ملخص الجهاز:
In the aftermath of 9/11, however, this series of European military invasions of the Middle East began to reappear in the media as analysts, historians, and academics posited that they were a precursor of the region’s present sociopolitical disorder as daunting as the current East West discourse and relations between the Christian and Muslim worlds.
Chapter 2, “The First Crusades,” deals with the Peoples Crusades, “the largest and most ambitious military operation” ever launched from western Europe against the Muslim world (p.
Chapter 4 explains the decline of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, which engendered the Third Crusade.
Madden defends the Sixth Crusade (1228) of Frederick II, who struck a ten-year truce with al-Kamil and thereby acquired Jerusalem for the time being, as a great success because European pilgrims could now easily to visit the Holy Land (p.
Here Cobb draws attention to an important but rather ignored impact of the Crusades: “the rich legacy of Frankish-Muslim relations [rather] than a strictly military narrative” (p.
In the epilogue, which summarizes all of the Crusades, Cobb asserts that the Islamic perspective “allows us to understand the context of the Muslim population who were the targets of the Frankish conquest from Spain to Syria, the economic, political, and social settings of actors in these events who were,” he argues, “poorly represented in the traditional [European] perspective.
Chapter 8 recounts the growing anti-Byzantine resentment in the Latin West after Jerusalem’s fall that, according to the author, peaked in the assertion that Emperor Isaac II allegedly had a hand in this event.