God's Battalions

August 10, 2009
It always seems counterintuitive to moderns that warfare and religion can be consistent. Ideally, followers of the prince of peace are to avoid the sword and shield. Clearly, this has not always been the case. Frequently in the crosshairs of critics are the Christian wars against Muslims known as the Crusades, commonly viewed as the birth of European imperialism and the forced spread of Christianity. But what if we've had it all wrong? What if the Crusades were a justifiable response to a strong and determined foe? Stark, a prominent sociologist and author of 27 books on history and religion, has penned a compelling argument that these bloody encounters had less to do with spreading Christianity than with responding to an ever more dangerous enemy—the emerging Islamic empire. There is much to be learned here. Filled with fascinating historical glimpses of monks and Templars, priests and pilgrims, kings and contemplatives, Stark pulls it all together and challenges us to reconsider our view of the Crusades.

Starred review from October 1, 2009
A cogent and feisty apologist for Christian history, Stark here synthesizes recent research discoveries about the Crusades and answers the introductions titular question, Greedy Barbarians in Armor? with a resounding No! Crusaders were self-sacrificing, not greedy, becoming immediately poorer from selling land and possessions to go on crusade, and they seldom got rich anew, even from the Fourth Crusade sacking of Constantinople, which, by the way, wasnt as costly in lives and destruction as many other attackers victories, Muslim as well as Western. Indeed, how could crusaders prosper when their culture, which mounted and funded the Crusades, was decisively more advanced than Islam, especially technologically? The crusaders were morally more advanced, too; unlike Muslims, they often refrained from killing and enslaving everyone left in captured towns (as was then the universal norm in wartime) and successfully curbed anti-Jewish impulses (the worst anti-Jewish incidents were effects of the nonmilitary, peoples crusades in the Rhineland, not the Levant). Perhaps only Western loss of money and morals ended the Crusades, as the aggrandizing monarchs on the rise during 200 years of crusading came to refuse more than lip service to late-thirteenth-century and subsequent popes attempts to rally Christendom again. An excitingly readable distillation of the new, revisionist Crusades historiography.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)