The Crusades were penitential war-pilgrimages fought in the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as in North Africa, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Baltic region, Hungary, the Balkans, and Western Europe. Beginning in the eleventh century and ending as late as the eighteenth, these holy wars were waged against Muslims and other enemies of the Church, enlisting generations of laymen and laywomen to fight for the sake of Christendom.

Crusading features prominently in today's religio-political hostilities, yet the perceptions of these wars held by Arab nationalists, pan-Islamists, and many in the West have been deeply distorted by the language and imagery of nineteenth-century European imperialism. With this book, Jonathan Riley-Smith returns to the actual story of the Crusades, explaining why and where they were fought and how deeply their narratives and symbolism became embedded in popular Catholic thought and devotional life.

From this history, Riley-Smith traces the legacy of the Crusades into modern times, specifically within the attitudes of European imperialists and colonialists and within the beliefs of twentieth-century Muslims. Europeans fashioned an interpretation of the Crusades from the writings of Walter Scott and a French contemporary, Joseph-François Michaud. Scott portrayed Islamic societies as forward-thinking, while casting Christian crusaders as culturally backward and often morally corrupt. Michaud, in contrast, glorified crusading, and his followers used its imagery to illuminate imperial adventures.

These depictions have had a profound influence on contemporary Western opinion, as well as on Muslim attitudes toward their past and present. Whether regarded as a valid expression of Christianity's divine enterprise or condemned as a weapon of empire, crusading has been a powerful rhetorical tool for centuries. In order to understand the preoccupations of Islamist jihadis and the character of Western discourse on the Middle East, Riley-Smith argues, we must understand how images of crusading were formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Focusing on the inner workings of the First Crusade in a way that no other work has done, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading delves into the Crusade's organization, its finances, and the division of authority and responsibility among its leaders and their relationships with one another and with their subordinates.

In the year 1095, Pope Urban II initiated what is known today as the First Crusade. His summons of the lay knights to the faith between 1095 and 1096 was Urban II's personal response to an appeal that had reached him from eastern Christians, the Pope referred to the struggle ahead as Christ's own war, to be fought in accordance with God's will and intentions. It was, too, called a war of liberation, designed to free the church and city of Jerusalem from oppression and pillage by the Muslims while liberating western Church from the errors into which it had fallen.

In this classic work, presented here with a new introduction, one of the world's most renowned crusade historians approaches this central topic of medieval history with freshness and impeccable research. Through the vivid presentation of a wide range of European chronicles and charter collections, Jonathan Riley-Smith provides a striking illumination of crusader motives and responses and a thoughtful analysis of the mechanisms that made this expedition successful.

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“A concise, clearly written synthesis . . . by one of the leading historians of the crusading movement. ”—Robert S. Gottfried, Historian

“A lively and flowing narrative [with] an enormous cast of characters that is not a mere catalog but a history. . . . A remarkable achievement.”—Thomas E. Morrissey, Church History

“Superb.”—Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Speculum

“A first-rate one-volume survey of the Crusading movement from 1074 . . . to 1798.”—Southwest Catholic

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The Templars and the Hospitallers were the two earliest and most famous of the major Military Orders of the Roman Catholic Church from the early twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century. In this book, Jonathan Riley-Smith attends to the Templars' and Hospitallers' primary role as religious orders, not as military phenomena or economic powerhouses. In a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue, Riley-Smith discusses the origins of the orders in dedication to the protection of pilgrims to the Holy Land (Templars) and to the care of the poor and the sick among them (Hospitallers). He examines their traditions and early history, the organization of their communities, modes of governance, and, in the fourth chapter, important differences between the orders and a brief account of their respective fates in the wake of the Crusades. The Templars were eventually persecuted by the Church and the order suppressed. Riley-Smith speculates that the violent end of the order was caused both by jealousy of its wealth and by internal problems of governance that left it vulnerable to accusations of conducting blasphemous rites. The Hospitallers survived in one form or another to the present day; vestiges of the original order inform the contemporary Knights of Malta....