The Crusader States

The Crusader States

by Malcolm Barber

Yale University Press, 2012

          A recent addition to the body of crusade historiography is this new work by Malcolm Barber on the principalities that formed around the Frankish nobility during and following the events of the First Crusade.  Barber utilizes a chronological history of the crusader states that spans the period of 1095-1192, roughly ending with the failure of the Third Crusade, to explain the nature of these brief but dynamic European ventures in the east.

         Rather than appearing to be another academic work covering the same ground of the events and people of the crusades, Barber’s thesis focuses on the distinct culture that emerged as western individuals sought to incorporate themselves into the territories they had won.  While demonstrating many examples of Latin activity within the city structures, Barber does not give much of the cultural comparison he promises in the introduction.  Antioch, Tripoli, and Edessa all receive relatively little attention in this area as compared to Jerusalem.  From the latter the reader is introduced to the military and economic contributions of the Italian city states in conjunction with the port cities under control of the Latin kings.  Further, the beginnings of educational facilities culminating in highly skilled works produced from the scriptorium of the Holy Sepulcher in the late 1120’s, are suggestive of cultural vibrancy.  However, Barber fails to show the ordinary people of the day to day running of the kingdom.  Hints of prosperity come forth, but there is almost nothing specific about the freemen or burgesses of any of the crusader states.  Contributions by the military orders are shorn of their predictable positive and negative connotations, and featured only as powerful interested parties in the conflict with the slowly growing Islamic coalition against the Latins. 

          Where Barber really contributes new material, is rather in the way in which he maintains a solid focus upon the life and death of the principalities themselves.  His reader can walk away from this work knowing the specific founding and dismantling of each crusade conquest, except that of Antioch, which he leaves off at the obsequious meeting of Bohemond III before Saladin in 1192.  Incidentally, Barber’s insights into the personality of Saladin is more complete than any other character in the narrative and provides a refreshingly balance perspective.  An attempt at explaining the short life of the Second Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was perhaps a bit much to ask of this work.  Barber keeps focused on his subject, and provides a much needed commentary on the often volatile and violent short history of the crusader states whose very existence required the very best of the high middle ages, and many of its resources.

John Lowe (J. Sharp)

King Stephen

King Stephen

By Edmund King

Yale University Press, 2010

     In tackling the history of King Stephen of England (1135-1154), Edmund King engages his readers in a discussion of the failure of a dynasty, and the roots of an English civil war in the early 12^th century.  Biographical but topical in nature, King examines the events of the disputed English crown from the point of view of a moderate outsider.  Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury speak for the author, who in his turn tries to identify the feelings of the English and Norman nobility who form the backdrop of the drama of rights to succession. 

     King demonstrates well the sympathetic situation of Stephen, by arguing alongside his subject that indeed it was the nobility who feared for their landed rights at the death of King Henry I (d.1135), who were responsible for elevating Stephen to the crown.  Ignoring the rights of the late monarch’s daughter Matilda and her son Henry Fitz Empress, King argues throughout his work that Stephen was elected more or less as a powerful figurehead of the designs of the nobility.  Passive, pious, and in love with pageantry, King describes a monarch whose power base derives not from himself, but from his strong willed queen Matilda of Boulogne, his brothers Henry of Winchester and Theobald, Count of Blois.  The eventual loss of the crown to the future Henry II is described as the result of failures of a single man, and the mitigation of powerful magnates wanting peace within their poverty and war stricken domains.

     King’s arguments are substantive and well documented, and his conclusions seem to hit the mark.  His main subject is rarely quoted in the whole work, arguably to substantiate his claim that the king was slow to uphold even his own rights, but it appears to give a disadvantage to the work.  The reader could use more information on the king’s actual activities, charters and words to better understand King’s thesis that the Stephen rarely raised his voice, let alone got listened too by his subjects.  This one drawback underscores the whole work, which really accomplishes its goal in describing the priorities of the English and Norman nobility and the scramble to gain and keep power in 12^th century England.

John Lowe (J. Sharp)

Robert Curthose: Duke of Normandy (c.1050-1134)

Robert Curthose:  Duke of Normandy (c.1050-1134)

William M. Aird

The Boydell Press, 2008

        This remarkably insightful biography has been touted as one of the most sympathetic and complete assessments of the life of Robert, Duke of Normandy to date, and I must agree.  Aird attempts the reconstruction of the duke’s life which admittedly is very sketchy in the primary sources, and at the same time illuminates the backdrop of Norman society and its incorporation into the kingdom of the Franks.  Aird presents a narrative account following the adventures of William the Conqueror, Robert’s birth and childhood, and advances through the major events to touch Normandy until the duke’s death in confinement at the hands of his duplicitous brother, Henry I.

        The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis serves as the primary source for Robert’s life and deeds, and Aird spends considerable time problematizing this source, demonstrating for his readers the usefulness of contemporary accounts and the pitfalls due to personal biases, hindsight, and politic expediency.  That said, Aird also typifies in his work the need for medieval historians like any scholars working with limited resources, to look at a source from every angle and to continue to ask questions that establish context and logical conclusions.  From a compositional point of view, the reader is much gratified to find well researched and annotated footnotes that establish Aird’s well-formed case for a reevaluation of the life and deeds of Robert.

        It is hard to establish Aird’s primary thesis other than in vague points that the reader can establish through the work.  First, Aird upholds Robert’s right to the kingdom of his father and the unscrupulous acts of his brothers.  Second, the argument is made that Robert’s rule of Normandy was more structured and better than has been handed down by contemporaries.  Third, personal piety and the heroic participation in the First Crusade by Robert did not establish any permanent and positive results other than his popularity.  Finally, Robert simply was not as ruthless as his brother Henry, and his somewhat naïve and trusting personality was not equipped to deal with the necessary amount of corruptness required to rule in the latter eleventh century.  These points combined paint a picture of a tragic individual, and one whose role in Norman politics and medieval relevancy needs to be reexamined.

John Lowe (J. Sharp)

The Baron’s Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences

The Baron’s Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences

Michael Lower

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

What Lower has attempted in this short monograph is extraordinary for its goal and simple delivery: the utilization of a historical event and its varied responses to argue for comparative analysis versus totalizing generalities that many historians utilize for narrative and explanatory constructs.  In essence, Lower presents a case for examining closely long held ‘truisms’ that are immensely popular in modern society, and gives credit to the people actually involved in the historical events for having personality, reasons that made sense to them, and their own opinions.

Lower begins his examination of the Baron’s Crusade (1234-1241), but outlining several key factors for his history.  The first is that the long held view that all of European Christianity felt the same about the crusades, should be challenged as a generality that perceives all Christians as coming from the same mold.  The response of the barons involved in this event (Thibaut IV of Champagne, Peter of Brittany, Earl Richard of Cornwall to name a few), were predicated not only by their own agendas, but by what was beneficial in each case to them, thinking no less that they were still indeed Christian and acting on behalf of God.  Lower goes on to challenge the assumption that the papacy of Rome held sweeping control, by utilizing the failed attempt of Gregory IX to direct the crusade to the aid of Constantinople.  At the height of its power, Lower argues that the Church itself and its head bishop could not ultimately control all who pledged allegiance to her.  In addition, the examination of each baron’s native location and the response towards ‘other’ in their midst (heretics and Jews), found greater impetuous in politic and situational expediencies, rather than as sweeping policies of the Church’s hierarchy.

While Lower does not provide as much detail as the reader might like about the actual chronological events of the crusade once it got under way, the purpose of the work becomes clear if one only glances through the introduction and the conclusion.  The complexities and shifting positions of individuals are best studied in comparative light with all the equations taken into account, and the scholar is better served by giving up archetypical crutches of identity based solely on affiliation.  The modern individual demands facts and quantitative details that form the basis for a conclusion in the medical and judicial world, why not in the study of history and the questioning of historical ‘truths’?

John Lowe (J. Sharp)                                                                                  

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

Destiny Disrupted:  A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

Tamim Ansary

PublicAffairs Books, 2009

                It can be very difficult to find a lot of good points in a book which presents one’s personal biases and views of history into question; even more so when the work has the ring of truth about it.  Destiny Disrupted is just such a book, arguing for more than just a sympathetic or revisionist view of Islam, the religion, societal order, or cultural history.  Instead, Ansary has presented a dual history, one which finds its narrative from the east as the center of world history.  This presentation moves the scene of action from the normal Eurocentric point of view (Rome), to the seat of religious and secular leaders of Islam in the Middle World, or the Middle East.

                The arguments proposed by Ansary about exceptional men and some women of the narrative of Islam, make sense of the preceding fourteen centuries since Mohammed first began his spiritual community of disciples.  Whereas the civilizations emerging from Islamic based cultures such as the Ottomans are painted in broad and colorful strokes, it would be wise for the reader to pursue more concrete studies on Middle Eastern cultures.  This work accomplishes what Ansary is attempting; namely a broad historical story that incorporates his idea of a different way of looking at world history from the perspective of the Islamic community through the centuries.

                That being said, Ansary is quite frustrating at times in his use of western historical figures, empires, and cultural movements as the foil for his comparisons to the east.  Utilizing just one example, the Roman Empire is often picked over for examples to help explain the importance of the Islamic figures or civilizations he is trying to praise, but often cast as the lesser comparable.  Roman prowess also finds itself emasculated in this work, another example being the failure of the Romans to defeat the Parthians, but Ansary fails to mention that this conflict was maintained for nearly two centuries.  Compiled with a near absence of notations or references to his sources, the scholar is frustrated by the clear suppression of information at times that make Ansary’s points look better than they are.  These inaccurate representations of Classical and Medieval Europe at times are jarring, but one gets the sense that they are purposeful examples of western writers and their tendency to gloss over historical facts of cultures outside of the Eurocentric fold.  The near complete absence of knowledge regarding current scholarship on the Crusades is just one more major example.

                On the whole, Ansary has delivered a much need work to open western eyes again to the historical realities of the east, and has done it in a simplified but exciting narrative form that is easily accessible to most readers.  His call for a little more understanding and reflection on the current problems in the Middle East based upon the historical dramas unfolding in that area over the last millennium and a half is fully justified and timely.

John Lowe (J. Sharp)