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Article Excerpt
THE PREVAILING VIEW of the Crusades has, until now, been damning. The philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who dismissed Christian belief as superstition, ridiculed these wars fought in the name of Christianity. The Scottish skeptic, David Hume, thought them "the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation." Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie, published in 1772, said they were inspired by greed, imbecility, and "false zeal." The same strain of contempt continues through Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to our near contemporary, Sir Steven Runciman, who concluded his monumental History of the Crusades with the judgement that they were "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."
Are these judgements fair? And, more pertinently, can they be sustained by the evidence available to dispassionate historians? Following the events of September 11, it was the clear objective...
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