Let's stop apologizing for the 11th Century.

Rodney Stark on the Crusades:

The Crusades is a topic that generates a lot of books each year. Why did you want to write God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades and what makes this book different from others?


Since my teens I have read a great deal of military history, but until now I had not written any myself. Along the way I read many books about the Crusades and in the past few years I have been greatly impressed by the work of historians such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and others including Thomas Madden. Unfortunately, these wonderful new studies have not reached the intelligent reading public. Nonsense about Crusaders as greedy, colonizing, brutal barbarians still prevails in the public sphere. So, I wrote a chapter on the matter as part of a proposal for a book on anti-Catholic historiography. My publishers responded that they wanted that chapter expanded into a book. So I did it. What makes my book different is, first, that it pulls together the scholarly literature (all of it carefully acknowledged) in one volume written for the general reader in hopes of setting the record straight. Secondly, my book begins in the seventh not the eleventh century, since I regard the Crusades as part of many centuries of conflict between Christendom and Islam. Thus far there have been four major book club pre-publication adoptions, so maybe God’s Battalions can have some corrective effects.

If one starts one's study of the Crusades in 1098, it looks like Christian aggression, in the same way that starting with a freeze-frame of one guy hitting another makes that person look like the aggressor.  Roll the tape back and a different picture emerges.  With respect to the Crusades, that picture includes the fact that the Crusades were into formerly Christian territory with a majority Christian population after Islamic Turks had lopped off the largest and richest part of the Christian territory in Turkey.