The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, by Jonathan Riley-Smith. Bamp- Ton Lectures in America Series

[CIS 4.1–2 (2008) 239–240] Comparative Islamic Studies (print) ISSN 1740-7125 doi: 10.1558/cis.v4i1–2.239 Comparative Islamic Studies (online) ISSN 1743-1638

The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, by Jonathan Riley-Smith. Bamp- ton Lectures in America Series. Columbia University Press, 2008. Hb. 136 pp., $13.25/£18.25. ISBN-13: 9780231146241.

Reviewed by J. Patrick Hornbeck II Fordham University, New York, USA Email: [email protected]

Keywords: Crusades, Christianity, Saladin, Riley-Smith, penitential, holy war.

“This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile,” declared George W. Bush in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Progres- sive commentators and Islamic leaders reacted angrily to Bush’s use of the word crusade, accusing the president of reigniting the wars fought by bloodthirsty, avaricious Christians against the refined civilizations of the Islamic world. But according to Jonathan Riley-Smith, the renowned Cambridge historian, it was not only Bush who engaged in anachronism. The Crusades, he argues in this slim but compelling volume, were not an anomaly for Christianity, which has had “in general no problem with the idea of holy war”; nor have they always been the prime source of bitter- ness between Christians and Muslims (4). Rather, for Riley-Smith, the crusading movement has been shaped in the popular imagination more by the claims of imperialists than historians. This volume, which has its origins in Riley-Smith’s 2007 Bampton Lec- tures in America, traces both the Crusades and the modern reception of their history. Riley-Smith chronicles the Crusades as penitential holy wars: each adjective is important, for the Crusades were not just violence justified by the command of God, but also wars fought in order to help save their warriors’ souls. In chapter one, Riley-Smith studies the devel- opment of holy war in Christian thought; in an interesting aside, he also comments on what he calls the phenomenon of introspective violence. At the same time as embarking on campaigns against others, Christians also persecuted their own: the time of the Crusades was also the time of pogroms against Jews and campaigns against heretics at home. Chapter two emphasizes the penitential nature of crusading warfare: innovative when first propounded in the eleventh century, the idea of violence as a form of penitence faced few barriers in minds already trained to think in penitential terms, and hence “the most characteristic feature of any

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR 240 Book Reviews expedition was how liturgical it was” (34). Chapters three and four look outward. The former considers attempts by latter-day missionaries and imperialists to renew the crusading ideal, whereas the latter looks at the ways in which pseudohistories of the Cru- sades have been received in European as well as Islamic milieux. In par- ticular, Riley-Smith argues that the portrayal of crusaders as “boorish” and concerned primarily for financial gain both distorted their penitential ideals and inspired European admiration for such Muslim leaders as Saladin (65). In turn, however, these histories renewed, and changed, the Islamic world’s perspective on the Crusades: from European historiography “Muslims took the idea of a destructive and savage West, which benefited by absorbing their civilized values while at the same time leav- ing a trail of wreckage” (72). For a thin book, this is also a provocative one. It challenges much of the received narrative of the Crusades, but it does so along a trajectory not foreign to recent scholarship. And Riley-Smith is no apologist for the crusaders: he may not think them motivated by greed alone, but nor is he prepared to excuse their violence. Where this volume falls down has most to do with its genre; in four lectures there is little space for Riley- Smith to qualify some of his assertions, for instance that a generic “Mus- lim reading” of crusading history owes debts to an equally generic Chris- tian imperialist historiography. But taken for what they are, these witty and erudite pages are testimony to a remarkable historical career.