Ryan Patrick’s Reviews > Seven Myths of the Crusades > Status Update

Chapter 7 - In reality, academic interest in the crusades both in the west and in Islamdom was fairly minimal until the nineteenth century when it became wrapped up in modern movements like nationalism, colonialism, pan-Arabism, and Salafism.

Chapter 6 - The connection between Templars and Freemasons was invented in the early 18th century to give the Masons a more romantic, chivalric origin and wasn't originally meant to be taken too literally. Now we have crazy authors declaring that 'it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts'.

Chapter 5 - The Children's Crusade has been horribly misrepresented by modern popular historians with an axe to grind against medieval culture more generally, and this is made possible because even the medieval sources for the event represent efforts by clerics to use the phenomenon to moralize about the state of the church in their day.

Chapter 3 - The first crusaders did attack the Jews of the Rhineland in 1096, but the subsequent connection between anti-Judaism and crusading was always tenuous at best, with most writers condemning such attacks and the popes issuing bulls calling for protection of Jews--not that any of this should lead us to think that medieval Europe wasn't deeply anti-Judaic; it definitely was.

Chapter 2 - You can't argue with Muldoon's conclusion--that it is a myth that the Crusades were only undertaken by frenzied religious madmen--but his argument is poorly constructed and fails to provide good, relevant evidence in support. Not to mention that his whole argument is a bit of a straw man--no serious writer on the crusades thinks this anymore (the view he challenges is from an 1830 book).

Chapter 1 - "The ideas that the crusades represented the 'first major clash' between Islam and Christianity, that Islam established itself only through 'enthusiasm and persuasion', or that the crusades were merely the result of an 'imperial-papal power play' that ended 'five centuries of peaceful coexistence' are simply and entirely wrong."