The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

the dangers attendant upon ‘crusade parallelism’ have proven to be particularly intense. Over the last two centuries, a fallacious narrative has taken hold. It suggests that the crusades were pivotal to the relationship between Islam and the West because they engendered a deep-rooted and irrevocable sense of mutual antipathy, leaving these two cultures locked in a destructive and perpetual war. This notion–of a direct and unbroken trail of conflict linking the medieval and modern eras–has helped to cultivate a pervasive, and almost fatalistic, acceptance that a titanic clash of civilisations is inevitable. Yet dark, brutal, even savage as they sometimes were, the crusades left no permanent marks upon western Christian or Muslim society. In truth, the war for the Holy Land had been all but forgotten by the end of the Middle Ages and was only resurrected centuries later.