My latest area of historical interest is the Crusades. I wanted to get up to speed on the Crusades quickly, which rules out reading a book. I’m not aware of any adult education mini-courses in my area on the Crusades (which is a shame; I wish there was a bigger assortment of serious adult education options out there, not limited to adult school night classes regarding spreadsheets, pottery making and starting a business). So, I had to find a DVD series. The Teaching Company is famous for its recorded courses on serious college and grad level topics, and indeed it offers a course on “The Era of the Crusades”. Unfortunately, it lasts 18 hours and doesn’t even get to the first crusade until after 6 hours of background lectures. <\/p>\n
So, that narrowed my choices down to the History Channel DVD series. They offer two Crusades shows; one is fairly brief and focuses mainly on the first two crusades, ending after the loss of Jerusalem. The second show is narrated by British comedian Terry Jones and gets thru the fourth crusade and the rise of the Egyptian Mamluks, who overwhelmed the last Crusader strongholds in the 13th Century (ending with the fall of Acre in 1291). OK, it seemed pretty good on the cover, so I bought it and watched it. And yes, I learned a lot about the Crusades from Mr. Jones. But I was also disappointed with his presentation. <\/p>\n
Mr. Jones is definitely interested in medieval history and has studied it quite a bit. But he is still a comedian, so his Crusades show mixes in a lot of his Monty Python-flavored British wit. It’s more than a bit of sprinkling to spice things up; Mr. Jones is constantly trying to make you laugh. If you appreciate his humor, I suppose you would find this entertaining. But I don’t, and it amounts to a waste of my time as a student wanting to understand what the Crusades were and were all about. Unfortunately, Mr. Jones also blends a third ingredient into the mixture behind this film, as if the comic diversions weren’t enough to make the public swallow an otherwise serious history presentation. No, Mr. Jones also has to teach us a lesson. He has a moral to his story. Telling history and preaching morals generally don’t mix well; one has to suffer, and it’s usually the quality of the history presentation. <\/p>\n
In a nutshell, when he’s not trying to make us laugh at some ironic twist or sardonic insight, Terry Jones wants us to know that we people of the Euro-Christian heritage need to hang our heads in shame for the Crusades, and confess that our medieval forefathers were horribly and irrationally wrong in attacking the Muslims in the Levant (along with their many other sins against Jews and Orthodox Christians). According to Mr. Jones’ picture of the Crusades, the European kings and nobles and the popes and bishops of the Catholic Church were greedy, power-hungry, blood-thirsty barbarians, a race and culture that was mostly backward, violent, unwashed and uncivilized in every way imaginable. They cited their religious faith in God and an afterlife as their inspiration, which is obviously (according to this DVD) some mixture of irrationality, delusion, stupidity and hypocritical insincerity. Their initial impetus was the takeover of Jerusalem by the Turks, and the sometimes fatal hostility experienced by throngs of Christian pilgrims who were once welcomed by the Muslim Arabs. Mr. Jones tries to paint this impression as untrue or beside the point by the time the first crusade was organized. You can get a more detailed accounting of Mr. Jones’ ‘political correctness’ by reading some of the Amazon reviews<\/a> for this series. <\/p>\n One reviewer said that you would do better by reading a good overview book, and recommended “A Concise History of the Crusades” by Thomas Madden. I didn’t intend to sink into a book on this topic, but at 200 pages, Mr. Madden’s college-level textbook didn’t seem too daunting. So I’m now going through it. My goodness, what a wonderful change. Madden is a history professor, and seems to stick to the telling of history. He doesn’t deny that the Crusaders did the horrible things that Mr. Jones plays up, such as eating the burnt flesh of Jewish or Moslem children that they killed. But he fits the Crusades within the broader sweep of medieval history and what society was like at the time, both in Christian Europe and the Islamic East. He does not deny that the Arab Islamic break-out of the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries subjected many formerly Christian lands and peoples to conquest and suffering. Islamic forces clearly had their sights on the whole of Europe and had beachheads in Spain and Austria by the time of the first crusade.<\/p>\n