The Islamic Interpretation of The Crusa

90 Paul E.
Chevedden
The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade:

A New (Old) Paradigm for Understanding the Crusades
Pa u l E . C h e ve d d e n
(UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies)
A Novemcentennial
Last year marked the 900th anniversary of the debut of the Islamic
interpretation of the Crusade. 900 years ago, not long after the Crusader
conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, a Muslim jurist in nearby Damascus for-
mulated an encompassing theory of the Crusade that came to enjoy ca-
nonical status in the Islamic historiographical tradition. His idea of the
Crusade was the first conceptual paradigm ever advanced to explain the
crusading movement, and his schema served as a model for later histori-
ans in the Middle East who examined the Christian jihad. His panoramic
overview of the Crusade is historically accurate and in fundamental
agreement with papal documents. Furthermore, his clear and precise
vision of the Crusade is capable of guiding future research in the field of
Crusade studies. Despite these noteworthy facts, the novemcentennial of
the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade was not accompanied by wide-
spread academic congresses or celebrations last year. The city of Damas-
cus, where this interpretation was first presented, did not commemorate
this significant intellectual achievement. In fact, there were no remem-
brances at all last year for the emergence of the very first scholarly con-
ceptualization of the Crusade. The reason is simple. The Islamic interpre-
tation of the Crusade remains unknown.
Why this is so is a bit of a puzzle. No cryptographer or symbologist
is needed to unravel the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade. It is
embedded in no secret code. The sources from which this interpretation
can be reconstructed are widely known and readily accessible to scholars.
A good number of the relevant Arabic texts have been translated into
Western languages and have been available to researchers and to the gen-
eral public for decades. Scholars – both in the West and in the Islamic
world – have examined these texts repeatedly, yet they have brushed
Der Islam Bd. 83, S. 90–136 DOI 10.1515/ISLAM.2006.004

© Walter de Gruyter 2006
ISSN 0021-1818
The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade 91
aside the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade as irrelevant – of no sig-

nificance for understanding the actual phenomenon of crusading. Con-
ceptual blinders have successfully prevented scholars from recognizing
the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade for what it is: a coherent and
historically verifiable explanation of the Crusade.
More than 40 years ago Francesco Gabrieli observed that Crusade
historians untrained in Middle Eastern languages exploited Islamic
sources, as far as they could, when these sources were available to them in
translation, but they treated them “as a purely technical tool of verifi-
cation, without arriving at a deeper insight into the spirit of their auth-
ors, and into the Muslim vision and interpretation of events”.1 Little has
changed since Gabrieli wrote these words. Today, Islamic sources for
the Crusades are being exploited, not to elucidate and substantiate an in-
terpretation of the Crusade that is actually found in them, but to prop up
a traditionalist view of the Crusade, one grounded in a nineteenth-cen-
tury framework of analysis that has largely been discarded by histori-
ans.2
Studies of the Crusades are particularly prone to tunnel vision. More
often than not the Crusades are taken out of their historical context and
are viewed not as a response to ongoing circumstances, but as the cause
of a new set of circumstances. The Crusades are frequently depicted as
1) Francesco Gabrieli, “The Arabic Historiography of the Crusades”, in

Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and Peter Malcolm Holt (Lon-
don, 1962), 101. Gabrieli’s remarks are echoed by Robert Irwin: “On the whole,
the [Middle Eastern] chronicles have been used merely to provide information
to confirm or supplement the western materials. There has been little attempt to,
as it were, get inside those sources and recreate the Einfühlung of the Muslim
counter-crusade” (Robert Irwin, “Orientalism and the Early Development of
Crusader Studies”, in The Experience of Crusading, II: Defining the Crusader
Kingdom, ed. Peter Edbury and Jonathan Phillips [Cambridge, 2003], 229). As
will be made clear below, getting inside Middle Eastern historical sources is not
simply a problem for those untrained in Middle Eastern languages. It is a problem
for distinguished Arabists, such as Gabrieli, as well as for those scholars whose
native language is Arabic (or Persian or Turkish).
2) See especially Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
(New York, 2000). The legacy of the nineteenth century in Crusade studies can be
seen in the “Great Man” theory of history, with Pope Urban II as the founding
father of the Crusade, in the tradition of German intellectual history or Geistes-
geschichte, which promotes the role of ideas as the motive force behind historical
events, and in the portrayal of the politics of crusading as an affair of elites, with
a corresponding neglect of non-elites.
92 Paul E. Chevedden
the start of a new development, not the culmination of a historical en-

counter between two Mediterranean societies. The Crusades are often
seen as the cause, not the effect of the struggle between Islam and
Christendom and in this way history is turned on its head: the effect is
made into the cause, and the result of a protracted conflict is promoted as
the paradigm for the entire complex of relations between Islam and
Christendom over many centuries. Thus, a recent study of the “First”
Crusade argues that this expedition produced a desperate clash between
the civilizations of Islam and Christendom, igniting hostility and enmity
that would last for centuries: “The lines of religious discord hardened;
Christendom and Islam had been set on the path to enduring conflict”.3
The reluctance to view crusading as part of a much wider phenomenon
has many causes, but Eurocentrism and the privileging of Latinate
sources are two chief culprits. Islamic sources, meanwhile, have been used
exclusively to verify an interpretation of the Crusades put forward by
Western historians. It is time that Islamic sources for the Crusades are
taken seriously.
“Islamic Perspective” or “Islamic Perspectives”
A recent book does, in fact, attempt to take Islamic sources for the
Crusades seriously. It purports to present “Islamic perspectives” on the
Crusades.4 Keeping up with scholarly fashions, “multiple perspectives”
are now in vogue. The prevailing assumption is that “Islamic” perspec-
tives are different from “Western” perspectives and that these perspec-
tives are numerous and various. The term “Islamic perspectives” implies
that the Muslim world during the Middle Ages was filled with many
minds – not with one mind only – each with its own perception of the Cru-
sade. Although this was certainly true, it is also trivial. The notion of
multiple perspectives ignores the underlying reality that there was one
predominant view of the Crusade shared by both Muslims and Christians.
Contemporary witnesses – Christian and Muslim – were conscious of the
political transformations taking place in the Mediterranean world during
the eleventh century. By the end of the century, no one who looked around
3) Thomas S. Asbridge, The First Crusade: A New History (New York, 2004),
ix, 339. So that the reader will not miss the point that the clash between Islam and
the West began with the Crusades, the jacket of the American edition of this book
carries the subtitle, The Roots of the Conflict Between Christianity and Islam.
4) Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives.
the shores of the Middle Sea could be blind to the shifting balance of
Mediterranean power.5
At the beginning of the eleventh century three great powers domi-
nated the Mediterranean world: the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans
and Anatolia, the Fatimid caliphate in North Africa and Syria, and the
Umayyad caliphate in al-Andalus. By the end of the eleventh century
these powers had either disappeared or had begun to disappear by de-
grees. The great Mediterranean powers at the turn of the millennium were
submerged by two major events of world-historical importance that
transformed the new millennium: the movement of western European
peoples that culminated in “the greatest upsurge of expansive energy
that human history has ever seen”6 and the movement of Turkic peoples
that created a vast Turkoman sphere stretching from the borders of China
to the Balkans and led to the formation of the great Islamic empires of
the Saljuqs, Mamluks, Timurids, Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans, all
with Turkic roots. These events were far from being the only influences at
work, but they proved decisive enough to constitute a turning point in the
history of the Mediterranean – and for that matter, of the whole world.
During the first century of the second millennium these events pro-
duced a dramatic shift in the power relationship between Islam and Latin
Christendom and a dramatic shift in the power relationships within the
Islamic world. In the western Mediterranean, these changes generated
the Crusade. In the eastern Mediterranean, these changes brought about
the Saljuq conquest of the Mashriq, which put an end to the Shii bid for
political supremacy over the umma Muhammadiya. Soon events along the
Tigris would become inextricably interlocked with events along the
Tagus. In 1071, the Saljuq victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert left
the Eastern Empire in peril and the eastern wall of Christendom perma-
nently breached. As Byzantium was reduced to a mere rump of its former
self, survival and recovery depended upon rescue efforts from the Latin
West. The Crusade, which had first turned to the Islamic south, now
turned to the Islamic east. By the time the eleventh century drew to a
close, the action and counteraction of jihad and anti-jihad, or Crusade,
and Crusade and counter-Crusade, or jihad, had already been estab-
lished. The Castilian conquest of Toledo in 1085 had provoked a vigorous
Almoravid counter-Crusade that turned the tide of the Christian ad-
vance, and Saljuq aggression had been answered by the “First” Crusade.
5) The classic statement of this development remains Archibald R. Lewis,

Naval Power and Trade in the Mediterranean, A. D. 500–1100 (Princeton, 1951).
6) Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton, 1957), 38.
With the onset of the twelfth century, Muslim scholars were able to assess
the crusading enterprise in its full Mediterranean-wide dimensions.
Muslim Historians Interpret the Crusade
Muslims throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond were aware

of the political shift taking place in the eleventh century and the general
nature of the Crusade. Recognizing the obvious congruencies between the
Islamic version of holy war and the Christian version, Muslim authors
had no reluctance calling the Crusade a jihad. By designating the Cru-
sade a jihad, Muslim authors indicated that crusading was regarded as
being sanctioned by God and inspired by a common Christian cause. In
1105, Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, a legal scholar and preacher at the Great
Mosque of Damascus, offered his account of the crusading movement in
his book Kitab al-jihad (“The Book of Holy War”). He describes it as a
Christian jihad that had begun in Sicily, then spread to Spain, and finally
advanced on Syria:
A host [of Franks] swooped down upon the island of Sicily at a time of divi-
sion and dissention, and likewise they took possession of town after town
in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus). When reports mutually confirmed the condi-
tion of this country (Syria) – namely, the disagreements of its lords, the dis-
cord of its leading men, coupled with its disorder and disarray – they acted
upon their decision to set out for it (Syria) and Jerusalem was the chief ob-
ject of their desires … They (the Franks) continued zealously in the holy war
(jihad) against the Muslims … until they made themselves rulers of lands
beyond their wildest dreams.7
This depiction of a Mediterranean-wide struggle that started in the west-

ern Mediterranean basin and finally encompassed the eastern Mediterra-
nean basin was the prevailing view presented in Islamic historical writing
of that general war between Islam and Christendom that became known
as the Crusades. Even historical works that are localized and chronologi-
cally limited, such as al-Azimi’s Ta#rikh Halab (“The History of Aleppo”),
written around 1160, reflect this view. Although focused on events in
7)Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-jihad, in Emmanuel Sivan, “La genèse de
la contre-croisade: un traité damasquin de dévut de XIIe siècle, Journal asiatique
254 (1966), 207 (Arabic text, 206–14; French trans., 214–22); Peter Malcolm Holt,
The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London,
1986), 27; Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, 32, 69, 71–74, 105–109, 165. All
translations from the Arabic in the text of this article are my own.
Syria, this chronicle nonetheless sees the emergence of the Latin King-
dom of Jerusalem and the Latin principalities of Syria as tied to a wider
movement of Christian reconquest and, for that reason, draws attention
to events in the western Mediterranean:
[In 478/1085] the Franks (al-firanj) gained mastery over al-Andalus. The
ruler of Toledo8 sought aid from the Almoravids (al-mulaththama), so [the
Almoravids] engaged the Franks in battle in al-Andalus9 and vanquished
them. They constructed minarets from the [severed] heads [of the Frankish
dead] and made the call to prayer from them. Then [the Almoravids] re-
turned to their country without recovering a single garrison town.10
The spark that ignited the “First” Crusade, according to al-Azimi,

was set off in 486/1093–94 when Christian pilgrims were prevented from
traveling to Jerusalem:
The inhabitants of the coastal regions [of Syria-Palestine] prevented the
Latin (al-firanj) and Byzantine pilgrims from going to Jerusalem. Those
that returned home safely to their countries (mimman salima minhum ila bi-
ladihim) spread the news of what had happened. As a result, they (i. e., the
Latin Christians) made preparations for the expedition (that came to be
known as the “First” Crusade).11
Islamic sources viewed the different strands of western European ex-

pansion in the Mediterranean world as all of a piece, just as the papacy
viewed Islamic movements in this region as all of a piece. This depiction
8) So in MS for “the ruler of Seville”.

9) The battle, which took place on 23 October 1086, is known to Muslim
historians as al-Zallaqa, or Yawm Aruba/al-Aruba, and to Christian historians as
Sagrajas.
10) Muhammad ibn Ali al-Azimi, Ta#rikh Halab, ed. Ibrahim Zarur (Damas-
cus, 1984), 353; idem, Azimî tarihi (Selçuklular dönemiyle ilgili bölümler, H.
430–538), ed. Ali Sevim (Ankara, 1988), 20; Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives,
51.
11) Al-Azimi, Ta#rikh, 356; idem, Azimî tarihi, 23. Both Moshe Gil and Carole
Hillenbrand translate the clause mimman salima minhum as “those who sur-
vived” and suggest that an attack or massacre had taken place (Moshe Gil, A His-
tory of Palestine, 634–1099 [Cambridge, 1992], 488–89; Hillenbrand, Islamic
Perspectives, 50–51). Hadia Dajani-Shakeel alludes to no massacre and under-
stands the passage to mean that “the pilgrims who returned safely to their
countries spread the news about the obstruction of their pilgrimage” (Hadia
Dajani-Shakeel, “A Reassessment of Some Medieval and Modern Perceptions of
the Counter-Crusade”, in The Jihad and Its Times, ed. Hadia Dajani-Shakeel
and Ronald A. Messier [Ann Arbor, 1991], 48).
of reality should not be taken as a literary topos designed merely to re-

duce a complex tangle of events to a single main drama. This depiction
of reality reflects the very structure of society in the Mediterranean
world. The Dar al-Islam – the society of Muslim peoples – was a relig-
iously based society, just as was Christendom – the society of Christian
peoples (populus christianus). When grave political threats arose that
endangered the realms of Islam, the nature of the political threat and the
response to it were cast in a religious light. More importantly, this depic-
tion of reality correctly conveys the papal view of the crusading enter-
prise as a Mediterranean-wide campaign to “spread greatly the Church
of God into Muslim territories”.12 Thus, the universal historians Ibn
al-Athir (1160–1233) and al-Nuwayri (1279–1332?) consider the Crusade
to be a general Christian offensive against Islam that had three main
fronts: Sicily, Spain, and Syria. It is Ibn al-Athir who elevated this inter-
pretation of the Crusade to canonical status in Arabic historiography
in his monumental work, al-Kamil fi l-ta#rikh (“The Consummate His-
tory”). His account reads:
The first appearance of the power of the Franks and the extension of their
rule – namely, attacks directed against Islamic territory and the conquest of
some of these lands – occurred in 478/1085, when they took Toledo and other
cities in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), as previously mentioned.
Then in 484/1091 they attacked and conquered the island of Sicily, as I have
also described; from there they extended their reach as far as the coast
of North Africa, where they captured some places. The conquests [in North
Africa] were won back, but they took possession of other lands, as you will
see.
12) “In Saracenorum finibus ecclesiam Dei plurimum dilatavit”: Urban to
Count Roger of Sicily, 1098, “Epistolae et privilegia”, PL 151, 506C, recounting

Roger’s conquest of Sicily; trans. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and
the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia, 1986), 18. In 1099, Urban described crusad-
ing activities that had begun in Sicily in 1061 as having spread across the Medi-
terranean world: “quod nostris temporibus ecclesia propagatur, Sarracenorum
dominatio diminuitur, antiquus episcopalium sedium honor, prestante Domino,
restauratur” (In our time the Church has been enlarged, the domination of the
Muslims has been reduced, the ancient honour of episcopal sees has been, by the
gift of God, restored): Urban to Bishop Pons of Barbastro, 1099; Paul F. Kehr,
Papsturkunden in Spanien: Vorarbeiten zur Hispania Pontificia, I: Katalanien,
pt. 2: Urkunden und Regesten (Berlin, 1926), 298 no. 31; Antonio Durán Gudiol,
La Iglesia de Aragón durante los reinados de Sancho Ramírez y Pedro I (1062?–1104)
(Rome, 1962), 154; trans. Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 18.
In 490/1097 they attacked Syria, and this is how it all came about: Bald-
win, their king,13 a relative of Roger the Frank,14 who had conquered Sicily,15
after having amassed a sizable force, sent a message to Roger saying: “I have
assembled a large army and am now on my way to you, and from your land I
shall conqueror North Africa and thereby become your neighbor”.
Roger gathered his companions and consulted them about this matter.
“By the Gospel”, they declared, “this project is excellent for us and for them
because these territories will then become Christian”. Then Roger raised his
leg and let fly a loud fart and said: “By my religion, a good fart is better than
your advice!” They asked him for an explanation, and he replied: “Look, if
they come to me, I shall have to supply them with vast quantities of provi-
sions and ships to transport them to North Africa, as well as some of my own
troops. Then, if they conqueror this territory, it will be theirs, and it will be
from Sicily that they will require provisioning, and I will lose my annual
profit from the harvest. And if they fail, they will return here and cause me
much trouble. In addition, Tamim will say, ‘you have deceived me and violated
our treaty’,16 and friendly relations and communications currently existing
13) Presumably this is Baldwin of Bouillon. If so, Ibn al-Athir incorrectly
identifies him as a king and relative of Count Roger I of Sicily. Baldwin of Bouillon
was the brother of Godfrey of Bouillon, the first king of Jerusalem (1099–1100).
He succeeded his brother on the throne (1100–18), but at the time of the “First”
Crusade he was neither a king nor a leader of Crusader forces. Peter Malcolm
Holt’s suggestion for why “Baldwin” was designated by Ibn al-Athir as the leader
of the “First” Crusade has merit: “Since [Baldwin of Bouillon] was followed in due
course by four other Baldwins, the name may have seemed almost like a regal or
dynastic title to the Arabic chronicler”. (Peter Malcolm Holt, The Crusader States
and Their Neighbours, 1098–1291 [Harlow, 2004], 19).
14) Roger I, Count of Sicily (d. 1101), was the youngest son of Tancred de
Hauteville and the Norman conqueror of Sicily in conjunction with his brother
Robert Guiscard, the Norman Duke of Apulia (1059–85).
15) February 1091 marked the completion of the conquest (Graham A. Loud,
The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest [Harlow,
2000], 172).
16) This is Tamim b. al-Muizz, the Zirid ruler of Tunisia (1062–1108), whose
peace treaty with Roger was concluded at some point prior to 1087 (Geoffrey
Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi
Ducis fratris eius, ed. Ernesto Pontieri [Bologna, 1927–28], IV.3, 86–87; trans.
Kenneth Baxter Wolf as The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of
his Brother Duke Robert Guiscard [Ann Arbor, 2005], 179; Loud, Age of Robert
Guiscard, 172; Hubert Houben, Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler between East and West
[Cambridge, 2002], 17–18). The treaty between Roger and Tamim aided Roger’s
conquest of Islamic Sicily since it effectively cut off all external assistance coming
to Sicily from North Africa. It also helped to protect Tamim’s territories. In 1087,
between us will be broken. Besides all this, North Africa will stay where it is,
and when we are strong enough, we will conqueror it ourselves”.
So he summoned Baldwin’s messenger and said to him: “If you want to
make holy war (jihad) against the Muslims, it would be better for you to con-
quer Jerusalem and deliver it from their hands and thereby win great glory.
As for North Africa, I am bound to its people by oaths and treaties”. So the
Franks made their preparations and set out to attack Syria.17
Ibn al-Athir traces the roots of crusading to Latin expansion in the

western Mediterranean basin; he even attributes the “First” Crusade to an
idea hatched by Islam’s foremost political opponent of the day, Count
Roger, the conqueror of Islamic Sicily. The Crusade is viewed as belonging
to the same world that produced the conquest of Sicily, the Castilian incur-
sion into al-Andalus, and Latin attempts to dominate North Africa. The
story he relates is most probably connected with Roger’s refusal to join
Pisa and Genoa in a combined assault on the Tunisian port of Mahdiya in
1087,18 but although the facts are transposed to suit the “First” Crusade,
there are some vital lessons to be derived from this account. It shows re-
markable insight into the essence of crusading. There was nothing in the
nature of crusading that precluded, either in theory or in practice, treaty
or clientage relations with Islamic powers, or that seriously hindered
Christian states from joining alliances – even with Muslims – against their
political and territorial rivals within Christendom. Nothing in crusading
interrupted the “diplomatic dance” in which Islamic and European
powers were engaged. These powers “lived by a web of pacts, truces, and
alliances, not only among their own religio-ethnic group but frequently
also with the countervailing ‘infidel’ powers around them”.19 Likewise,
Roger refused to join the combined Genoese-Pisan assault on the Tunisian port of
Mahdiya. See n. 18 below and text.
17) Izz al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi
l-ta#rikh (Beirut, 1965), X, 272–73; Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, 52;

Houben, Roger II of Sicily, 17–18; Holt, Crusader States and Their Neighbours,
18–19. An English translation of this passage was first published in Arab Histori-
ans of the Crusades, trans. from the Arabic sources by Francesco Gabrieli; trans.
from the Italian by E. J. Costello (London, 1969), 3–4.
18) See n. 16 above and text, as well as H. E. J. Cowdrey, “The Mahdia Cam-
paign of 1087”, English Historical Review 92 (1977), 1–29; Max Seidel, “Dom-
bau, Kreuzzugsidee und Expansionspolitik. Zur Ikonographie der Pisaner Kathe-
dralbauten”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 11 (1977), 340–69.
19) Robert I. Burns and Paul E. Chevedden, Negotiating Cultures: Bilin-
gual Surrender Treaties in Muslim-Crusader Spain under James the Conqueror

(Leiden, 1999), 213.
nothing in the nature of jihad barred alliances between Christians and

Muslims, or even alliances with Christian powers against Islamic states.
Neither jihad nor Crusade functioned autonomously, unrelated to politi-
cal, social, and military circumstances.20 Christendom’s greatest cham-
pion, Count Roger, could become the good ally of the Zirid ruler of Tuni-
sia with no hint of impropriety or bewilderment. Ibn al-Athir’s tale of
“the fart heard round the Mediterranean” is obviously designed to ridi-
cule and denigrate the Europeans, but it does provide an understanding
into the inner character of the Crusade. To appreciate the complex his-
torical processes that made up crusading, it is essential to ponder the
Muslim vision and interpretation of events. Even when this interpre-
tation is hopelessly flawed, as is the case with Ibn al-Athir’s account of
the “First” Crusade, there are underlying truths embedded in the nar-
rative.
In the early fourteenth century, al-Nuwayri expounded his own ver-
sion of the Crusade in his colossal Nihayat al-arab fi funun al-adab (“The
Ultimate Aim in Letters and Literature”), which follows closely that of
Ibn al-Athir:
The appearance of the Franks and their expansion and penetration into the
realms of Islam began in the year 478/1085. This occurred in al-Andalus
when its rulers broke up the land [into petty principalities] after [the col-
lapse of] the Umayyads, and each region fell into the hands of [an indepen-
dent] kinglet. Each ruler scorned the idea of submitting to another ruler and
being subject to someone else’s authority. They were similar to the rulers of
the successor states of Alexander’s empire (muluk al-tawa#if) in Persian
times. Each ruler was incapable of offering resistance to the neighboring
ruler or of directing [an attack] against the Franks. This situation brought
about a deterioration of conditions, and the enemies [of the faith] conquered
Islamic territory. The first place they captured was the city of Toledo in al-
Andalus, as we have mentioned under the year 478/1085. Then they took pos-
20) Robert I. Burns, “The Many Crusades of Valencia’s Conquest (1225–
1280): A Historiographical Labyrinth”, in: On the Social Origins of Medieval

Institutions: Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan, ed. Donald J. Kagay and
Theresa M. Vann (Leiden, 1998), 167–77. Others disagree with this position.
Tomaš Mastnak, for example, presents crusading as “a totalizing religious war”,
“a total war”, and a “totalized struggle against Islam”, having “a clean-cut reli-
gious motivation”. Any Christian conflict with Islam that does not obtain its total
of religious elements is deemed by Mastnak to be “absent of religiously based ex-
clusivism” and classified as a secular war (Tomaš Mastnak, Crusading Peace:
Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order [Berkeley, 2002], 70,
71, 85–88, 106, 107, 113, 121, 183, 184).
session of the island of Sicily in 484/1091, and they invaded the North Afri-
can coast where they took possession of a portion of it before withdrawing, as
we have previously mentioned.21
Syriac Historians Interpret the Crusade
The Islamic interpretation of the Crusade influenced the Syriac his-

torical tradition, as exhibited in the Syriac and Arabic chronicles of Abu
l-Faraj Gregorius Bar Hebraeus (1226–86). In his great Syriac chronicle
entitled Maktbanut zabne (derived from Greek chronographia), Bar He-
braeus states that the Christian advance against Islam began in the west-
ern Mediterranean, when the Franks first seized territory in al-Andalus:
When the Turks were ruling over Syria and Palestine, and all the [other]
countries they made the Christians who were coming to pray in Jerusalem to
suffer very many serious evils, and especially those who were coming from
Rome and other countries of Italy. Then the Franks became filled with rage,
and they collected troops and went forth first of all to Spain, and they took
possession of the cities there and they shed much blood in them.22
Like al-Azimi, Bar Hebraeus sees the Crusade as a Latin response to

the suffering endured by Christian pilgrims in Syria-Palestine. This in-
terpretation is also found in the great twelfth-century historical chron-
icle written by the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch Michael the Syrian
(1126–1199), from which Bar Hebraeus doubtless derived his own ac-
count of the “First” Crusade found in his Chronicon syriacum. Michael’s
account reads:
21) Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Abd al-Wahhab al-Nuwayri, Nihayat al-arab fi
funun al-adab, XXVIII, ed. Muhammad Muhammad Amin and Muhammad Hilmi
Muhammad Ahmad (Cairo, 1992), 248; Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, 54.
22) Abu l-Faraj Gregorius Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography of Gregory Abu#l
Faraj, I: Engl. Translation, trans. Ernest A. Wallis Budge (London, 1932), 234.
My analysis of the account of the “First” Crusade in the Syriac and Arabic chron-
icles of Bar Hebraeus is heavily indebted to the excellent study by Herman Teule,
“The Crusaders in Barhebraeus’ Syriac and Arabic Chronicles”, in East and West
in the Crusader States: Context, Contacts, Confrontations: Acta of the Congress
held at Hernen Castle in May 1993, ed. Krijnie Ciggaar, Adelbert Davids, and
Herman Teule (Leuven, 1996), 39–49. See also Matti Moosa, “The Crusades: An
Eastern Perspective, with Emphasis on Syriac Sources”, Muslim World 93 (2003),
249–89.
As the Turks were ruling the lands of Syria and Palestine, they inflicted in-
juries on Christians who went to pray in Jerusalem, beat them, pillaged
them, levied the poll tax at the gate of the town and also at Golgotha and the
[Holy] Sepulchre; and in addition, every time they saw a caravan of Chris-
tians, particularly of those [who were coming] from Rome and the lands of
Italy, they made every effort to cause their death in diverse ways. And when
countless people had perished as a result, the kings and counts were seized
with [religious] zeal and left Rome; troops from all these countries joined
them, and they came by sea to Constantinople.23
Bar Hebraeus’s Syriac account provides one curious element not in-
cluded in Michael’s history: he links attempts by the Latin West to curb
the oppression suffered by Christian pilgrims in the East to a Latin offen-
sive that began in Spain. Or, conversely, he explains a Latin military re-
surgence that began in the West by relating it to concerns about Chris-
tians in the East. There may be a solid causal connection between the two
phenomena, but Bar Hebraeus does not make a case for it, let alone a con-
vincing one. Two distinct interpretations of the “First” Crusade sit un-
comfortably alongside one another in the Chronicon syriacum, and Bar
Hebraeus makes no attempt to graft the two together into a coherent nar-
rative. Bar Hebraeus appears to have fused two variant interpretations of
the Crusade in his Syriac chronicle: one taken directly from Michael the
Syrian that links hardships suffered by Latin pilgrims in the East to a
Latin military expedition to the East, and the other derived from an
Arabic historiographical tradition that connects the “First” Crusade to a
general Christian offensive against Islam that began in the western Medi-
terranean.
In writing his Syriac chronicle, Bar Hebraeus engaged in source criti-
cism and checked different versions of the same event. He is known to
have examined information in Michael’s history with that found in Arabic
sources, and in one instance he consulted five different Arabic chronicles.
To construct his account of the “First” Crusade, Bar Hebraeus obviously
made use of Michael’s version of events, but he also incorporated the pre-
vailing view of the Crusade presented in Islamic sources. He made no at-
23) Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche

(1166–1199), ed. and trans. Jean-Baptiste Chabot, (Paris, 1899–1910), III, 182;
trans. Bat Ye#or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad
to Dhimmitude, Seventh-Twentieth Century, trans. Miriam Kochan and David
Littman (Madison, 1996), 292–93; Teule, “Crusaders in Barhebraeus’ Syriac
and Arabic Chronicles”, 44–49; Moosa, “The Crusades: An Eastern Perspec-
tive”, 254–55.
tempt, however, to reconcile the discrepancies between the two accounts.

When he wrote the Arabic counterpart to his Syriac history, Ta#rikh
mukhtasar al-duwal (“A Short History of the Dynasties”), Bar Hebraeus
relied heavily on Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fi#l-ta#rikh, especially in his ac-
count of the “First” Crusade. In his retelling of the event, Bar Hebraeus
abandons completely the explanation offered by Michael the Syrian and
instead adopts the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade as transmitted
by Ibn al-Athir:
In 491/1098, Baldwin, king of the Franks, gathered a great army and at-
tacked Syria and took Antioch. Before this the Franks had conquered Toledo
from Islamic Spain (al-Andalus) and other cities. Then they attacked and
conquered the island of Sicily and turned their attention to the North Afri-
can coast where they made some conquests.24
Islamic sources define the Crusade as a Frankish holy war (jihad)

against Islam that began in the western Mediterranean basin and finally
enveloped the whole Mediterranean world. These sources implicitly rec-
ognize that events in Sicily, Spain, and Syria share a common character.
The Norman war in Sicily, the Catalan and Castilian advances southward
into al-Andalus, and the “First” Crusade were part of the same general
phenomenon: a Mediterranean-wide surge of the Latin West against Is-
lamic powers.
Modern Scholarship and the Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade
“Extraordinarily Far-Sighted and Illuminating …”
How has modern scholarship regarded the Islamic interpretation of

the Crusade? To begin with, the Islamic view of the Crusade has not been
recognized for what it is: a historically accurate description of the Cru-
sade – at least in broad general outline – that found wide acceptance in
the Muslim historiographical tradition. When it is considered at all, it is
treated as merely a subjective impression of the Crusade, hailed for its
24) Abu l-Faraj Gregorius Bar Hebraeus, Ta#rikh mukhtasar al-duwal, ed.
Antun Salihani (Beirut, 1890), 341. Herman Teule wrongly states that Bar
Hebraeus’s account of the “First” Crusade in the Mukhtasar includes “the story of
the long detour via Spain” and that this tale is “not mentioned in the Chronicon
Syriacum”. On the contrary, the Spanish “detour” is found only in the Chronicon
syriacum; the Mukhtasar makes no mention of it (Teule, “Crusaders in Barhe-
braeus’ Syriac and Arabic Chronicles”, 45, 47).
wider framework of historical vision, but essentially incompatible with

how crusading actually emerged and developed. There is a paradox here.
When the views of the Crusade expressed by al-Sulami and Ibn al-Athir
are assessed as to their correspondence to historical reality, they receive
very high marks indeed. But when these same views are assessed as to
their correspondence to crusading reality, they receive very low marks.
Peter Malcolm Holt commends al-Sulami for giving “his view of the
Frankish advance, not only in his own country [Syria] but also in Sicily
and Spain”.25 He points out that al-Sulami “does not see the Crusade
and the consequent losses of Muslim territory in isolation, but views
them as part of a wider Frankish assault upon Islam as witnessed by the
conquest of Sicily and of many towns in Spain”.26 Likewise, Robert
Irwin correctly notes that al-Sulami was “aware of conflicts between
Christianity and Islam which were going on in Spain, Sicily, and North
Africa”, and describes “his readiness to see the crusade within the
broader context of a struggle between the two religions, extending all the
way across the Mediterranean”, which “was later to be closely echoed in a
chronicle written by the thirteenth-century Mosuli historian Ibn al-
Athir”.27
Carole Hillenbrand praises al-Sulami for “an extraordinarily far-
sighted and illuminating work (Kitab al-jihad) showing an understand-
ing, probably unique at this early stage of the Crusades, of what the
Franks were planning to do and of how the Muslims should respond”. She
acknowledges that “al-Sulami has a wide view of the Crusader enterprise,
seeing the whole sweep of the western European Christian advances
southwards”. Hillenbrand applauds al-Sulami for discerning “the
Franks’ aims all too clearly” and for grasping with acute perception
“that the Franks have further expansionist aims which must be stopped
at all costs by Muslim reunification”. She credits al-Sulami with “pen-
etrating insights into the military and political vulnerability of the
Franks”, and even attributes a “prophetic statement” to al-Sulami who
has the wisdom to foresee “what would happen later in the century when
Nur al-Din and Saladin worked towards the encirclement of the Crusader
state of Jerusalem and in particular the unification of Syria and Egypt,
divided politically and ideologically since the tenth century”.28 Niall
25) Holt, Age of the Crusades, 27.

26) Holt, Crusader States and Their Neighbours, 17.
27) Robert Irwin, “Islam and the Crusades, 1096–1699”, in The Oxford Illus-
trated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford, 1995), 226.
28) Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, 71–73.
Christie and Deborah Gerish affirm “al-Sulami’s accurate assessment

of Frankish purposes” but do not indicate what al-Sulami believed their
intentions were, other than fighting a holy war against Mulsims.29
Hadia Dajani-Shakeel has made the most perceptive comments
about al-Sulami. Countering the thesis advanced by a number of Western
scholars that Muslims lacked interest in the Crusade or were unaware of
the nature and purpose of the enterprise, she asserts that Muslim intellec-
tuals “were aware of the nature and motives of their enemies (i. e. the Cru-
saders)”. Commenting on al-Sulami’s description of the Christian jihad as
an offensive that began in the Muslim West and spread to the Muslim
East, she remarks that al-Sulami “seems to have known that the Normans
and the Franks, who were involved in the Crusades against al-Andalus
and Sicily, were also involved in the Crusade against the Muslim East”.
Such information could easily have been acquired, she indicates, through
diplomatic channels, through the normal transit of Muslim scholars from
the Muslim West to the Muslim East, and through the flow Muslim refu-
gees from Sicily and Spain eastward. Dajani-Shakeel sums up al-Sula-
mi’s view of the Crusade in these words:
Al-Sulami defined the Crusade as an invasion by Western nations, which
started with the conquest of Sicily and parts of al-Andalus … This definition
of the Crusades by al-Sulami appears to have escaped many modern histori-
ans, who allege that the Muslims underestimated the nature and motives of
the Crusade in the twelfth century.
The new understanding that al-Sulami brings to the Crusade does not
tempt Dajani-Shakeel to re-evaluate the conventional interpretation of
the Crusade. Her primary concern is “to redefine the Muslim perception of
the Crusades” in order to counter “some contemporary misconceptions re-
garding the Muslims’ ignorance of the true identity or background of their
enemies (i. e. the Crusaders)”. Although she credits al-Sulami and Ibn al-
Athir with having “linked the invasion of the Muslim East with that of the
Muslim West” and demonstrates that Muslim intellectuals, such as Ibn al-
Athir, had “more knowledge and insight” into the Crusade than Western
scholars have indicated, she does not attempt to redefine the Crusade in
light of the “knowledge and insight” provided by Islamic sources.30
29) Niall Christie and Deborah Gerish, “Parallel Preachings: Urban II and
al-Sulami”, Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 15 (2003), 139–48.
30) Dajani-Shakeel, “Reassessment”, 42, 45–48; idem, “Some Medieval Ac-
counts of Salah al-Din’s Recovery of Jerusalem (Al-Quds)”, in Studia Palaestina:

Studies in Honour of Constantine K. Zurayk, ed. Hisham Nashabe (Beirut, 1988),
102–103.
Ibn al-Athir has received every bit as much praise as al-Sulami for his
penetrating historical vision. Dajani-Shakeel describes his notion of
the Crusade as “a systematic Latin-Christian invasion of Muslim lands,
which started in al-Andalus, Sicily, and North Africa and then moved to
the East”. She shows that “he was certainly not unaware of the nature
of the enemies (i. e. the Crusaders) and their settlements”.31 Bernard
Lewis calls Ibn al-Athir “a man of genius” for being “able to detect a
connection between the reconquest in Spain and Sicily and the arrival of
the Crusaders in the Levant”.32 Donald Richards extols Ibn al-Athir
for “taking a wider view of historical processes, for example, the ‘global’
threat of the Franks to the interests of Islam in Spain, Sicily and the
Levant”.33 Hubert Houben affirms that Ibn al-Athir “saw a connection
between the Reconquista in Spain, the Norman conquest of Sicily and
the First Crusade”.34 Alex Metcalfe notes that Ibn al-Athir “links
the ‘Frankish’ capture [of] Toledo (1085) with the first appearance of the
Normans in Sicily (1091) and the Crusader’s (sic) siege of Antioch
(1097–98)”, but he warns against such a view because “modern thought
usually separates these [episodes], regarding them as an associated series
of events”.35
Modern scholars extract certain details from Islamic sources regard-
ing the Crusade and esteem these details as “extraordinarily far-sighted
and illuminating”, abounding in “penetrating insights”, and offering “a
wider view of historical processes”, while they fail to discern the incisive
vision provided by these sources into the nature and character of the
Crusade. The very insights that Muslim authors provide are regarded as a
form of myopia and intellectual short-sightedness. Modern scholars are
so sure that they have a better understanding of the Crusade than con-
temporary Muslim scholars that they fault Muslim authors for failing to
31) Dajani-Shakeel, “Reassessment”, 47.

32) Bernard Lewis, “Reflections on Islamic Historiography”, in Bernard
Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (Oxford, 2004),
411. See also Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 2001),
23, where Ibn al-Athir is commended for viewing the Crusades “in a larger per-
spective”.
33) Izz al-Din Abu l-Hasan Ali ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Athir, The Annals of the
Saljuq Turks: Selections from al-Kamil fi#l-ta#rikh of Izz al-Din Ibn al-Athir,
trans. Donald S. Richards (London, 2002), 5.
34) Houben, Roger II of Sicily, 17.
35) Alex Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic Speak-
ers and the End of Islam (London, 2003), 9 n. 33.

arrive at an understanding of the Crusade that is compatible with their

own. Gabrieli, for example, chastises Ibn al-Athir for being unable to
confine his notion of the Crusade to the eastern Mediterranean:
Even the well-known passage of Ibn al-Athir, where he compares the First
Crusade with the Christian offensives in Spain and Sicily, although it shows
the breadth of the Mesopotamian historian’s vision, proves to us that he did
not perceive what distinguished the Crusades from the other wars between
Christians and Islam in the Middle Ages, nor realize the special character-
istics of the Latin settlement in the Levant.36
The abstract conceptual framework that guides Gabrieli’s under-
standing of the Crusade cannot accommodate Ibn al-Athir’s historical vi-
sion of the crusading enterprise. What could Crusade possibly mean in
the absence of a distinction between the Christian offensives in Spain and
Sicily and the Christian offensive in Syria? What could Crusade possibly
signify in the absence of the special characteristics of the Latin settle-
ment in the Levant? Gabrieli cannot attain a clear and distinct appre-
hension of what Ibn al-Athir is telling him about crusading without form-
ing a judgment regarding his views. This renders him unable to perceive
the idea of Crusade put forward by the Mesopotamian historian. The as-
similation of Ibn al-Athir’s views would require Gabrieli to re-evaluate
his own time-honored theory of the Crusade, as well as the historical re-
cord, which he is unwilling to do because he is convinced that his theory is
the correct one. Even to suspend his own theory from consideration for
the briefest of moments to consider what Ibn al-Athir is saying lies
beyond Gabrieli’s ability. Certain preconceived ideas will have to be set
aside before Ibn al-Athir’s image of crusading can come into view. The
Crusade has been dismembered by Western scholars, broken down into
pieces, so that the whole cannot be seen. A re-assemblage of the dismem-
bered parts that compose the Crusade must be undertaken before the Is-
lamic interpretation of the Crusade can be grasped.
… but of no Relevance to the Crusade
Modern scholarship exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards the

Islamic interpretation of the Crusade. This interpretation is full of “pen-
etrating insights”, yet misguided. Whatever correspondence there is to
historical reality in the works of al-Sulami and Ibn al-Athir, such a corre-
lation has no bearing on the actual reality of crusading as it was under-
36) Gabrieli, “Arabic Historiography of the Crusades”, 98.

stood in the Latin West. The insights of al-Sulami and Ibn al-Athir into
the fundamental character of the Crusade have not been valued as being a
source of sound information. Scholars cannot help praising Muslim auth-
ors for their perceptive powers, but, on the other hand, they are not about
to recommend that their “extraordinarily far-sighted and illuminating”
views be adopted as the basis for a new understanding of the Crusade.
Substituting the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade for the conven-
tional interpretation of the Crusade would be unthinkable. Al-Sulami,
Ibn al-Athir, and other Muslim thinkers presented the Crusade as a three-
pronged offensive by the Latin West against Islam that encompassed
Sicily, Spain, and Syria. Not only did they give coherent meaning to a
range of events but they also accurately depicted these events as being in-
spired by a common Christian cause. Yet Muslim attempts at explaining
the Crusade are regarded as no more than interesting oddities that can-
not be admitted as being essential to what real crusading was all about.
Michael Brett, for example, does not adopt the self-understanding of
medieval Christians and Muslims regarding the nature of the Crusade.
When the medieval evidence tells him that the Latin counteroffensive
against Islam was inspired by a common Christian cause, he rejects such a
notion. He sees instead the opposite of what the evidence is telling him.
Christian encroachment on Muslim territories, he contends, was “pecu-
liar to each country” and “not inspired by a common Christian cause”.37
One reason why Western scholars have failed to appreciate the Islamic
interpretation of the Crusade lies in the nature of the sources that they
have used to reconstruct the crusading enterprise. Muslim authors ex-
perienced the Crusade whole; the papacy experienced the Crusade whole;
but Crusaders themselves and the Latin chroniclers did not. With rare
exception, the complex whole of the Crusade could not be seen by the par-
ticipants and the chroniclers.38 Latin authors zoomed in on particular
37) Michael Brett, The Rise of the Fatimids: The World of the Mediterranean
and the Middle East in the Fourth Century of the Hijra, Tenth Century CE (Leiden,
2001), 432.
38) A rare exception among the Latin chroniclers of the “First” Crusade is
William of Malmesbury, who viewed the Jerusalem expedition as “an important el-
ement in a process of world significance, by which pan-European military action
recovered territory previously occupied by Islam, thus achieving a new balance of
power” (Rod Thomson, “William of Malmesbury, Historian of Crusade”, Reading
Medieval Studies 23 [1997], 129). See William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglo-
rum: the History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors; completed
by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998–99).
campaigns and a handful of individuals. The result was a vignette or a

series of vignettes, not a full picture. Muslim authors, like al-Sulami and
Ibn al-Athir, could see the full picture: a Christian counteroffensive
against Islam on many fronts. The papacy shared this perspective. The
resounding success of the “First” Crusade blinded Latin authors to the
fact of earlier Crusades. The “First” Crusade, quite obviously, had over-
shadowed all previous campaigns against Islam. Latin chroniclers were
keen to emphasize the fundamental significance of this episode in history.
But in doing so, they overlooked the hard road that crusading had taken
to achieve this momentous success. Modern scholars viewing the histori-
cal record have discounted that very long and hard road as a distortion of
true crusading, which can only find its essential core in the so-called
“First” Crusade. When once the a priori presumption in favor of the
“First” Crusade as the “Big Bang” of the crusading movement is aban-
doned, the full picture of the Crusade will begin to emerge. As this picture
forms, the cloud of discredit hanging over Muslim authors will be lifted.
It is not generally recognized that medieval Muslim scholars enjoyed
a distinct advantage over modern scholars when it came to interpreting
the Crusade: they did not come to the subject with a preconceived idea
about what the Crusade ought to be. Undeterred by the accidents of cru-
sading (e. g. the ecclesiastical apparatus of cross, vow, and indulgence),
Muslim authors were able to discern the essence of crusading: a Mediter-
ranean-wide war against Islam by the Latin West. Muslim authors accu-
rately recorded the patriotic sentiment that inspired the Crusade: a de-
sire to recover lands that had “originally belonged to the Christians” but
had been conquered by Islam and subjected to Islamic rule.39 United by
39) In an encounter with the Mozarab count Sisnando Davídiz, who served
under both Fernando I, king of León-Castile (1016–18?–1065), and his son Alfonso
VI (1065–1109), Abd Allah ibn Buluggin, the last Zirid ruler of Granada (r.
1073–90), recalls what the Christian wazir told him “face to face”: “Al-Andalus
originally belonged to the Christians. Then they were defeated by the Arabs and
driven to the most inhospitable region, Galicia. Now that they are strong and ca-
pable, the Christians desire to recover what they have lost by force”: Abd Allah ibn
Buluggin al-Ziri, Kitab al-Tibyan li-l-amir Abd Allah ibn Buluggin akhir umara#
Bani Ziri bi-Gharnata, ed. Amin Tawfiq al-Tibi (Rabat, 1995), 100; trans. Amin
T. Tibi as The Tibyan: Memoirs of Abd Allah ibn Buluggin, Last Zirid Amir of Gra-
nada (Leiden, 1986), 90. Ibn Idhari’s fourteenth-century chronicle records the re-
marks made by Fernando I to an embassy from Toledo soon after his accession to
the throne. His words sound the same theme as the statement of Count Sisnando
Davídiz: “We seek only our own lands which you conquered from us in times past
the common bond of religion and mutual promises (the crusading vow),
Western Crusaders joined together in a common cause to undo Islamic
occupation of Christian territories and rebuild a subjugated Church.
While neglecting or distorting many features of crusading, Muslim auth-
ors nonetheless were able to perceive the general nature and the scope of
the enterprise.
Modern assumptions and biases cloud our view of the historical evi-
dence. In so far as crusading is viewed as the outcome of Urban’s call,
medieval Muslim thinkers cannot be credited with having provided an ex-
planation of the Crusade that is objectively true. And, in so far as modern
scholars cannot discard the “Jerusalem First” theory of the Crusades,
they cannot recognize what the historical evidence is telling them about
crusading, nor can they bring themselves to accept the understanding of
medieval peoples – Muslim and Christian – regarding the nature of the
Crusade. No magic key is required to unlock the evidence, however. The
task of reconstructing the origins of crusading from the existing primary
sources is not a complex one. The door to understanding the Crusade has
been wide open for generations. All that is needed is an ability to listen to
what the evidence is saying, regardless of its origin.
Western Scholarship and the Rejection of “the Other”
Modern scholarship, whether in the West or in the Muslim world,

passes over the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade as irrelevant. Why?
For Western scholarship, the vision of the whole crusading movement has
been skewed by the fact that the expedition that set out for Jerusalem in
1096 came to be known as the “First” Crusade. Most Western scholars
contend that the crusading movement started with a campaign that cap-
tured Jerusalem, and many scholars contend that a true Crusade must
at the beginning of your history. Now you have dwelled in them for the time al-
lotted to you and we have become victorious over you as a result of your own
wickedness. So go to your own side of the straits (of Gibraltar) and leave our lands
to us, for no good will come to you from dwelling here with us after today. For we
shall not hold back from you until God decides between us”: Abu l-Abbas Ahmad
b. Muhammad Ibn Idhari al-Marrakushi, al-Bayan al-mughrib fi akhbar al-Anda-
lus wa-l-Maghrib, ed. Évariste Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne musul-
mane au XIème siècle, III (Paris, 1930), 282; trans. David Wasserstein, The Rise
and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086
(Princeton, 1985), 250.
have Jerusalem as its military and spiritual goal. Little heed is paid to the
fact that the very pope who launched the so-called “First” Crusade, Pope
Urban II (1088–99), did not consider the venture to be a new creation or
the first enterprise of its kind. Urban adopted and applied the apparatus
related to crusading in Sicily and Spain to the Jerusalem Crusade and
carried out a plan originally put forward by his predecessor, Pope Gre-
gory VII (1073–85).40 In the words of the noted Islamic scholar Claude
Cahen, “Urban II’s eastern projects were linked with his western pro-
jects in that they were both anti-Moslem wars, and … [the eastern pro-
40) Urban’s biographer in the Liber pontificalis claims that Urban’s Jerusalem
Crusade carried out an idea originally put forward by Pope Gregory VII. See Liber
pontificalis, ed. Louis Duchesne and Cyrille Vogel (Paris, 1886–1957), II, 293:
“Audierat iste praeclarus et devotus pontifex predecessorem suum Gregorium
papam praedicasse ultramontanis Iherosoliamam pro defensione Christianae
fidei pergere et Domini sepulcrum manibus inimicorum liberare, quod facere mi-
nime potuit, quia persecutio Heinrici regis nimium eum undique urguebat. Quod
vero praedecessor eius facere non valuit, iste a Deo electus et praeclarus pontifex
Dei gratia fretus implevit”. For a discussion of Pope Gregory’s crusading plans of
1074, see Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart,
1935), 146–53, 186–99, 288–91, 299–301, 305, 308–309, 313–15, 324–25; trans.
Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart as The Origin of the Idea of Crusade,
foreword and additional notes by Marshall W. Baldwin (Princeton, 1977),
161–69, 202–16, 311–13, 322–25, 330, 333–34, 340–42, 353–54; Alfons Becker,
Papst Urban II (1088–1099) (Stuttgart, 1964–88), II, 294–300; James A. Brund-
age, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison, 1969), 26–27; E. O. Blake,
“The Formation of the ‘Crusade Idea’”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21
(1970), 14–17; Ian S. Robinson, “Gregory VII and the Soldiers of Christ”, History
58 (1973), 169–92; idem, The Papacy, 1073–1198: Continuity and Innovation
(Cambridge, 1990), 325; H. E. J. Cowdrey, “Pope Gregory VII’s ‘Crusading’ Plans
of 1074”, in Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusa-
lem presented to Joshua Prawer, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans Eberhard Mayer,
and R. C. Smail (Jerusalem, 1982), 27–40; idem, “The Gregorian Papacy, Byzan-
tium and the First Crusade”, in Byzantium and the West, c. 850–c. 1200, ed. James
Howard-Johnston (Amsterdam, 1988 [= Byzantinische Forschungen 13 (1988)]),
145–64; idem, “The Papacy and the Origins of Crusading”, Medieval History 1
(1991), 48–60; idem, “Pope Gregory VII and the Bearing of Arms”, in Montjoie:
Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer, ed. Benjamin Z.
Kedar, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Rudolf Hiestand (Aldershot, 1997), 21–35;
idem, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 1998), 484–85, 652–54; Jonathan
Riley-Smith, “The First Crusade and St. Peter”, Outremer, 41–63; Loud, Age of
Robert Guiscard, 194–201.
ject] envisaged extending to Palestine what had been begun in Sicily and
Spain …”41
Urban described the “First” Crusade as an expedition of “knights
who are making for Jerusalem with the good intention of liberating Chris-
tianity” so that “they might be able to restrain the savagery of the Sara-
cens by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom”.42
41) Claude Cahen, “An Introduction to the First Crusade”, Past and Present 6
(1954), 24–25; idem, Orient et Occident au temps des Croisades (Paris, 1983), 58:
“Ce qui avait été commencé en Sicile et Espagne devait être étendu à la Palestine”.
In 1950, Augustin Fliche had reached a similar conclusion, declaring, “c’est en
Occident que la croisade a dévuté, dès le pontificat d’Alexandre II” (Augustin
Fliche, La réforme grégorienne et la reconquête chrétienne [1057–1123] [Paris,
1950], 52). Alfons Becker acknowledges that a movement of reconquest that was
already underway in the western and central Mediterranean was expanded by
Urban to include the eastern Mediterranean (the Christian East), but he main-
tains that only at Clermont did the reconquest become a Crusade. The ultimate ob-
jective of the military campaign announced at Clermont (i. e. Jerusalem), accord-
ing to Becker, gave a new character to the Christian movement of reconquest. To
the concept of a holy war willed by God was added the idea of pilgrimage, which
transformed a reconquest into a Crusade. Becker provides ample direct evidence
to support his first proposition – that Urban expanded a movement of reconquest
that had already begun. Yet he presents no evidence to substantiate his second
proposition – that the iter Hierosolymitanum was different in its essential nature
from the movement of Christian reconquest in Sicily and Spain. Nor does he pres-
ent any evidence that would support the theory that Pope Urban considered the
eastern phase of this reconquest movement to be any different from the western
phase. The iter Hierosolymitanum was in Urban’s mind equivalent to the iter his-
panicum, and Becker himself draws attention to this fact when he quotes from
Urban’s letter of 1098 to Bishop Pedro of Huesca: “[Deus] nostris siquidem diebus
in Asia Turcos, in Europa Mauros christianorum viribus debellavit et urbes quon-
dam famosas religionis sue cultui … restituit” (Alfons Becker, “Urbain II et
l’Orient”, in Il Concilio di Bari del 1098: Atti del Convegno Storico Internazionale e
celebrazioni del IX Centenario del Concilio, ed. Salvatore Palese and Giancarlo
Locatelli [Bari, 1999], 123–44; see n. 44 below).
42) “Audiuimus quosdom uestrum cum militibus, qui Ierusalem liberandae
christianitatis gratia tendunt … nos enim ad hanc expeditionem militum animos

instigavimus, qui armis suis Saracenorum feritatem declinare et christianorum
[read christianos or christianorum (ecclesias)] possint libertati pristinae resti-
tuere …”: Urban’s letter to the monks of Vallombrosa, 7 October 1096; Wilhelm
Wiederhold, “Papsturkunden in Florenz”, Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wis-
senschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse (1901), 313, no. 6; trans.
Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 310; Eng. trans. 336; Louise Riley-Smith and Jon-
He presented the Jerusalem Crusade as a campaign “to aid the churches

in Asia and to liberate their brothers from the tyranny of the Saracens”,
but he viewed it as part of a wider movement “to liberate Christians from
Saracens” throughout the Mediterranean, “for it is no good to liberate
Christians from Saracens in one place (i. e. in Asia) only to deliver Chris-
tians to Saracen tyranny and oppression in another place (i.e. in Spain)”.43
athan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095–1274 (London, 1981),
39; Edward Peters, ed., The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres
and Other Source Materials, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1998), 44–45. This passage may
be read as “we were stimulating the minds of knights to go on this expedition, since
they might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms and re-
store the Christian Churches to their former freedom”. See Janus Møller Jensen,
“Peregrinatio sive expeditio: Why the First Crusade was not a Pilgrimage”,
Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 15 (2003), 121, which follows the
edition of this text in Papsturkunden für Kirchen im Heiligen Lande, ed. Rudolf
Hiestand (Göttingen, 1985), 89 no. 2: “qui armis suis Saracenorum feritatem
declinare et christianorum <ecclesias> possint libertati pristinae restituere.”
According to Robert Somerville, the Crusade described by Urban in this pas-
sage is intended neither to “restore the Christians to their former freedom”, nor to
“restore the Christian churches to their former freedom”, but to “restore (Jerusa-
lem) to pristine Christian freedom” (Robert Somerville, “The Council of Cler-
mont and the First Crusade”, Studia Gratiana 20 [1976], 330). Somerville’s
error stems from his failure to understand the crusading decree of the Council of
Clermont, which he assumes designates an enterprise that is local in its focus, with
the city of Jerusalem as its sole objective.
43) “Si ergo ceterarum prouinciarum milites Asiane ecclesie subuenire una-
nimiter proposuere et fratres suos ab Saracenorum tyrannide liberare, ita et uos

unanimiter uicine ecclesie contra Saracenorum incursus patientius succurrere
nostris exortationibus laborate. In qua uidelicet expeditione si quis pro Dei et
fratrum suorum dilectione occubuerit, peccatorum profecto suorum indulgentiam
et eterne uite consortium inuenturum se ex clementissima Dei nostri miseratione
non dubitet. Si quis ergo uestrum in Asiam ire deliberauerit, hic deuotionis sue
desiderium studeat consummare. Neque enim uirtutis est alibi a Saracenis chris-
tianos eruere, alibi christianos Saracenorum tyrannidi oppressionique exponere”
(If, therefore, the warriors of other provinces unanimously propose to aid the
churches in Asia and to liberate their brothers from the tyranny of the Saracens,
so also should you, at our earnest request, collectively strive to help with continu-
ous efforts the neighboring churches suffering from the incursions of the Sara-
cens. If anyone should die for God and for the love of his brethren in that expedi-
tion, he should not doubt that by the mercy of our most clement God he will truly
receive indulgence of his sins and participation in life eternal. If anyone of you,
therefore, plans to go to Asia, let him try to fulfill the desire of his devotion here.
Urban portrayed the Crusade as a Mediterranean-wide struggle against

Islam that was directed against “the Turks in Asia and the Moors in Eu-
rope” for the purpose of “restor[ing] to Christian worship cities that were
once celebrated”.44 This broader view of the Crusade is confirmed by
For it is no good to liberate Christians from Saracens in one place [i. e. in Asia] only
to deliver Christians to Saracen tyranny and oppression in another place [i. e. in
Spain]): Urban’s letter to the counts of Besalú, Ampurias, Roussillon, and Cerd-
anya and their knights, c. July 1096; Kehr, Papsturkunden in Spanien, I, pt. 2,
287–88, no. 23; trans. based on Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade
in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003), 33, with additions and amendments made
by author. See also Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 294–95; Engl. trans., 317; Riley-
Smith and Riley-Smith, Crusades: Idea and Reality, 40; Peters, First Crusade,
45–46; José Goni Gaztambide, Historia de la bula de la cruzada en España (Vi-
toria, 1958), 60–61; Norman Housley, “Jerusalem and the Development of the
Crusade Idea, 1099–1128”, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar (Jeru-
salem, 1992), 32–33. Kehr assumed that this undated Crusade bull dealt with
preparations for the first attacks on Tarragona and dated it between 1089 and
1091 (Kehr, Papsturkunden in Spanien, I, pt. 2, 287, no. 23). Erdmann recog-
nized that it referred unmistakably to the Council of Clermont and the departure
of knights on the “First” Crusade and fixed its date between 1096 and 1099 (Erd-
mann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 294 n. 37; Engl. trans., 317 n. 37). Lawrence McCrank
suggests that it was most likely issued in 1096 when Urban made his tour of south-
ern France and met with Archbishop Berenguer at Nîmes and Saint-Gilles in July
of 1096 (Lawrence J. McCrank, “Restoration and Reconquest in Medieval Cata-
lonia: The Church and Principality of Tarragona, 971–1177” [Ph. D. diss., Univer-
sity of Virginia, 1974], 284–85 n. 51).
44) “Quia post multa annorum curricula nostris potissimum temporibus chris-
tiani populi pressuras releuare, fidem exaltare dignatus est. Nostris siquidem die-
bus in Asia Turcos, in Europa Mauros christianorum uiribus debellavit, et urbes
quondam famosas religionis sue cultui gratia propensiore restituit”: Urban to
Bishop Pedro of Huesca, 11 May 1098, “Epistolae et privilegia”, PL 151, 504;
Durán Gudiol, Iglesia de Aragón, 193 no. 20. This letter is very important for de-
termining what the pope thought the Crusade to be. Referring to the victories at
Nicaea and Dorylaeum, as well as in Spain, the pope states: “In our days God had
eased the sufferings of the Christian peoples and allowed the faith to triumph. By
means of the Christian forces He has conquered the Turks in Asia and the Moors in
Europe, and restored to Christian worship cities that were once celebrated” (trans.
Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 296; Engl. trans., 319). For Erdmann, this passage
indicates that the pope “considered the two wars as parallel undertakings” (ibid.).
Urban’s vision of the crusading movement was of a Mediterranean-wide struggle
against Islam. He had expressed this idea earlier in his letter to a number of
Catalan counts and their knights, dating from c. July 1096, when he spoke of the
Crusade as a two-front war: in the eastern Mediterranean and in the western Medi-
papal documents and corroborated by Islamic sources, but it has not

gained the support of modern scholars. Modern scholars start from an
axiomatically accepted premise – the “Jerusalem First” theory of the
Crusades – and order the facts to support this premise.
Urban’s position as founding father of crusading has generated im-
mense confusion among those who seek to understand how the Crusade
originated and developed. Historians have studied Urban and have
achieved a greater understanding of the man and his times in which he
lived without questioning the assumption that his summons to Crusade
must be seen as the key to the emergence of the crusading movement.45
Generations of historians have been misled into producing accounts of
the Crusade that view it as resulting from Urban’s appeal at Clermont
in 1095.46 If crusading is to be explained solely in terms of Urban’s call,
then it is inevitable that one will project that idea onto the historical
reconstruction of the Crusades. Thus, historians have dutifully picked
out those aspects of crusading that could be seen as having value for the
development of the “First” Crusade and have produced a retrospective
terranean (see n. 43 above and text). Urban’s view of the Crusade is directly re-
lated to his vision of Christian history, which, according to Becker, follows a four-
fold schema. For a discussion of Urban’s schema of Christian history and how
it relates to crusading, see Becker, Papst Urban II, II, 352–62, 374–76, 398–99;
H. E. J. Cowdrey, “Pope Urban II and the Idea of the Crusade”, Studi medievali
36 (1995), 723; Jean Flori, “Réforme, reconquista, croisade (l’idée de reconquête
dans la correspondance pontificale d’Alexandre II à Urbain II)”, in Jean Flori,
Croisade et chevalerie: XIe–XIIe siècles (Brussels, 1998), 73–74.
45) See especially Becker, Papst Urban II.
46) Recent general studies on the Crusades all adhere to the “Jerusalem First”
theory of the Crusades: Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History

(New Haven, 1987); Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades, trans. John Gilling-
ham, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1988); Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., The Oxford Illustrated
History of the Crusades (Oxford, 1995); idem, The Oxford History of the Crusades
(Oxford, 1999); Bernard Hamilton, The Crusades (Stroud, Gloucestershire,
1998); Thomas F. Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades (Lanham, Md.,
1999); idem, The New Concise History of the Crusades (Lanham, Md., 2005); Jean
Richard, The Crusades, c. 1071–c. 1291, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1999);
Jonathan P. Phillips, The Crusades, 1095–1197 (Harlow, 2002); Norman Hous-
ley, The Crusaders (Stroud, 2003); Thomas F. Madden, ed., The Crusades: The
Illustrated History (Ann Arbor, 2004); Asbridge, First Crusade; Christopher
Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford, 2004);
Helen Nicholson, The Crusades (Westport, 2004); Andrew Jotischky, Crusad-
ing and the Crusader States (Harlow, 2004).
reading of history that deduces causes from results. Events that do not fit
into the “Jerusalem First” theory of the Crusades are ignored, distorted,
or manipulated so that they do not fit. The so-called “pre-Crusade”
period is manipulated to show that expeditions prior to the “First” Cru-
sade were groping their way toward Crusade but were unable to achieve
the significant breakthrough that would usher in crusading.47 It is all too
easy for historians unfamiliar with the range of crusading expeditions of
the second half of the eleventh century to be misled into thinking that the
“First” Crusade was the first event of its kind. This is due to the fact that
scholars remain trapped by an inability to explore certain avenues (Cru-
sades prior to 1095) and to focus seriously on the direct evidence.48 When
the direct evidence is properly evaluated (e. g. Crusade bulls prior to 1095,
conciliar legislation, papal correspondence, etc.), it can be clearly estab-
lished that no discrepancy exists between the Islamic interpretation of
the Crusade and the Christian interpretation: the two interpretations are
mirror images each of the other.49
47) See below, nn. 64–71, 90, and text.

48) A current trend in Crusade scholarship is to focus attention away from the
direct evidence and to concentrate on the indirect evidence. This is done under the
pretext of focusing attention on the reception, rather than on the origin, of cru-
sading. This line of approach, advanced by Marcus G. Bull in Knightly Piety and
the Lay Response to the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, c. 970–c. 1130
(Oxford, 1993) and by Jonathan Riley-Smith in The First Crusaders, 1095–1131
(Cambridge 1997), is a curious amalgam of the old and the new. It contains a relic
of the old idealist concept of Crusade as a “species” of pilgrimage, but, in a delib-
erate attempt to appear modern, emphasis is placed on the Crusaders and their
motivations, rather than on Pope Urban and his Crusade appeal. This line of
approach is fraught with pitfalls. Only by first mastering the direct evidence
pertaining to the Crusade will it be possible to make sense of the indirect evidence.
Although Bull and Riley-Smith purport to draw attention away from the per-
spective of Urban’s call (a view from above) and to focus attention upon the
manner in which members of society responded to the Crusade (a view from
below), they are inevitably drawn back to Urban’s call because they frame the
responses of the participants in the context of their interpretation of Urban’s call.
A focus on the response to Urban’s call is premature. Only by first fleshing out
Urban’s intention and his role in the launching of the “First” Crusade will it be
possible to establish the relationship between him and his contemporaries.
49) See my forthcoming book, The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade, which
uses Islamic sources as the basis for a reinterpretation of crusading.

Islamic Scholarship and the Rejection of “The Self”
Unfortunately, scholarship in the Islamic world does not offer an al-

ternative approach to the study of the Crusades. One of the finest studies
on the Crusades in Arabic remains al-Hurub al-Salibiyin wa-atharuha fi
l-adab al-arabi fi Misr wa-l-Sham (“The Crusades and Their Impact on
Arabic Literature in Egypt and Syria”) by Muhammad Sayyid al-Kilani,
first published in 1949. It begins with Ibn al-Athir’s famous passage of
the fart heard round the Mediterranean only to discredit it with these re-
marks: “Perhaps this great historian stands alone in having heard that
great fart!”50 An examination of major studies on the Crusades written in
Arabic over the past century indicates that the discussion of the subject
is conducted within the framework of analysis laid down by Western
scholars.51
Arabic historical works on the Crusades do not pay heed to the Is-
lamic interpretation of the Crusade. Like their Western counterparts,
Arab historians systematically ignore the Islamic interpretation of the
Crusade. Instead of deriving an interpretation of the Crusade that is
found in Islamic historical sources, Arab historians bolster a view of the
Crusades formulated by Western scholars. In her assessment of recent
50) Muhammad Sayyid al-Kilani, al-Hurub al-Salibiyin wa-atharuha fi

l-adab al-arabi fi Misr wa-al-Sham (Cairo, 1949), 10.
51) See, for example, Sayyid Ali al-Hariri, al-Hurub al-salibiya: asbabuha,
hamlatuha, nata#ijuha, ed. Isam Muhammad Shibaru (Beirut 1988; first pub-
lished in Cairo in 1899 as al-Akhbar al-saniya fi l-hurub al-salibiya); Rafiq al-
Tamimi, al-Hurub al-salibiya: ahdath wa-asahh ma kutiba bi-l-lugha al-Arabiya fi
l-hurub al-salibiya, wa-fihi wasf daqiq li-l-waqa#i al-kurba wa-tarajim wafiya li-
ashhar al-quwwad min muslimin wa-salibiyin (Jerusalem, 1945); Hamid Ghu-
naym Abu Said, al-Jabha al-Islamiya fi l-hurub al-salibiya (Cairo, 1971–74);
Said Abd al-Fattah Ashur, al-Haraka al-salibiya: Safha mushriqa fi ta#rikh al-
jihad al-arabi fi l-usur al-wusta (Cairo, 1971); idem, al-Haraka al-salibiya: Safha
mushriqa fi ta#rikh al-jihad al-islami fi l-usur al-wusta (Cairo, 1986); Fayid Ham-
mad Muhammad Ashur, al-Jihad al-islami didda al-salibiyin fi l-asr al-ayyubi
(Cairo, 1983); idem, al-Jihad al-islami didda al-salibiyin wa-l-mughul fi l-asr
al-mamluki (Tripoli, 1995); Muhammad al-Arusi al-Matwi, al-Hurub al-salibiya
fi l-mashriq wa-l-maghrib (Beirut, 1982); Suhayl Zakkar, al-Hurub al-salibiya:
al-hamlatan al-ula wa-l-thaniya hasb riwayat shuhud ayan, kutibat aslan bi-l-igh-
riqiya, wa-l-siryaniya, wa-l-arabiya wa-l-latiniya (Damascus, 1984); Muhammad
Mu#nis Ahmad Awad, al-Hurub al-salibiya: al-alaqat bayna l-sharq wa-l-gharb fi
l-qarnayn 12–13 M. / 6–7 H. (al-Haram, 1999–2000); Asad Mahmud Hawmad,
Ta#rikh al-jihad li-tard al-ghuzah al-salibiyin (Damascus, 2002).
Arab scholarship on the Crusades, Carole Hillenbrand complains that

it is divided into two camps: (1) scholarship that is polemical in nature,
with a heavy dose of “moralising and an explicit political agenda”, and
(2) scholarship that is heavily reliant on “European” works and follows a
Western approach to the topic. She finds it paradoxical “that precisely
those historians whose native language is Arabic have done very little in-
deed to provide a properly documented counterweight, based on Arabic
materials, of the accounts of the Crusades produced by modern historians
of the medieval West”.52
In an age that has witnessed an explosion of research on “the Other”
that purportedly seeks to understand “the Other” on its own terms
rather than on terms derived from the West, Crusade scholarship has
remained immune to this trend. Western scholars are content to under-
stand the Crusade through the prism of outmoded theories. Arab
scholars, who might otherwise offer a needed alternative to this approach,
are content to warm over Western scholarship on the Crusade and present
it in a way that conforms to present-day political aspirations. In doing so,
Arab scholars have succeeded in collapsing the past into the present,
thereby alienating the modern Arab world from its own history.
The Crusading Matrix: the Muslim West and the Latin West
The Islamic interpretation of the Crusade focuses attention on the re-

lations between the Muslim West and the Latin West and traces the Cru-
sade to a struggle between Islam and Western Christendom that broke
out in the western Mediterranean. Scholarship on the Crusade has tradi-
tionally focused attention on the relations between the Muslim East and
the Latin West and has traced the Crusade to a struggle between Islam
and Western Christendom that broke out in the eastern Mediterranean.
Given the enormous distance separating the Latin West and the Muslim
East, modern scholarship on the Crusade has always found it somewhat
bizarre that such a conflict ever came about in the first place. Tomaš
Mastnak, for example, views the Latin West as living in majestic profu-
sion up till the very moment of the Crusades – isolated and aloof and
remote from the world of Islam – and portrays crusading as “an unpro-
52) Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, 4–5. See also Emmanuel Sivan,

“Modern Arab Historiography of the Crusades”, in Emmanuel Sivan, Interpre-
tations of Islam: Past and Present (Princeton, 1985), 3–43.
voked military offensive far beyond western Christian borders”. Like-

wise, Byzantine historian Aristeides Papadakis characterizes the Cru-
sade as “Latin Christendom’s unprovoked offensive against medieval
Islam”. In a similar vein, Richard Bulliet presents the Crusade as “a
movement that brought Islam and Latin Christendom into contact”, as if
the Islamic invasion of Latin Christendom in the seventh and eighth cen-
turies had failed to do so.53 How did such an interpretation of the Cru-
sade – one that is so much at variance with the Islamic interpretation of
the Crusade – ever emerge?
A Conceptual Straitjacket
In the nineteenth century, scholars who examined the Crusade studied

both crusading and the Latin East. Naturally, their interest in the Cru-
sade was focused strongly on what took place in the eastern Mediterra-
nean, and, consequently, they attempted to explain a movement that
began in the western Mediterranean by investigating what happened in
the eastern Mediterranean. By adopting such an approach, and in par-
ticular by numbering crusading expeditions so that only those expedi-
tions to the eastern Mediterranean counted as Crusades (with one excep-
tion made for King Louis IX’s North African “detour”), they placed the
study of the crusading movement in a conceptual straitjacket. This
straitjacket was regarded as exceptionally comfortable because the vast
majority of scholars who perceived themselves to be working in the field
of Crusade history, like their nineteenth-century counterparts, still con-
tinued to study both the Crusades and the Latin East. With the estab-
lishment of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East
in 1980 (the sole international association of scholars devoted to the
study of the Crusades), the bias towards the Latin East in Crusade schol-
arship was institutionalized. Scholars could not perceive that the intel-
lectual focus of this organization was inherently unsound and funda-
mentally at odds with the historical evidence pertaining to the Crusade.
Those advancing the “Jerusalem First” theory of the Crusade with its
lopsided focus on the Latin East recognized their paradigm as the only
53) Mastnak, Crusading Peace, 119; Aristeides Papadakis (in collaboration

with John Meyendorff), The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The
Church, 1071–1453 A. D. (Crestwood, 1994), 69; Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for
Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York, 2004), 30.
approach to the study of the Crusade. To the detriment of scholarship,

this theory now reigns supreme with an institutional base that ensures its
primacy.54
The Lessons of Bar Hebraeus
The contemporary straitjacketing of Crusade studies is not conducive

to the advancement of knowledge. In the thirteenth century, Bar He-
braeus faced a similar predicament when he attempted to provide a co-
herent account of the Crusade. In his Chronicon syriacum he struggled
with two irreconcilable interpretations of the Crusade. Both of these in-
terpretations can be found in the Muslim historiographical tradition.
One interpretation focused attention on the relations between the Muslim
East and the Latin West and traced the Crusade to a struggle between
Islam and Western Christendom that broke out in the eastern Mediterra-
nean (al-Azimi). The other interpretation focused attention on the re-
lations between the Muslim West and the Latin West and traced the Cru-
sade to a struggle between Islam and Western Christendom that broke
out in the western Mediterranean (al-Sulami and Ibn al-Athir). His at-
tempt at resolving the “clash of interpretations” in his Chronicon syria-
cum was not successful. He settled for an account of the Crusade that fo-
cused attention on the relations between the Muslim East and the Latin
West and traced the Crusade to a struggle between Islam and western
Christendom that broke out in the western Mediterranean over a problem
related to evils suffered by Christians in the eastern Mediterranean.
Bar Hebraeus was clearly not satisfied with his first attempt at pro-
viding a coherent account of the Crusade. His efforts to resolve the prob-
lem of irreconcilable facts in the historical sources had produced other
irreconcilable facts. The problem of too many irreconcilable facts did pre-
54) The official website of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and
the Latin East (SSCLE) promotes the “Jerusalem First” interpretation of

the Crusade with its focus on the Latin East: “Chronology of the Crusades”,
http://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/mmarkowski/sscle/ssclechr.html
(accessed 4 July 2005). This international academic society with an acknowledged
bias towards the Latin East claims to be “pluralistic” in its approach to the study
of the Crusades, while it maintains a hierarchical scale of crusading wars. Its
so-called “pluralist approach” is in fact a “monist approach” (see n. 82 below). On
the idiosyncratic use of the term “pluralistic” by SSCLE, see the “Editors’ State-
ment” in the first volume of the SSCLE journal, Crusades 1 (2002): ix–x.
cipitate a state of crisis for Bar Hebraeus, and he admirably demon-

strated his ability to resolve the conundrum caused by the conflicting
evidence. After pondering the evidence, he recognized that Muslim his-
toriography had already resolved the state of crisis over the “clash of in-
terpretations” pertaining to the Crusade. Muslim scholars had intro-
duced a successful theory explaining the Crusade that had already
achieved the status of a paradigm in the Islamic historiographical tradi-
tion. This theory focused attention on the relations between the Muslim
West and the Latin West and traced the Crusade to a struggle between
Islam and Western Christendom that broke out in the western Mediterra-
nean. Bar Hebraeus was convinced of the superiority of this theory and
adopted it in his revised account of the Crusade found in his Mukhtasar.
In adopting the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade, Bar Hebraeus
raised this theory beyond the confines of Muslim historiography and
made it part of the main historiographical tradition of the Middle East.
Muslim scholars had blazed the trail to a new Crusade paradigm by
producing a coherent account of crusading that focused attention on the
relations between the Muslim West and the Latin West. Instead of ex-
plaining the Crusade as a struggle between Islam and Western Christen-
dom that broke out in the eastern Mediterranean, Islamic history and
historiography explained the Crusade as a struggle between Islam and
Western Christendom that broke out in the western Mediterranean. West-
ern scholars have something to learn from the historiographical tradition
of the Middle East. An explanation of the Crusade that focuses attention
on the relations between the Muslim East and the Latin West and that
traces the Crusade to a struggle between Islam and Western Christendom
that broke out in the eastern Mediterranean is riddled with irreconcilable
facts. Historians of the Middle East – Muslim and Christian – came to this
realization in the Middle Ages. Western scholars have yet to grasp what
Middle Eastern historians recognized centuries ago.
For Bar Hebraeus, irreconcilable facts in the historical evidence pro-
duced a state of crisis. At first he attempted to resolve the crisis by em-
ploying a simple patchwork solution. He wove together two irreconcilable
accounts of the Crusade into a single narrative, and, without making any
effort to establish a causal connection between the events in the two ac-
counts, he maintained that the events were nonetheless linked in some
way (Chronicon syriacum). This ad hoc solution proved unsuccessful; it
produced more problems than it solved. After carefully weighing the evi-
dence again as he was writing his Mukhtasar, Bar Hebraeus came to the
realization that Muslim scholars had already come up with a solution to
the crisis in Crusade historiography by introducing a new Crusade para-
digm. This paradigm successfully dealt with the irreconcilable facts that
had plagued other explanations of the Crusade and offered a coherent ac-
count of the crusading enterprise. Bar Hebraeus broke the deadlock in
understanding the Crusade by adopting the Islamic interpretation of the
Crusade. The current impasse into which Crusade history seems to have
fallen can be overcome in exactly the same way that Bar Hebraeus re-
solved his own historiographical crisis. The lessons of Bar Hebraeus are
clear. Ad hoc modifications to the existing “Jerusalem First” paradigm
will not work; the only way to end the current stalemate in Crusade
studies is to adopt the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade.
There are compelling reasons for considering the adoption of the Is-
lamic interpretation of the Crusade, but none of the preconditions for the
adoption of an alternate paradigm have yet been met. A crisis-provoking
problem that would goad scholars into searching for a new paradigm has
not emerged in the field of Crusade studies.55 Yet a crisis-provoking
problem may not be necessary to facilitate the adoption of this paradigm.
First of all, the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade is not a new para-
digm. It is an old paradigm. In fact, it is the oldest paradigm ever pro-
posed to explain the Crusade. Second, this paradigm is already part of
the historiography of the Crusade. Third, Carl Erdmann presented this
paradigm in rudimentary form 70 years ago in the most influential book
ever published on the Crusade, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens
(“The Origin of the Idea of Crusade”).56 This may come as some surprise
to Crusade historians. This surprise stems from the fact that “the histori-
ography [of the Crusade]”, as Giles Constable points out, “has received
comparatively little attention from scholars”.57 Once Erdmann’s posi-
tion on the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade is made known, resis-
tance to this paradigm will begin to break down, and a 900-year-old
interpretation of the Crusade will begin to find acceptance.
55) On the role of crises in making scholars receptive to alternative theories,

see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago,
1996), 67–76, 80, 82, 84–86, 89, 154, 158, 181.
56) Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke; Engl. trans.
57) Giles Constable, “The Historiography of the Crusades”, in The Crusades
from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou
and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC, 2001), 1–2.
Carl Erdmann and the Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade
The “Power of Negativity”
Long before the publication of Erdmann’s seminal study, crusading

had been presented as the “absolute fusion of the religion of peace with
barbarous warfare”.58 Crusading was portrayed, not as the outgrowth of
the historically rooted values and norms of the community of Christian
peoples (populus christianus), but as the end product of the rejection of
these values and norms. A clash between the peace-making and war-mak-
ing tendencies in Latin Christianity – between consent and opposition to
violence in the Latin Church – was thought to have produced the Crusade.
The Crusade, according to this view, had decisively resolved the conflict
arising over the question of violence in favor of violence.59 A scenario was
58) Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity: Including That of the
Popes to the Pontificate of Nicolas V (London, 1864), IV, 206.

59) Recent scholarship, as John Gilchrist points out, rejects Erdmann’s
idea that there was a sharp break with the past on the part of the reform popes
from an anti-war to a pro-war stance (John Gilchrist, “The Papacy and
War against the ‘Saracens’, 795–1216”, International History Review 10 [1988],
174–97). In fact, the early history of conflict between western Christendom and
Islamic powers may be described as the fairly harmonious flowing together of the
various currents of thought that later made up crusading ideology. There is a
marked continuity in the ideology of war in the crusading era with the preceding
period of late antiquity, as a host of studies demonstrate: John M. Wallace-
Hadrill, “War and Peace in the Early Middle Ages”, in J. M. Wallace-Hadrill,
Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), 19–38; Friedrich E. Prinz, “King, Clergy
and War at the Time of the Carolingians”, in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies
in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. Margot H. King and Wesley
M. Stevens (Collegeville, 1979), II, 301–29; Janet L. Nelson, “The Church’s
Military Service in the Ninth Century: A Contemporary Comparative View?”, in
The Church and War: Papers Read at the Twenty-First Summer Meeting and
the Twenty-Second Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical Historical Society, ed.
W. J. Sheils (Oxford, 1983), 15–30; Graham A. Loud, “The Church, Warfare and
Military Obligation in Norman Italy”, in The Church and War, 31–45; Michael
McCormick, “The Liturgy of War in the Early Middle Ages: Crisis, Litanies, and
the Carolingian Monarchy”, Viator 15 (1984), 1–23; idem, Eternal Victory: Trium-
phal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West
(Cambridge, 1986); idem, “A New Ninth-Century Witness to the Carolingian
Mass against the Pagans”, Revue Bénédictine 97 (1987), 68–86; Simon Coupland,
“The Rod of God’s Wrath or the People of God’s Wrath? The Carolingian Theology
of the Viking Invasions”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42 (October, 1991),
needed to specify how this alleged development had taken place. Erd-
mann proposes a dialectical scenario. The transition from abhorrence of
violence to the embrace of violence was achieved by the Church through
the merger of holy war and the peaceful pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher
in Jerusalem. To support such a thesis, Erdmann employs the dialectical
“power of negation” as a deus ex machina, which ensures that the mu-
tually antagonistic forces of war and peace, embodied in holy war and pil-
grimage, do not destroy one another but instead blend together smoothly
to create a new essence – crusading.60 The militarization of Latin Chris-
tianity was thus the direct product of the synthesis of war and pilgrim-
age.
Even though Erdmann promotes an interpretation of the Crusade as
an event that occurred in response to forces internal to the Latin West,
not in response to external forces, much of his book adopts an evolution-
ary approach to the study of the Crusade that does focus on external fac-
tors, such as the ongoing conflict between Islam and Christendom. Em-
phasis is placed on the idea of Christian knighthood and the concept of
Christian holy war against the infidel in the development of the Crusade.
Erdmann is clearly divided regarding how crusading came about – grad-
ually or rapidly. For nine chapters, he seems intent upon constructing a
gradualist model of the Crusade, while making a serious effort to study
the Crusade as an enterprise embedded in wider events and historical
processes. Then Chapter Ten brings the book to a climax with a sudden
about-face. Here Erdmann claims that the Crusade possessed a unique
characteristic – “war-pilgrimage”. The Jerusalem Crusade was markedly
different from all previous papally sanctioned campaigns against the
Muslims because it was a combination of war and pilgrimage. This expedi-
tion occurred, not in response to external forces (e. g. the Saljuq con-
quests and the threat to Christendom), but through the action of forces
internal to the Latin West, predisposing these forces to act in a particular
way – directed toward the development of the “First” Crusade. The
535–54; John R. E. Bliese, “St. Cuthbert and War”, Journal of Medieval History
24 (1998), 215–41; John France, “Holy War and Holy Men: Erdmann and the
Lives of the Saints”, in The Experience of Crusading, I: Western Approaches, ed.
Marcus Bull and Norman Housley (Cambridge, 2003), 193–208.
60) The “power of negativity” has much to answer for. The radical merger of
conflicting values produced not the least inconcinnity or discord, but instead cre-
ated harmony and concord around a movement that was, it is alleged, utterly in-
compatibility with all Christian ethical and moral standards of the past.
“mechanism” of change that brought about the Crusade was an abrupt

mutation – “the unification of holy war with pilgrimage”.
The gradualism of nine chapters is eclipsed in Chapter Ten by a sudden
transformation, or saltation, that is introduced to trigger the Crusade,
thereby preserving the importance of Urban’s role in generating the Cru-
sade. The development of the Crusade would thus not be predictable on
the basis of a gradual trend in history, since it could not have occurred
without the crucial fusion of war and pilgrimage. Those expeditions that
had not developed to the level of a synthesis of war and pilgrimage could
only be recognized as crusading failures. The Jerusalem Crusade was the
first crusading success because it embodied “the unification of holy war
with pilgrimage, something that Urban first brought about”.61 Chapter
Ten left Erdmann’s thesis dominated by a view of the Crusade as an es-
sentially discontinuous event, yet the chapter concludes with an attempt
to straddle the divide between continuity and discontinuity: “The break-
through of the knightly movement in the First Crusade displays the char-
acteristic combination of continuity and revolution that is proper to the
great events of universal history”.62 Erdmann makes a concerted effort
to accommodate his saltationist theory of “war-pilgrimage” with a grad-
ualist theory that views the militarization of the Church as “an evolution,
but never a leap or a new beginning”, whereby the Crusade emerged “from
the genuine evolution of holy war, Christian knighthood, and the general
crusading idea” (i. e. the idea of Christian holy war against the infidel).63
In fact, one might even characterize his scenario for the linking of war and
pilgrimage as a hybrid one: evolutionary martial tendencies in Latin
Christianity reached a threshold of development until the fundamental
breakthrough of Urban occurred – “war-pilgrimage”. Yet to do so would
be a mistake. The holy wars of the period immediately preceding the
“First” Crusade, which have been identified as “pre-Crusades”,64 “proto-
61) Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 319; Engl. trans., 348.

63) Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 317, 320; Engl. trans., 345, 348.
64) For “pre-crusading”, see Augustin Fliche, L’Europe occidentale de 888 à
1125 (Paris, 1930), 550–51; Paul Rousset, Les origines et les caractères de la pre-
miere croisade (Geneva, 1945), 27–42; Joseph Calmette, Le monde féodal, (Paris,
1951), 360; Albrecht Noth, Heiliger Krieg und Heiliger Kampf in Islam und
Christentum. Beiträge zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (Bonn,
1966), 100 (“Vorkreuzzug”), 120 (“[Vor-] Kreuzzug”); Huguette Taviani- Carozzi,
La terreur du monde: Robert Guiscard et al conquéte normande en Italie, mythe et
histoire (Paris, 1996), 378; Bull, Knightly Piety, 113; Flori, “Réforme, recon-
quista, croisade”, 51, 54.
Crusades”,65 “premature Crusades”,66 “quasi-Crusades”,67 “demi-Cru-

sades”,68 “near Crusades”,69 “ersatz Crusades”,70 and the self-contra-
dictory “Crusade before the Crusades” (una cruzada antes de las cruza-
das),71 ultimately give no real indication of the formative stages of
Crusade because they lack the essential ingredient that would make them
a true Crusade (war + pilgrimage). The doctrine of “war-pilgrimage”
maintains that the primordial element of Crusade is “the unification of
holy war with pilgrimage”. Without the ingredient encapsulating the es-
sence of crusading – “war-pilgrimage” – there could be no Crusade, not
even the hint of a Crusade. The fusion of war and pilgrimage forms the
basic principle of the Crusade, and the formative stages of Crusade begin
with the coming together of these two indispensable components.72
Erdmann’s attempt at a hybrid solution was not successful. Event-
ually the gradualist elements in his thesis came face to face with the
obvious discontinuity of the “war-pilgrimage” paradigm – a problem that
Erdmann had never fully resolved. Without a conceptual revolution,
there would have been no fusion of war and pilgrimage and hence no Cru-
sade. Crusade was a product of a deliberate effort to join war and pilgrim-
age, not the outcome of a gradual intensification of conflict between two
65) For “proto-crusading”, see Charles Julian Bishko, “The Spanish and Por-
tuguese Reconquest, 1095–1492”, in History of the Crusades, III: The Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Harry W. Hazard (Madison, 1975), 403; Deno
J. Geanakoplos, Medieval Western Civilization and the Byzantine and Islamic
Worlds: Interaction of Three Cultures (Lexington, 1979), 277; Robinson, The Pa-
pacy, 1073–1198, 324–25; Bull, Knightly Piety, 71, 75, 76, 80, 81, 96, 110.
66) Flori, “Réforme, reconquista, croisade”, 57 (croisade prématurée).
67) For “quasi-crusading”, see Bull, Knightly Piety, 71, 85.
68) For “demi-crusading”, see Rousset, Origines, 27.
69) For “near-crusading” or “presques-croisades”, see Rousset, Origines, 27.
70) For “ersatz crusading”, see Geoffrey Regan, First Crusader: Byzantium’s
Holy Wars (Stroud, 2001), 192, 194, 221. The German loan word ersatz does not
convey the same meaning in English as it does in German. Its literal German
meaning of “compensation” or “replacement” takes on a pejorative meaning in
English and refers to “an inferior substitute for the genuine article”. The use of
the terms “ersatz Crusade” and “ersatz crusading” implies that true Crusades
have yet to appear.
71) Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (Madrid, 1929), I, 163.
72) Because the formative stage of Crusade must comprise the fusion of war
and pilgrimage, Jean Flori, a self-avowed Erdmannist, rejects the whole notion of
“pre-crusading” (Jean Flori, “Pour une redéfinition de la croisade”, Cahiers de
civilisation medievale 47 [2004], 329–50).
Mediterranean societies that reached a crescendo in the eleventh century

due to the recovery of the Latin West. The mortal wound that proved
fatal to Erdmann’s saltatory thesis was its unresolved tension between
Crusade as a marked continuity with the past and Crusade as a sudden
break with the past. This dilemma left Erdmann’s thesis plagued by in-
consistencies.
Erdmann’s Facts and Erdmann’s Thesis
Any close reading of Erdmann reveals that he shows not only a pro-
found disregard for the facts of medieval history but also a profound dis-
regard for the facts of medieval history as he had established them. He
identifies many conflicts between Christians and Muslims prior to the
“First” Crusade as Crusades, or as campaigns “conducted entirely as a
crusade” or having a “crusading character”, yet these wars are treated as
a “lower” form of crusading because they lacked the essential ingredient
that would make them “true” Crusades – “war-pilgrimage”. According
to Erdmann, “the outlines of the crusading idea are discernible” in
the naval expedition of Genoa and Pisa against Sardinia in 1016, which
had the blessing of Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24).73 “Fighting the Mos-
lems along the Italian coast”, he declares, had become such “a habitual
occupation” that it was “automatically associated with the idea of cru-
sade”.74 During the 1060s, Erdmann asserts, “the idea of crusade
reached a high point of evolution”.75 In the Norman conquest of Sicily
(1061–91), “the crusading character of the fighting clearly emerges”, he
claims, and this war, he concludes, “resembled a crusade to a degree un-
precedented by any earlier aggression upon heathens that we know of”.
“The Norman historians”, he emphasizes, “represent the Sicilian under-
taking as a crusade from the first”. The aim of the Sicilian Crusade, as
these historians depict it, was
that the Christians inhabiting the island should cease to live in servitude,
that Christianity should govern there, and that Christian observance should
be restored to fitting splendor. That the land had formerly been Christian,
and that the Moslems were themselves violent intruders, were particularly
emphasized. The motivation, therefore, did not differ in essentials from that
of the First Crusade, and its significance should be similarly judged.76

76) Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 121–23; Engl. trans., 133–36.
For Erdmann, the reasons for the Sicilian Crusade were the same as
the reasons for the “First” Crusade, and its importance was much the
same as well. He recognizes no essential difference between the Sicilian
Crusade and the “First” Crusade.
Turning to Spain, Erdmann finds crusading everywhere. He not only
singles out specific expeditions as Crusades (e. g. “Barbastrokreuzzug”)
but he also affirms the crusading character of the whole Muslim-Chris-
tian conflict in Spain and refers to the Christian side of the struggle as a
series of “Spanish Crusades” (“Spanienkreuzzuges”). Erdmann calls the
Barbastro expedition “the Spanish crusade of 1064” (“Spanienkreuzzug
von 1064”) and states that the papacy was a “participant in this crusade”
with a “papal crusading indulgence” offered to the participants and with
the “commander of the Roman cavalry” (Ar. qa#id khayl ruma) as “the
leader of the foreign crusaders”. Erdmann claims that the Barbastro
Crusade was followed up “in the next decades by a series of similar under-
takings”. Such enterprises included a French expedition in 1073 under
the leadership of Count Ebles de Roucy, as well as the campaigns of
“Hugh I of Burgundy and William VI [of Poitou (VIII)] of Aquitaine
in support of the king of Aragon”. Following the conquest of Toledo by
Alfonso VI (1065–1109) in 1085, Erdmann states that “bands of cru-
saders” took the field against the great Almoravid counter-Crusade at
the battle of Zallaqa in 1086. “The severe defeat suffered there by the
Christians”, Erdmann declares, “brought new stimulus to the idea of a
Spanish crusade” (“Spanienkreuzzuges”), and during the following year
“substantial contingents of knights reached Spain from various parts of
France under high-placed leadership” that counted among its members
Raymond of St. Gilles, count of Toulouse, who “was first to respond to the
papal appeal when the First Crusade was proclaimed”. Genoa and Pisa
“entered the Spanish war in 1092, by joining Alfonso VI of Castile in a
combined attack on Valencia”. After being turned away at Valencia, they
struck Tortosa, but without success. Those that took up the struggle
against Islam in Spain, Erdmann notes, attributed to this conflict “the
crusading character it had had in the Barbastro campaign”. Six years
prior to the call for the “First” Crusade, Pope Urban granted the same
spiritual benefits that would be gained by making a pilgrimage – either
“to Jerusalem or some other place” – to whoever “in the spirit of penance
and piety … turn[ed] all the costs and efforts of such a [pilgrimage] jour-
ney toward the restoration of the church at Tarragona”, destroyed in the
Islamic conquest of Spain in 711–14. Urban’s appeal to reestablish the
archbishopric of Tarragona, “for penance and the forgiveness of sins”,
had a “direct relationship”, Erdmann asserts, “to the later (sic!) crusad-
ing indulgence”. Those that answered the Clermont crusading summons

received the same crusading benefits as those engaged in the Spanish Cru-
sades. Observing the similarities between the two theaters of operation,
Erdmann maintains that Urban “considered the two wars as parallel
undertakings, forming a unit from the spiritual standpoint but separate
as campaigns”.77 The “First” Crusade was not “a leap or a new begin-
ning”. “Urban’s idea of crusade had been present in Gregory VII”,
Erdmann argues, and Gregory VII’s aborted Eastern Crusade of 1074,
he insists, “was a crusade”.78 Erdmann also maintains that the Mahdiya
campaign of 1087, which “took place simultaneously with the attempted
counterattack against the advance of the African Almoravids upon the
Iberian peninsula”, was “conducted entirely as a crusade”.79
There was indeed a “whole lot a crusadin’ goin’ on” prior to the
“First” Crusade, yet Crusade dare not speak its name because the doc-
trine of “war-pilgrimage” requires that crusading evolve along a path
that joins war with pilgrimage. Although Erdmann makes scarcely any
effort to underpin his distinguishing criterion for Crusade – “war-pil-
grimage” – with historical fact,80 this is not true for crusading operations
77) Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 124–27, 140–41, 199, 267–70, 272, 292–96;

Engl. trans., 136–40, 155–56; 216, 288–90, 293, 314–19.
78) Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 152, 309; Engl. trans., 168, 334.
80) At Clermont, Erdmann claims, “the much more impressive possibility
arose of declaring the new war to be an actual pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher”,
and, accordingly, “the idea of the armed pilgrimage was proclaimed for the first
time at Clermont” (Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 307; Engl. trans., 331). No such
proclamation was ever made, despite the assertions of Jonathan Riley-Smith and
Karen Armstrong to the contrary (Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 77; Karen
Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World, 2nd ed.
[New York, 2001], 59, 67). To support his contention that it was, Erdmann refers
to “a series of sources [that] summarily define the crusade as ‘traveling in arms
to Jerusalem’” (Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 307 n. 78; Engl. trans., 331 n. 78).
The condition of “traveling in arms to Jerusalem” was necessitated by the fact
that knights had undertaken a military expedition to Jerusalem, not because
a pope had declared a war to be a pilgrimage, or had taken “the novel step of as-
sociating his own summons to a military enterprise with the idea of a pilgrimage”
(H. E. J. Cowdrey, “Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the First Crusade”, History 55
[1970], 178). Generations of Crusade historians have fallen into the trap of assum-
ing that because one could postulate, or even demonstrate, that there was a link
between Crusade and pilgrimage, this must somehow indicate that the Crusade re-
sulted from this linkage.
in Sicily, Spain, and North Africa prior to 1095. Erdmann does not
hesitate to affirm the crusading nature of these enterprises and produce
the historical evidence to support this opinion. Erdmann’s radical
claims for “war-pilgrimage” in Chapter Ten undermine his earlier find-
ings and make the inception of the Crusade a matter of uncertainty. For
Sicily, Spain, and North Africa, an expedition could be a Crusade and at
the same time not be a Crusade. The “First” Crusade was ensnared in
similar ambiguity. It could be both the First Crusade and at the same
time not be the First Crusade. Erdmann’s thesis was at war with the evi-
dence. Moreover, it was at war with the very evidence that Erdmann had
presented. His thesis went against his facts, and no amount of argument
could establish coherence between his facts and his thesis.
Without affinity between Erdmann’s facts and his thesis, his theory
of the Crusade could not be accepted. Crusade historians after Erdmann
were in a quandary. They found it impossible to make Erdmann’s grad-
ualism compatible with a thesis that laid so much stress on discontinuity.
Yet no serious attempt was ever made to reconcile Erdmann’s gradual-
ism with discontinuity. Instead, a way was found to make his thesis plau-
sible in terms of internal coherence without subjecting Erdmann’s facts
or his thesis to analysis or synthesis.81 Erdmann’s thesis could be sal-
vaged by rejecting Erdmann’s gradualism. A broad range of neo-Erd-
mannist interpreters of the Crusade rose to the challenge. The end result
was the abandonment of any attempt to reconstruct an evolutionary his-
tory of the Crusade.82
81) John Gilchrist finds that “Erdmann’s book was widely reviewed but not
over-critically”, and that his thesis was not subjected to “any critical analysis of
its theoretical foundations” (John Gilchrist, “The Erdmann Thesis and Canon
Law”, in Crusade and Settlement: Papers Read at the First Conference of the Society
for the Study of Crusades and the Latin East and Presented to R. C. Smail, ed. Peter
W. Edbury [Cardiff, 1985], 37).
82) The two leading schools of Crusade scholarship, inappropriately and
misleadingly named “traditionalist” and “pluralist”, both adhere to a saltatory

account of the Crusade, with the saltatory element of “war-pilgrimage” deemed
essential to the enterprise. Various champions have arisen to explain and defend
these schools of thought. Today, the leading champion of the “traditionalist”
school is Jean Flori whose recent manifesto defines the Crusade as “une guerre
sainte ayant pour objectif la récupération des Lieux saints de Jérusalem par les
chrétiens” (Flori, “Pour une redéfinition de la croisade”, 349). Flori’s counter-
part in the “pluralist” camp is Jonathan Riley-Smith. In his various statements
of the “pluralistic” hypothesis, Riley-Smith recognizes that the Crusade diverged
into distinct theaters of operation (the eastern Mediterranean, Spain, North
Ultra-Erdmannism
The rejection of Erdmann’s gradualism produced a view of the Cru-

sade ultimately derived from Carl Erdmann but stripped of his most
Africa, the Baltic, the Balkans, Italy, southern France, and the Atlantic), targeted
a manifold number of groups (Muslims, as well as Mongols, orthodox Christians,
schismatics, heretics, pagans, and political opponents of the papacy), and lasted for
seven hundred years, yet all Crusades must always be copies of an underlying type –
the Holy Land Crusade – because all Crusades are regarded as having descended
from a common ancestor – the “First” Crusade. The idea that all Crusades de-
scended from a common ancestor (monogenism) is a form of monism, not plural-
ism. Here resides a major conceptual problem for the “pluralist” school: the proof
of common ancestry is shared characteristics, yet the leading advocate of the “plu-
ralist” position acknowledges that the common ancestor of all Crusades possessed
a unique characteristic that made it “special”. In Riley-Smith’s words, “Jerusa-
lem was special”, and the Jerusalem Crusade provided the “scale” against which
others Crusades were measured. Once the Holy Land Crusade was elevated as the
absolute “standard” by which all Crusades were to be measured, it became obvious
that the non-Holy Land Crusades could not measure up. However hard they tried
to match the Holy Land Crusade, all of the non-Holy Land Crusades fell short. The
proposition that all Crusades had diverged from a common ancestor of crusading
came up against the assumption that something very special had happened to
make the Holy Land Crusade “special”, and this “special” quality was not trans-
ferable to other Crusades. The unique characteristic that made the Holy Land Cru-
sade special – pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher – created a gulf between it and all
other Crusades, and that gulf could only be shattered if all Crusades shared the
same characteristics. The “pluralists” could not break down the gulf between the
Holy Land Crusade and the non-Holy Land Crusades because to do so would jeop-
ardize the “special” status of the Holy Land Crusade. As a result, the alleged gulf
between Crusades remained. The prospect that common descent might not be the
source of the similarities between Crusades was never considered. For background
on how the terms “traditionalist” and “pluralist” came to designate two versions of
ultra-Erdmannism, see Norman Housley, with Marcus Bull, “Jonathan Riley-
Smith, the Crusades and the Military Orders: An Appreciation”, in The Experience
of Crusading, I, 1–10. Affirmations of the “pluralistic” hypothesis are found in
Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? (London, 1977); Riley-Smith
and Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality; Riley-Smith, First Crusade;
Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., The Atlas of the Crusades (New York, 1991); Riley-
Smith, Crusades: A Short History; idem, “History, the Crusades and the Latin
East, 1095–1204: A Personal View”, in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-century
Syria, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Leiden, 1993), 1–17; idem, “The Crusading Move-
ment and Historians”, in Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, 1–12; idem,
First Crusaders; idem, What Were the Crusades? 3rd ed. (San Francisco, 2002).
valuable observations and conclusions. This view, which may be termed

“ultra-Erdmannism”, regards the Crusade, even more radically than
Erdmann ever imagined, as a wholly autonomous product of the intellect
and the outcome of an intellectual mutation caused by a fallacious idea
that emerged in a single revolutionary upheaval. The fallacious idea is
“war-pilgrimage” – “a bastard politico-theological theory”83 – and the
revolutionary upheaval is the great tumult caused by the radical conjunc-
tion of irreconcilable ideas – war and pilgrimage – that were joined to-
gether by Pope Urban II.
Ultra-Erdmannism depicts the Crusade as “a truly revolutionary
event, because the pope presented the faithful with an idea (“war-pil-
grimage”) that had been unprecedented in Christian thought”.84 Euro-
pean society, at least at the level of its elites, was massively won over by
the abstract idea of “war-pilgrimage” that was all the more incompatible
with the values of existing society because it arose in opposition to the re-
ligious values of the day and triumphed precisely because European in-
tellectuals were seized by mental paralysis: “It is amazing that no pro-
tests from senior churchmen are recorded, even though figures like Ivo of
Chartres and Anselm of Canterbury, who was at Hugh of Lyon’s synod
at Anse, may well have had doubts”.85 Deprived of “criticism of so radical
an initiative” as the association of war and pilgrimage, the new bellicose
ideology took root in the consciousness of an “emergent nobility of mod-
erate status” because prior social and religious conditioning had “predis-
posed” this armsbearing class “to react positively to an appeal of this
sort”. Monastic reform movements, the institution of pilgrimage to atone
for sin, and the clerical condemnation of lay violence had religiously
sensitized this class to crusading ideology. A prevailing social ethos
of kinship solidarity among the armsbearers consolidated support for the
Crusade and advanced the crusading movement through successive
expeditions.86 Propelled by its initial upheaval, crusading continued
willy-nilly for the next seven centuries. Only in modern times have intel-
lectuals been able to accomplish what their medieval counterparts could
not: give the coup de grâce to the crusading movement by exposing it
as a grotesque misunderstanding of Christian teaching. Thus did Crusade
historians bring about the final extinction of that new species of war-
83) Robinson, “Gregory VII and the Soldiers of Christ”, 183.

84) Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 189.
85) Ibid., 77.
86) Ibid., 1, 6, 83–85, 97, 189–91.
fare sparked by the “radical” and “revolutionary” idea of “war-pilgrim-

age”.87
Ultra-Erdmannism had resolved the contradictions and ambiguities
of Erdmann’s thesis, but it did so at a price. In rejecting the developmen-
tal component of his thesis, ultra-Erdmannism had rejected his most
important insights. What scholars had not realized was that Erdmann’s
gradualism had pioneered a totally new way of interpreting the Crusade,
but he was unable to sustain the implications of his insights and
present them in a coherent thesis due to his idealist leanings. Whenever
Erdmann allows the facts to speak for themselves, instead of trying to
fit the facts into a preconceived theoretical framework, he brings insight
and understanding to the study of the Crusade. But scholars were too
mesmerized by Erdmann’s conceptualizing framework to recognize this.
His contemporaries and successors proved incapable of perceiving what
was truly original about his approach to the study of the Crusade.
Neither his supporters nor his opponents recognized the novelty of iden-
tifying the so-called “pre-Crusades” in Sicily, Spain, and North Africa as
genuine Crusades. For his supporters, as well as his opponents, Erdmann
had betrayed the spirit of his own theory. His supporters and opponents
did not see that he was pointing the way to a new interpretation of the
Crusade. Nor did they see that he was pointing the way to an interpre-
tation of the Crusade that is 900 years old. All that was needed was for
Crusade historians to follow the historical path that Erdmann had
sketched, instead of following the idealist elements of his thesis.
This proved to be easier said than done. Only by stressing those as-
pects of Erdmann’s thesis that he had suppressed could a historical in-
terpretation of the Crusade be achieved. Crusade historians in the post-
Erdmannian era have shown even less interest in the historical processes
that produced the Crusade than Erdmann. Today’s Crusade interpreters
promote a continuation of his thesis in a new, but cruder, guise. It is a
truncated Erdmann that is promoted – an Erdmann divested of all of his
worthwhile insights. Erdmann’s most important contribution – the his-
torical component of his thesis – has not aroused the interest of Crusade
scholarship. Now the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade emerges as a
way to rescue his insights by incorporating them into a coherent and his-
torically verifiable explanation of the Crusade.
87) The “radical” and “revolutionary” nature of Crusade is one of the pillars of
ultra-Erdmannism (Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 39, 48, 52, 77, 189).
Erdmann and al-Sulami: a New Synthesis
Erdmann, like al-Sulami, recognizes the war against Islam in Sicily

as a Crusade. He maintains that “the Norman-Papal alliance of 1059 was
crucial to the development of the idea of crusade”.88 The political agenda
was set in 1059, long before it would be fully worked out in theory or in
practice: Sicily was to be liberated and the Church was to be restored. The
key political issue in the crusading movement had been introduced in
1059 at the Council of Melfi. On the surface it pertained to the jurisdic-
tion of Islam over Sicily, with the Normans given the nod. Yet the bigger
issue was the jurisdiction over Christendom. And on this issue there was
agreement: Christendom was to be free. This new principle of indepen-
dence was to have far-reaching consequences. In 1059, the first concrete
steps were taken to establish a body politic committed to the public free-
dom of the Church (libertas ecclesiae), both from secular control by em-
perors, kings, and feudal lords and from external domination by Islamic
powers. The new political community of Western Christendom under
papal leadership, as yet in embryo, made its first stirrings at Melfi in 1059
with the oath of Robert Guiscard to Pope Nicholas II (1058–61), which
gave the stamp of legitimacy to the return of Christian rule to Sicily.89

89) At the Council of Melfi, Robert Guiscard swore “fealty” to the pope and re-
ceived in return authorization that granted him legitimacy to the rights of juris-
diction over Islamic Sicily as a “vassal” of the Holy See. This oath conferred legit-
imacy on the return of Christian rule to Sicily; it approved Robert Guiscard as the
rightful ruler of Sicily; and, it placed Sicily under papal protection as part of “the
lands of St Peter”. The text of the oath is published in Le Liber Censuum de l’Eglise
Romaine, ed. Paul Fabre and Louis Duchesne (Paris, 1889–1952), I, 422, with
English translations in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–
1300: With Selected Documents (Toronto, 1988), 44, and Loud, Age of Robert
Guiscard, 188–89. For analysis of the oath, see Erdmann, Kreuzzugsgedanke, 121;
Engl. trans., 133; Loud, Age of Robert Guiscard, 186–94; and Harold J. Berman,
Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge,
MA, 1983), 411–12. The Norman-papal alliance of 1059 laid the foundations for a
new form of government in the Latin West: a “federal” Christendom, “ruled
jointly by a single unified ecclesiastical hierarchy and a multiplicity of secular
polities” (Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant
Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition [Cambridge, 2003], 127). This “fed-
erated” Christendom was the first European Union, a confederation of sovereign
political societies within an overarching ecclesiastical unity, and the international
enterprises of this union were the Crusades. Hugh Kennedy’s observation that
From the first moment that the recovery of the lost lands of Christendom
became a stated objective of a newly emancipated papacy, efforts to
achieve this political purpose were put into effect and crusading was
born. The principle engine of the Crusade was not an intellectual or ideo-
logical breakthrough – the union of war and pilgrimage – but a political
and organizational breakthrough – the rise of the first pan-European
government. As an entirely new paradigm of politics emerged, the “inde-
pendence principle” became the catalyst for a revived Europe, and an ex-
panding society recrystallized ideologically around the recovery of the
Church.
The Sicily example proved contagious and established a model to be
followed elsewhere. There were other Sicilies to be reclaimed and other
budding rulers like the Normans with an eye on expanding their realms,
who needed little urging to swing into action and raise the crusading
banner. The Norman war against Islam in Sicily soon led to something
larger. In 1064, crusading expanded its reach to Spain. An Aragonese-
papal alliance initiated a Franco-Catalan Crusade that was spearheaded
by a papal army of Italo-Norman knights led by the Norman adventurer
Robert Crispin. This Crusade captured Barbastro, an important border
stronghold guarding Islamic Zaragoza and the Ebro plain.90 Other cam-
“the ties binding the Muslim world together went deeper than the links of Latinate
culture and Roman Christianity” takes no account of the first pan-European gov-
ernment and the international enterprises of this government (Hugh Kennedy,
“The Decline and Fall of the First Muslim Empire”, Der Islam 81 [2004], 28).
90) Amatus of Montecassino identifies the leader of the Barbastro Crusade as
Robert Crispin (Amato di Monte Cassino, Storia de’ Normanni di Amato di Mon-
tecassino volgarizzata in antico francese, ed. Vicenzo de Bartholomaeis [Rome,
1935], I.5, 13–14; trans. Prescott N. Dunbar as The History of the Normans, rev.
Graham A. Loud [Woodbridge, 2004], 46–47). Ibn Hayyan (987 or 8–1076), who
provides the most detailed account of the Barbastro Crusade, identifies its leader
both as “the commander-in-chief” (akbar ru#asa#) and as “the commander of the
papal mounted army” (qa#id khayl ruma). This last designation translates the
Latin title princeps Romanae militiae (“the commander of the papal army”). The
forces that Robert Crispin led are identified as the “army of the Normans” (jaysh
al-Urdamaniyun) and the “mounted army of the Christians” (khayl al-nasara).
See Ali Ibn Bassam al-Shantarini, al-Dhakhira fi mahasin ahl al-jazira, ed. Ihsan
Abbas, (Beirut, 1975–79), I, pt. 3, 181, 182, 185, which preserves Ibn Hayyan’s
account of the siege. Al-Bakri (1040–94) identifies the leader of the Barbastro
Crusade by name as Albiyutbin, which joins together a garbled form of the Norman
leader’s given name, Robert (Albiyut), and the last syllable of his surname, Crispin
(-bin, for “-pin”). The recent edition of al-Bakri’s Kitab al-masalik wa-l-mamalik
paigns to “spread greatly the Church of God into Muslim territories” fol-
lowed. A decade after the Barbastro Crusade the eastern Mediterranean
was targeted, as Pope Gregory VII sought to mount a rescue of the By-
zantine Empire and retake Jerusalem. In 1099, Gregory’s crusading vi-
sion was realized with the conquest of Jerusalem.
From Damascus, al-Sulami saw these events as interrelated, as part of
a wider movement aimed at the heart of Islam that had three main the-
aters of operation – Sicily, Spain, and Syria. From Rome, Urban II por-
trayed these events as being part of a Mediterranean-wide struggle aimed
at recovering from Islam the lost lands of Christendom. The view from
Damascus and the view from Rome were not contradictory but comple-
by A. P. Van Leeuwen and André Ferré incorrectly transcribes Albiyutbin as

Albiyutin (Kitab al-masalik wa-l-mamalik, ed. A. P. Van Leeuwen and André
Ferré (Tunis, 1992), II, 910. This name is correctly transcribed in Abu Ubayd
Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Bakri, Jughrafiyat al-Andalus wa-Urubba, min
Kitab al-masalik wa-al-mamalik, ed. Abd al-Rahman Ali al-Hajji (Beirut,
1968), 93; trans. Charles Melville and Ahmad Ubaydli, “The Crusade against
Barbastro (456/1064)”, in Christians and Moors in Spain, III: Arabic Sources
(711–1501) (Warminster, 1992), 70–71. The account of the siege of Barbastro by
al-Himyari, found in his Kitab al-Rawd al-mitar fi khabar al-aqtar, transcribes
only Robert Crispin’s given name. It is rendered as Albiyutush, which is a garbled
version of the Latin form of his name, “Robertus” (Muhammad b. Abd Allah al-
Himyari, La péninsule Ibérique au Moyen-Âge d’apès le Kitab ar-Rawd al-mitar fi
äabar al-aktar d#Ibn Abd al-Munim al-Himyari, ed. Évariste Lévi-Provençal
[Leiden, 1938], 40). More than a century ago, Reinhart Dozy accurately trans-
lated and interpreted Ibn Hayyan’s text and brought papal participation in the
Barbastro Crusade to the surface (Reinhart Dozy, Recherches sur l’histoire et la
littérature de l’Espagne pendant le moyen âge, 3rd ed. [Leiden, 1881], II, 335–53).
Seeking to erase papal involvement from the history of the Barbastro Crusade, a
host of scholars subsequent to Dozy, most with no knowledge of Arabic, have mis-
represented Ibn Hayyan’s text in order to discount this expedition as part of the
crusading enterprise (Michel Villey, La croisade: Essai sur la formation d’une
théorie juridique [Paris, 1942], 69; Pierre-François David, Études historiques sur
la Galice et le Portugal du VIe au XIIe siècle [Lisbon, 1947], 371; Marcelin Defour-
neaux, Le Français en Espagne aux XIe et XIIe siècles [Paris, 1949], 131–35; Noth,
Heiliger Krieg und Heiliger Kampf, 109–20; Alberto Ferreiro, “The Siege of
Barbastro, 1064–65: A Reassessment”, Journal of Medieval History 9 [1983],
129–44; Jean Flori, La Guerre sainte: La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’Oc-
cident chrétien [Paris, 2001], 278). Recent analysis of the Barbastro Crusade relies
upon a correct interpretation of Ibn Hayyan’s text: Manuela Marín, “Crusaders
in the Muslim West: The View of Arab Writers”, Maghreb Review [Majallat al-
Maghrib] 17 [1992]: 95–102; O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 24–27).
mentary. It was this understanding of the Crusade towards which Erd-

mann had pointed 70 years ago. His historical vision offers a new ap-
proach to the study of the Crusade that is similar to the one advanced by
al-Sulami 900 years ago. The potential value of Erdmann’s historical
contribution can now be realized. Erdmann did not betray the spirit of
his own theory but instead laid the groundwork for a new conceptualiz-
ation of the Crusade. This new conceptualization of the Crusade is in fact
an old conceptualization of the Crusade, first pioneered by Muslim
scholars. As T. S. Eliot so eloquently points out,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.91
91) T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (the last of his Four Quartets).

The Islamic Interpretation of The Crusa

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90 Paul E.

The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade:

Der Islam Bd. 83, S. 90–136 DOI 10.1515/ISLAM.2006.004

aside the Islamic interpretation of the Crusade as irrelevant – of no sig-

1) Francesco Gabrieli, “The Arabic Historiography of the Crusades”, in

the start of a new development, not the culmination of a historical en-

“Islamic Perspective” or “Islamic Perspectives”

5) The classic statement of this development remains Archibald R. Lewis,

Muslim Historians Interpret the Crusade

Muslims throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond were aware

This depiction of a Mediterranean-wide struggle that started in the west-

The spark that ignited the “First” Crusade, according to al-Azimi,

Islamic sources viewed the different strands of western European ex-

8) So in MS for “the ruler of Seville”.

of reality should not be taken as a literary topos designed merely to re-

12) “In Saracenorum finibus ecclesiam Dei plurimum dilatavit”: Urban to

Count Roger of Sicily, 1098, “Epistolae et privilegia”, PL 151, 506C, recounting

13) Presumably this is Baldwin of Bouillon. If so, Ibn al-Athir incorrectly

Ibn al-Athir traces the roots of crusading to Latin expansion in the

l-ta#rikh (Beirut, 1965), X, 272–73; Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, 52;

gual Surrender Treaties in Muslim-Crusader Spain under James the Conqueror

nothing in the nature of jihad barred alliances between Christians and

20) Robert I. Burns, “The Many Crusades of Valencia’s Conquest (1225–

1280): A Historiographical Labyrinth”, in: On the Social Origins of Medieval

Syriac Historians Interpret the Crusade

The Islamic interpretation of the Crusade influenced the Syriac his-

Like al-Azimi, Bar Hebraeus sees the Crusade as a Latin response to

23) Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche

tempt, however, to reconcile the discrepancies between the two accounts.

Islamic sources define the Crusade as a Frankish holy war (jihad)

Modern Scholarship and the Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade

“Extraordinarily Far-Sighted and Illuminating …”

How has modern scholarship regarded the Islamic interpretation of

wider framework of historical vision, but essentially incompatible with

25) Holt, Age of the Crusades, 27.

Christie and Deborah Gerish affirm “al-Sulami’s accurate assessment

counts of Salah al-Din’s Recovery of Jerusalem (Al-Quds)”, in Studia Palaestina:

31) Dajani-Shakeel, “Reassessment”, 47.

ers and the End of Islam (London, 2003), 9 n. 33.

arrive at an understanding of the Crusade that is compatible with their

… but of no Relevance to the Crusade

Modern scholarship exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards the

36) Gabrieli, “Arabic Historiography of the Crusades”, 98.

campaigns and a handful of individuals. The result was a vignette or a

Western Scholarship and the Rejection of “the Other”

Modern scholarship, whether in the West or in the Muslim world,

christianitatis gratia tendunt … nos enim ad hanc expeditionem militum animos

He presented the Jerusalem Crusade as a campaign “to aid the churches

nimiter proposuere et fratres suos ab Saracenorum tyrannide liberare, ita et uos

Urban portrayed the Crusade as a Mediterranean-wide struggle against

papal documents and corroborated by Islamic sources, but it has not

theory of the Crusades: Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History

47) See below, nn. 64–71, 90, and text.

uses Islamic sources as the basis for a reinterpretation of crusading.

Islamic Scholarship and the Rejection of “The Self”

Unfortunately, scholarship in the Islamic world does not offer an al-

50) Muhammad Sayyid al-Kilani, al-Hurub al-Salibiyin wa-atharuha fi

Arab scholarship on the Crusades, Carole Hillenbrand complains that

The Islamic interpretation of the Crusade focuses attention on the re-

52) Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, 4–5. See also Emmanuel Sivan,

voked military offensive far beyond western Christian borders”. Like-

In the nineteenth century, scholars who examined the Crusade studied

53) Mastnak, Crusading Peace, 119; Aristeides Papadakis (in collaboration