Catholic and Enjoying It!
Jones’ four-part video was, even at the moment of its creation, based on outdated scholarship. In essence, he presented a rehashing of Steven Runciman’s three-volume history of the crusades that appeared between 1951 and 1954, and which was itself behind the curve of mid-twentieth-century crusade scholarship at its inception. Put bluntly, Runciman’s A History of the Crusades is a morality play masquerading as serious history. It is brilliantly written, and as is true of Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it will live on as great literature. But it is hardly solid history based upon a careful analysis of the evidence. Runciman viewed the crusaders as intolerant barbarians who foolishly destroyed the foundations of the Byzantine Empire, which he deeply admired. Jones accepted this interpretation and added to it the notion that the crusaders were brutes and zealots who attacked a highly sophisticated and largely pacific Islamic world. In his words, their leaders were “barbarous warlords [who] emerged from the German forests,” whereas so far as rank-and-file crusaders were concerned, “if safety pins had been invented [then]…[they] would have worn them through their noses.” And the so-called People’s Crusade of 1096 was composed of “fanatical peasants armed with only bad breath.” Indeed, Jones claims, with no supporting evidence, that the ruthless form of warfare waged by the “Franks” was previously unknown in the lands the West knew as Outremer, and it took two hundred years of such intolerant brutality for the Muslims to learn how to respond in kind. Had he consulted the records, Jones would have seen how this statement is ludicrous on so many levels. But dispassionate history was not his objective.
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