Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

For generations, historians have been trying to fight the idea that the medieval Crusades were at root a “clash of civilizations” between the Christian and Islamic worlds. For one thing, such a stark and binary reading of medieval history plays uncomfortably into the narratives of extremist factions today, ranging from white supremacists and neofascists in America and Europe to Islamist fanatics and followers of al-Qaeda and ISIS.* For another, to characterize the Crusades as a simple faith war between Islam and Christianity is to ignore the complex regional and local politics that informed successive waves of crusading from the late eleventh century onward. Crusading was about more than a tussle of ascendant monotheisms. It was about the changing shape of the western world at large. From the time of the First Crusade until the end of the Middle Ages, popes ordered or sanctioned military campaigns on three continents, against enemies who included Turkish warlords, Arab sultans, Kurdish generals, and Spanish Arab emirs, as well as Baltic pagans, French heretics, Mongol chieftains, disobedient western Christian kings, and even Holy Roman emperors.