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For years, scholars and historians focused on material or economic factors behind the Crusades. People argued that the Crusades were caused by nobles seeking land, wealth, and conquest. Today this has shifted and historians are focusing more on ideological causes: the Crusades were launched because people sincerely believed in the cause. That sort of attitude is completely foreign to us today, but the arguments are sound.

Summary

Title: The First Crusade: A New History
Author: Thomas Asbridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195178238

Pro:
? Exceptionally engaging prose that can sound more like a novel than a history
? Helps readers understand the ideological background of the Crusades

Con:
? Does not explicitly connect the crusade to modern history, but hints are left behind

Description:
? Detailed analysis and history of the First Crusade
? Explains how the First Crusade occurred and what happened at each stage
? Argues that the Crusaders really and truly believed in the religious mission of their war

Book Review

Thomas Asbridge is Lecturer in Early Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London, and an expert in the history of the Crusades. His book The First Crusade: A New History is a strong example of the revived ideological approach to understanding the Crusaders and the bloody conflict launched against Muslims in the Holy Land. In addition to helping people understand the Crusades, it may also help them a bit in understanding more recent events and conflicts between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Middle East.

Asbridge obviously focuses on the First Crusade rather than the entire Crusading Age. This is important because, unlike the other Crusades, the first one actually worked. That may be the saddest aspect to the Crusading Age because the success of this first expedition ensured that people would continue trying again and again.

Asbridge also spends time discussing scholarship on the Crusades. He writes about the various ideas medieval and modern scholars have had on why the Crusades started and what they meant, explaining what people were wrong about and what they got right. Many common notions about the Crusades are incorrect and Asbridge?s book helps dispel them.

It is not, however, a ?dense? book that one might expect to find in college courses. Asbridge is aiming also for a popular audience and to that end he his text is thoroughly engaging, gripping, and fast paced. There's a lot of potential for drama in the history of the Crusades and that?s just what Asbridge delivers ? but without being melodramatic or sacrificing good historical scholarship.

Readers will feel like they are really getting to know the people involved ? important in such a personality-driven enterprise like the Crusades ? but at the same time they also get to know a great deal about the ideas and culture of the age. In this way Asbridge takes us from the birth of the Crusades in Europe to the final, violent massacres in Jerusalem itself. As vicious and bloody as it was, though, the Crusaders never lost their religious devotion:

• ?In the minds of the crusaders, religious fervor, barbaric warfare and a self-serving desire for material gain were not mutually exclusive experiences, but could all exist, entwined, in the same time and place.... In a moment that is perhaps the most vivid distillation of the crusading experience, they came, still covered in their enemies? blood, weighed down with booty, ?rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus?.?

• ?There was certainly nothing noble or praiseworthy about the Frankish sack of Jerusalem, but it demonstrates that many crusaders were driven on, not simply by bloodlust or greed, but also by an authentic and ecstatic sense of Christian devotion.?

There should be an emphasis on the word ?authentic? here. The Crusades were an authentic act of Christian devotion, not a violent aberration. The Crusades didn?t contradict Christianity; instead, they followed logically from centuries of Christian theology and writing on war. The Crusades were a form of ?positive violence? consistent with Christian doctrine. The Crusades cannot be excised from Christianity, nor can Christianity be excised from the Crusades.

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