Mark Johansen's Reviews > God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

This book serves two useful purposes:

(1) It is a good short, readable history of the crusades. If you don't know much about the period, it's a good introduction. Stark relates an excellent overview of the history, culture, and military realities of the era. This is pretty straightforward so I'll leave it at that.

(2) The clear goal of this book is to explain the motivations of the crusaders. The "pop culture" understanding of the crusades today is that it was an unprovoked attack on Arabs by Europeans. Depending on who's telling the story, it was either a bunch of Christian religious fanatics who saw it as their pious duty to massacre Muslims out of intolerance, or religion had nothing to do with it and it was all an effort to steal land and exploit it for profit. Or both.

Stark points out that this makes no sense. The immediate cause of the crusades was that Muslims attacked the Christian city of Constantinople, and the people of Constantinople sent out an appeal for help to the rest of Europe. In the longer term, the Muslims had invaded and conquered huge tracts of land that were populated by Christians, and massacred and/or enslaved the inhabitants. (Including north Africa, Syria, and Turkey -- once Christian places -- and Spain and Italy.) By the time of the First Crusade, Europe was finally mustering the strength and resolve to fight back. The war wasn't started by the Christians: it was started by the Muslims. When Muslims complain about the Crusaders invading the Middle East, what they are saying is that when they invade a country, it is grossly immoral and unjust for that country to fight back.

He also explains that the Crusaders could not have been motivated by greed because the Crusades were not a profitable enterprise by any measure. Building an army, transporting it to the Middle East, supplying and maintaining it were hugely expensive. The lands they conquered or tried to conquer were not particularly wealthy. No one got rich from being a Crusader, and quite a few bankrupted themselves and their families. Not to mention that the majority of the Crusaders died in the effort -- at one point Stark says that only 10% of the people who started out in the First Crusade reached Jerusalem. Some number of these turned back and went home, but most died in battle or from the hardships of the campaign, starvation, disease, etc. I suppose someone could reply to Stark that even if the Crusaders didn't get rich, maybe they thought they would. But the Crusades stretched over hundreds of years. Surely if what people were after was money, after they saw that the first few tens of thousands of people had not gotten rich but instead died terrible deaths, enthusiams would have tapered off rapidly.

On the minuses:

(1) There's a lot of discussion of specific places and routes in this book. This army marched along such-and-such a route and a battle was fought in this city and so on. But there are only a few maps and most of these have little detail. I think I have a fairly good knowledge of geography, but I certainly don't know the name and location of every small town in the Middle East in AD 1090.

(2) The book is almost entirely from the Crusader's point of view. I don't mean "pro-Crusader" here, though it is that. I mean, I think it would have been helpful if he had included more discussion of what was going on in the Muslim side. Maybe this is an unfair criticism: maybe that just wasn't the author's purpose or would have made the book longer than he wanted.

(3) At a few points Stark defends the Crusaders with the argument that some action violates our standards today but was accepted at the time. Most notably, he offers this defense for killing the inhabitants of a city after a succesful siege. Personally I don't buy this argument. Even if it's true that "everybody was doing it", that doesn't make it right.