Dimensions
157 x 236 x 25mm
In God's Battalions, award-winning author Rodney Stark takes on the long-held view that the Crusades were the first round of European colonialism, conducted for land, loot, and converts by barbarian Christians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. Instead, Stark argues that the Crusades were the first military response to Muslim terrorist aggession.
In God's Battalions, Stark reviews the history of the seven major crusades from 1095-1291, demonstrating that the Crusades were precipitated by Islamic provocations: by centuries of bloody attempts to colonize the West, and by sudden new attacks on Christian pilgrims and holy places. Although the Crusades were initiated by a plea from the pope, this had nothing to do with hopes of converting Islam.
Nor were the Crusades organized and led by surplus sons, but by the heads of great families who were fully aware that the costs of crusading would far exceed the very modest material rewards that could be expected--most went at immense personal cost, some of them knowingly bankrupting themselves to go. Moreover, the Crusader kingdoms that they established in the Holy Land, and which stood for nearly two centuries, were not colonies sustained by local exactions, but required immense subsidies from Europe.
In addition, it is utterly unreasonable to impose modern notions about proper military conduct on medieval warfare as both Christians and Muslims observed quite different rules of war. Finally, claims that Muslims have been harboring bitter resentments about the Crusades for a millennium are nonsense. Muslim antagonism about the Crusades did not appear until about 1900 in reaction against the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of European colonialism in the Middle East.
