The Crusades Book

It is my first time to read a book on the Crusades and Medieval Ages Middle East and East Mediterranean. I liked the book as it gives an interesting window on the 200-year-old conflict between Islam and Christendom. The book shows the minimal effect of these wars on the Islamic world, which was more concerned about the Mongol threat and expansion from East. It also shows a superiority of both Islamic and Byzantine world over Western Europe at the time and the deep scientific, military, artistic and architectural influence of East on Europe at the end of such wars. It also shows the negative impact of such wars on indigenous Christian communities in the Middle East, how it ended the well-known tolerance that characterized the previous centuries and the rebirth of Islamic expansionism. It also deeply weakened the Byzantines and gives a strong push to the Mamluks. I was surprised that sometimes Jerusalem was given peacefully to the Crusades; Muslims and Crusaders fought together against other Muslim dynasties; and how prisoners - both Crusaders and Muslims - sometimes converted to the opposite religion and fought with their new masters to be killed once their former people capture them. This book will give you a great understanding of the reality of Jewish community in the Middle East and how they were living in peace and actually fled the Crusaders. The book gave me a first glance of dynasties I never read about, namely the Seljuks, The Fatimids, The Mamluks, The Atabegs and others. It is a must read for people in the Middle East.

Quotes:

- During the 12th and 13th centuries the Crusades were of greater historical importance for Christian Western Europe than for the Islamic world.

- During the period of the Crusades Western Europe also learned a great deal from and about its Islamic neighbours. New technology, crops, patterns of trade, trade-goods and philosophical, medical, scientific and geographical knowledge all poured into a Western Europe eager to learn, exploit, dominate and conquer.

- The significance of the Crusades for the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire, and for Christian communities within the Islamic Middle East, was almost entirely negative. Byzantium was economically and militarily weakened by Western European pressure as well as by the Muslim Turks. Some Christian communities in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere still formed the majority of the population under Islamic rule in the 11th century, but declined into harassed minorities by the 14th century.

- Certainly the Crusades were never seen as a mortal threat to Islam. Nevertheless they and the Jihad which they prompted undermined the old culture of toleration which had characterised the Middle East from the 7th to the 11th centuries.

- The savagery, intolerance and sheer ignorance shown by Western Europeans encouraged intolerance and conservatism among their victims, and among the Sunni Muslim majority this was directed not only against Western European 'barbarians' but also local Christians, Jews and the Shi'a Muslim minority.

- Meanwhile the Islamic Middle East had little to learn from the Western European 'Franks', who remained inferior in almost all aspects of culture until the later 13th and 14th centuries.

- As the Crusaders made their way east by land and sea, the first blood to be spilled in large quantities was not Muslim but Jewish. In what has been called 'the first Holocaust'.

- One of the most lasting impacts the Crusades had upon the Islamic lands of the Middle East was to stimulate bigotry against local or indigenous Christian communities. Whether this rising tide of intolerance, so unlike the cultural co-existence of the preceding Golden Age of Islamic civilisation from the 7th to the 11th centuries, was inevitable or was a direct result of the Crusades is unclear. What is clear is that Christians had been in a majority in Anatolia, Egypt, much of Syria and perhaps even parts of Iraq, and had been flourishing minorities in several other territories at the moment when the First Crusaders burst upon the scene. By the time the Crusader city of Acre fell in 1291 they were minorities almost everywhere, increasingly suspect to their Muslim rulers and neighbours alike. The fact that the status, role and even the size of Jewish communities did not suffer a similar collapse may perhaps be taken as evidence that the Crusades were, from the point of view of those Eastern Christian communities which the Crusades were in part intended to 'save' nothing less than a disaster.

- The Franciscans' habitual salutation of 'The peace of God be with you' is, of course, a direct translation of the Arabic 'Salam alaykum'.

- Religious relics and assorted exotic luxury goods were brought back from the Middle East, sometimes as booty, sometimes legitimately purchased. Though few in number, their influence can be seen in a wide variety of artistic forms including abstract decoration and pseudoArabic inscriptions in medieval manuscripts, ceramics, textiles and so on.

- The cultural superiority enjoyed by the Islamic World in earlier centuries resulted in most Muslims continuing to despise Western Europe. This attitude of mind persisted long after the original cultural and scientific superiority had been lost. Of course the Crusader States disappeared before the greatest cultural flowering of the European Renaissance in the 14th-15th centuries, and so could not serve as a channel of influence.

#GilgameshNabeel