The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam by Jonathan Riley-Smith

Author:Jonathan Riley-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: REL017000, Religion/Comparative Religion, HIS037010, History/Medieval
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Para- and pseudocrusading were related to Lavigerie’s authentic military order, in the sense that all emerged from the same environment and drew on the same romantic and imperialistic emotions. Until now the most recent date anyone has given for the demise of the crusading movement has been 1798, when Malta fell to Napoleon. The question arises whether we should be thinking of extending its history to the collapse of Lavigerie’s military order in 1892. A historian like myself, approaching the nineteenth century from the direction of the Middle Ages, is tempted to do so, but I wonder whether the initiative for the events I have described lay rather with imperialism itself. Crusading was moribund, as even the Order of Malta recognized and as the short life of the Frères Armés du Sahara demonstrated, but its ideas and images were seized on and exploited as a package to serve the ends of empire. This had consequences for the future and we are now paying a price, because the newly emerging Arab nationalists took nineteenth-century imperialist rhetoric literally. They came to believe that the West, having lost the first round in the Crusades, had embarked on another, and their vision of past and present crusading was inherited by a new generation of Pan-Islamists. I will turn in the final chapter to this unexpected and extraordinary development in crusade historiography.

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