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)