I recently heard an episode of "In Our Time," the BBC radio series hosted by Melvyn Bragg, devoted to the Third Crusade. It first aired in 2001, I heard it in 2021. Riley-Smith was one of the three invited experts. Toward the end of the episode, the massacre perpetrated by the Crusaders at the climax of the First Crusade, when they captured Jerusalem after a long siege, and killed non-combatants of the city by the thousands, men, women and children, Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians indiscriminately -- this massacre was mentioned, an event similarly described by eyewitnesses of all religious affiliations. Riley-Smith became audibly angry, insisting that there was nothing unusual about the Crusaders' behavior at this moment, insisting that the Muslims were just as bad, refusing even to refer to the event as a massacre, repeatedly using the term sack instead of massacre. He even started to talking about ways in which Christians' mentality could have impelled them to greatly exaggerate the horror of the -- sack -- in their descriptions of it. 

Yes, concentrating on people's motivations as Riley-Smith does, gives an historian a very great amount of flexibility in his depictions of events. 

One thing is encouraging: of all the historians who attacked Gibbon during his own lifetime and for a century after -- I don't know one of their names. I'm confident that very few of you could name a single one of them.