Historiography in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Books Reviewed: Thomas F. Madden, The Concise History of the Crusades, 3d ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, 2d ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). During the last six decades, historians have adopted various approaches to studying the Crusades. Unfortunately, few contemporary Muslim scholars have dealt with this topic at all. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, this series of European military invasions of the Middle East began to reappear in the media as analysts, historians, and academics posited that they were a precursor of the region’s present sociopolitical disorder as daunting as the current East- West discourse and relations between the Christian and Muslim worlds.1 Some works deconstruct the perception that there is no connection between them, whereas others view the Crusades from the Islamic perspective in an attempt to balance the general triumphalist western narrative.2 This essay focuses on three recent works that, although dealing with different standpoints, are explicitly interwoven. Thomas F. Madden’s The Concise History of the Crusades “is an attempt to illuminate the complex relationship of the past to the present” and narrates the Crusades in a “concise, understandable, and engaging manner” (pp. vii, viii) based on modern scholarship; Paul M. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise shows how medieval Muslims perceived the Crusades and is based on his research primarily from original Islamic sources (p. 6); and Jonathan Harris’ Byzantium and the Crusades concentrates on the relations between Byzantium and the Latin West during the Crusades. Madden’s book comprises ten chapters. Chapter 1, “The Call,” discusses the crusading movement’s background as primarily an act of piety despite an underlying current of selfish/secular desires, a fact that western scholars often overlook. He also criticizes historians who believe that many Crusaders were motivated by medieval Europe’s policy of “castoffs,” wherein only the first son could inherit his father’s estate, by stating that the majority of crusading ...