牛津通识读本：The Crusades.pdf
While the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume
thought the Crusades ‘the most signal and most durable monument of
human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’, he admitted
they ‘engrossed the attention of Europe and have ever since engrossed
the curiosity of mankind’. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The
twin themes of judgement on past violence and fascination with its
causes have ensured the survival of the Crusades as more than an inert
subject for antiquarians. Since Pope Urban II (1088–99) in 1095
answered a call for military help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I
Comnenus (1081–1118), by summoning a vast army to fight in the name
of God to liberate eastern Christianity and recover the Holy City of
Jerusalem, there have been few periods when the consequences of this
act have not gripped minds and imaginations, primarily in western
society but increasingly, since the 19th century, among communities
that have seen themselves as heirs to the victims of this form of religious
violence. With the history of the Crusades, modern interest is
compounded by spurious topicality and inescapable familiarity.
Ideological warfare and the pathology of acceptable communal violence
are embedded in the historical experience of civilization. Justification
for war and killing for a noble cause never cease to find modern
manifestations. The Crusades present a phenomenon so dramatic and
extreme in aspiration and execution and yet so rebarbative to modern
sensibilities, that they cannot fail to move both as a story and as an
expression of a society remote in time and attitudes yet apparently soabundantly recognizable. Spread over five hundred years and across
three continents, the Crusades may not have defined medieval Christian
Europe, yet they provide a most extraordinary feature that retains the
power to excite, appal, and disturb. They remain one of the great
subjects of European history. What follows is an attempt to explain why.
The phenomenon of violence justified by religious faith has ebbed and
flowed, sometimes nearing the centre, sometimes retreating to the
margins of historical and contemporary consciousness. When I was
asked to write this short introduction to the Crusades, holy war,
Christian or otherwise, was not high on the public or political agenda.
Now when I have finished, it is. So this work conforms to a pattern
traced in what follows, of historical study relating to current events. My
views on that relationship will, I hope, become clear enough. What
remain hidden except to the lynx-eyed are the debts to many other
scholars, colleagues, and friends from whom I have learnt so much and
should have remembered so much more. They must forgive a collective
thanks. The faults in this libellus are mine not theirs. The dedication is a
very small recompense for incalculable munificence of advice, support,
and friendship over so many years, in dark days as well as bright
evenings of exhausting but inexhaustible hospitality.
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