Helena P. Schrader
The Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades: Kingdoms at the Crossroads of Civilizations, 1100-1300
(Pen & Sword, 2022), 341pp. $42.95
The crusades are a source of nearly constant and perennial fascination for scholars and a wide section of the public. The complex mixture of medieval politics, warfare, and religious idealism, coupled with debates over the relevance of medieval holy wars to modern conflicts, has effectively enshrined the crusades as an important fixture of medieval scholarship. Indeed, every year sees the publication of new books on the crusades, ranging from narrative histories aimed at popular audiences to specialist monographs for other scholars. By contrast, books specifically focused on the history of the Crusader States of Outremer – the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli – tend to generate far less buzz and interest, particularly outside of academia, leaving the study of Frankish Outremer as the purview of specialized historians and archeologists. Helena P. Schrader’s newly published The Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades: Kingdoms at the Crossroads of Civilizations, 1100-1300 aims to rectify this dearth of popular literature by writing an accessible book aimed at amateur hobbyists and college undergraduates – an admirable goal, considering the difficulty in accessing specialized academic studies on the history of Frankish Outremer. However, while the resulting work is not without merit, it unfortunately has significant flaws that prevent it from being easily recommended without substantial caveats and corrections.
Schrader is not a crusades historian by profession; she earned her PhD in history at the University of Hamburg, where her research primarily focused on the life and career of Gen. Felix Olbricht (a participant within the July 20th 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler). She has since written extensively about the crusades (among other historical topics) in the context of historical fiction, and this marks her first foray into writing a non-fiction book on either the Crusaders or the Crusader States. Her experience in writing historical fiction is evident in her prose, which is concise, elegant, and generally straightforward – all virtues when writing for a popular audience, although this can come at the cost of specificity and nuance. In terms of internal structure, the book is divided into ten chapters, not including the introduction, a small concluding chapter, end notes, and a bibliography of recommended readings; these are supported by some (truly excellent) maps, examples of period art, dynastic family trees, and artistic reconstructions of archeological findings, all of which contribute to the attractiveness of the work and provide useful assistance to an amateur or undergraduate reader.
The first chapter begins with a (extremely brief) recitation of Islamic military expansion from the seventh century A.D. up to the beginning of the eleventh century before pivoting to discuss late antique and early medieval Christian contributions to just war theory and the origins of the First Crusade. This section is serviceable, if unremarkable in its contents compared to other concise histories of the Crusades (for example, Thomas Madden’s Concise History of the Crusades or Jonathan Phillips’ Holy Warriors). The second chapter covers the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem up through 1187 and the Battle of Hattin, and here the strengths of Schrader’s work become more readily apparent, as she focuses on covering the political and military problems confronting the Crusader principalities in Frankish Outremer prior to Saladin’s string of military victories in 1187. Her narration is lucid and she deftly moves between the major crusades and the political and military goings-on within Frankish Outremer, particularly in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is also here, however, that a (not insubstantial) critique can be made: Schrader seems so focused on discussing the Kingdom of Jerusalem that discussion of events in Edessa, Tripoli, and Antioch, receive fairly light treatment in comparison.
Chapter three carries the narrative post-Hattin and the military campaigns of the Third Crusade and analysis of the revised political and strategic concerns confronting the Kingdom of Jerusalem following the loss of Jerusalem, as well as the convoluted origins of the Kingdom of Cyprus. Chapter four essentially covers the remainder of the narrative portion of the work, covering the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem up to the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291. The remaining six chapters are devoted to population demographics (chapter five), political institutions (six), diplomacy (seven), economics (eight), and social history (nine); the final chapter is devoted exclusively to charting the history of the house of Ibelin in Outremer as a means of illustrating (in practice) the political, economic, social, religious, and military factors discussed more abstractly in previous chapters. These six chapters represent perhaps the best part of Schrader’s work, as she ably and accessibly presents the findings of recent historical investigations (particularly in regards to archeology, political institutions, economics, among other fields) into the complex history of the Crusader States. Readers will benefit particularly from Schrader’s discussion of archeological findings regarding Frankish settlements and architecture, as she succeeds in presenting complex and fascinating historical minutia without ever being tedious or dull. However, her chapters dealing with demography and inter-religious encounters and treatment of very nearly anything to do with medieval Islam are decidedly less reliable.
The merits of this book cannot overcome the fact that there are important caveats that must be addressed, including some significant flaws that are particularly unfortunate in a work aimed at addressing a popular audience and correcting popular misunderstandings, particularly outside the scope of the (generally competent) contents of the main text. The most significant problem is that Schrader’s reading of scholarship appears (based on the end notes of each chapter and the recommended reading list presented at the end) to be uneven in places, and at times depends on works that are of questionable value. This is particularly the case in regards to historical scholarship on the medieval Islamic world: among Schrader’s cited and recommended sources are Bat Ye’or’s badly dated and prejudicial The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam. One wonders why Schrader did not consult more robust scholarship, given that Christian C. Sahner’s Christian Martyrs Under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (published in 2018 by Princeton) offers a superior and objective reading of the historical evidence that avoids either idealizing or demonizing its historical subjects. A similar case could be made for including Peter Frankopan’s The First Crusade: The Call from the East (2012), which offered one of the finest recent examinations of the plight of Eastern Christian populations in the eleventh century to date, but which is entirely absent here (again, in favor of a far inferior and less reliable work). Dario Fernandez-Morea’s The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise receives a substantial praiseworthy end-note for chapter five, this despite the fact that that work was widely rejected by medieval Iberian and Crusades scholars as a work of ideologically-motivated invective (Madden’s damning statement in the New Criterion that the book is “an angry screed” was perhaps overly generous). An unusual and rather misguided work by the late Rodney Stark (not a medieval historian, but a sociologist) is also highlighted positively in the main text, the end-notes, and the recommended reading list for his 2010 work God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, a work which (as the subtitle implies) was rather more a work of historical apologia than sober evaluation of historical evidence. There are very few sources cited in relation to Islamic history and the Crusades (aside from Ye’or and Fernandez-Morea, and a token bone thrown to Amin Malouf’s badly-dated but seminal The Crusades Through Arab Eyes). Given that Schrader references works written as recently as 2022, why not include Carole Hillenbrand’s The Crusades: An Islamic Perspective (1999) or Paul M. Cobb’s (superb) The Race for Paradise (2016), both of which were written by competent scholars who treated their subjects fairly without either romanticizing or demonizing them? Finally, discussion about demographics and the life of religious minorities within the Crusader States would seem to justify citing specializing literature on these specific topics, yet the sources utilized for this section are quite limited (Joshua Prawer’s substantive and seminal monograph on Jewish life within the Kingdom of Jerusalem did not seem to merit mention for either citation or further reading for curious readers).
After finishing Schrader’s work, I could not help but find myself wrestling with profoundly mixed feelings. There is much to commend about The Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades, but its flaws significantly reduce its value as a fair-minded introduction to a complex and difficult topic. Her uneven reading and citation of relevant scholarship ultimately has consequences for her historical analysis as a whole: indeed, in reading Schrader’s account of life in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the reader cannot but help notice the emphasis on faddish sloganeering: the Crusader States were noteworthy for the “harmonious coexistence” of “highly diverse ethnic and religious” groups “more than half a millennium before the founding of the United States of America” (“Introduction,” pg. XXXV); this kind of language resurfaces throughout the work and seems out of place whenever it appears. Schrader is clearly aware of (and cites extensively) Christopher MacEvitt’s The Crusades and the Christian World of the Middle East: Rough Tolerance (2008), yet it is hard to see in her own treatment of Frankish society where the adjective “rough” could ever enter the conversation, given her tendency to obscure historical data in the kind of glossy and effusively empty language favored by university diversity departments, but which does little to clarify the rather more thorny historical realities of the twelfth through thirteenth centuries.
For a book that aims at combatting misconceptions, Schrader inadvertently helps feed several herself, at times conjecturing a Frankish Outremer that looks less like a complex, multifaceted (and indeed rough) world of shifting religious, political, and ethnic power dynamics into something more akin to the batty romanticism of Ridley Scott’s anachronistically tolerant Baldwin IV in Kingdom of Heaven. The fact that her work frequently cites dated or even questionable scholarship at key junctures does not help cure the impression that this is something of a missed opportunity. What Schrader does well here is worthy of commendation, but it cannot be recommended without significant caveats and corrective readings to balance out its weaknesses; for now, Andrew Jotichsky’s Crusading and the Crusader States remains the gold standard for treatments of this particular subject.
Trevor J. Davis
History Instructor
Founders Classical Academy of Corinth
