What schools usually teach, and what they leave out

The notes call the Crusades a turning point in medieval European history before the Renaissance, and even a spark for it. They date the wars from 1096 to 1270 — the eleventh to the thirteenth century, about two centuries, a hundred and seventy-four years — as eight expeditions, in their wording, to take back the holy land of Palestine and the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslims. The soldiers are named for the cross marked on chest and shoulder.

The outcome, they write, is usually told as an Islamic victory. Many Western European knights died, and the frame of medieval feudalism was badly shaken; royal power grew, markets developed, and the Catholic Church, which had held up medieval European life and values, began to split, with the Avignon captivity later weakening the pope’s standing. Schools, they say, teach cause and result from the Western European side, and barely how Islamic states stood in the wars, or how those states changed.

A late Arabic history, and leaders who would not last

Madden’s The Crusades (2005), as they cite it, says the first Arabic history of the Crusades was published in 1899, about six hundred and thirty years after the wars. In the West the wars have a high historical standing; in Islamic countries, the notes write, they were one among many wars with people of another faith, and the image many Muslims now hold is, in Madden’s words as they give them, a “made memory.” The notes add a claim they do not soften: that in the crusading period the Ottoman Empire was stronger than the Western European states, and that once that empire fell and the balance of power turned, a distorted idea was taught — that the wars had been fought to spread Western civilisation in the Middle East. The writer likens this to Japan’s Imna Nihonfu claim, and to the claim that colonial rule was for Korea’s development.

In 1099, when Jerusalem fell — a crusade the notes number as the second — Muslims were massacred, and the people called for jihad, a holy war. The leaders, they write, answered lukewarmly. There was no pretext for Islamic forces to join, and powerful names they list — Ilghazi, Ilbursuqi, Imad al-Din Zengi, Nur al-Din — left the stage by illness or assassination.

Saladin in 1187, and a quieter aftermath

Then came Saladin, a commander recognised even in Europe, who from 1169 to 1186, about seventeen years, dominated the Middle East. He had not begun by calling for jihad; in 1175 he even made a truce with Jerusalem. Early in 1187 a caravan that included his sister — merchants the notes describe as mounted on elephants — was attacked and looted by crusaders from Jerusalem. In March 1187 he declared jihad; in October the crusaders surrendered, and Jerusalem returned to Islamic hands after eighty-eight years. He then, they write, allowed those crusaders to go home. Europe later sent four more crusades, but not, in their account, to retake Jerusalem: the aim was money and plunder, and little was gained.

The wars, they say, did thicken exchange between Asia, represented by the Middle East, and Europe, and Islamic goods and learning spread west, feeding the spark of the Renaissance. Amin Maalouf, in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (2002), saw the wars as a Western invasion of the Arabs, yet also held that Muslims living under crusader rule could have more personal freedom, rationalism, and property rights than under autocracy in the Arab world. Still, the notes say, no obvious social change followed in Arab society. For the Arabs the Crusades were a familiar kind of invasion, and also a chance for trade to flourish. Feudalism as a system collapsed in Europe; the Arab world, they write, did not change in the same way, because it had won. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of the Crusades as Islamic states met them, citing Madden (2005) and Maalouf (2002).

Last updated: 15 November 2026