Hi everyone, the question came up as I am reading a book about the fourth crusade by Jonathan Phillips, and the thing that bothered me is that in giving a brief history of previous crusades he doesn't mention Christians that where present before the arrival of franks/franj/crusaders. I mean Koptic, Armenian, etc. Instead he chooses to present is as a West Christendom v Arabs issue. And I understand that it is not that big of a deal, you want to be concise, but is also feels like he chooses to present it this way, oh, and he mentions recent American conflicts in Middle East to give context to modern readers I guess?? Which was not what I expected in a work about medieval history.
Anyhow, it made me thinking, before you read a book how do you check an author, so you don't end up reading highly partisan viewpoint unintentionally? Especially when you are new to the topic, and cannot make the value judgment for yourself.
And to be clear, in no way am I saying that Phillips specifically has an agenda, just that reading his book made me wonder about the issue.
/u/sunagainstgold has previously written about How To Read An Academic Book.
/u/caffarelli has previously written How To Judge A Book Without Even Reading It!
/u/flyingdragon8 answered How do you find trustworthy books and avoid bad history?
When I evaluate a book, I first like to read reviews. Most of the time, I just go over amazon reviews or goodreads, but if you really care about credibility, I'd look for academic reviews about his book. I think most professional historians would have noticed that he over simplified the crusade conflict, especially since Christians have lived in the Arab world for centuries and were very much apart of the cultural landscape. Books like The Ornament of the World do a good job of getting away from the western bias that I think really hurts scholarship surrounding that topic. The book isn't about the crusades, but it is about how Muslim, Christian, and Jewish culture co-existed in pre-Isabella Spain.
Another thing, I think you should also try searching for historians who aren't white Europeans so you can compare and contrast cultural biases. Reading history from a different cultural context can be extremely interesting. I'm not trying to insinuate that white Europeans are bad at scholarship, just that they might not focus on things that another person would. Or they might come up with different arguments from the ones you've already heard from living in a western country.
I definitely think a Muslim scholar would have brought up the relationships between Christians, Jews, and Muslims pre-crusades. Seems like a huge mistake to have not covered that, especially considering the present day issues that exist in southwestern Asia.
I disagree that it's 'not that big a deal'. It's a big enough deal to have made you ask the question! It's also a very problematic and common depiction of West Asian history, depicting the region's story as a conflict between East and West, as an unbroken 'clash of civilisations' stretching from the Greek wars with Persia to the present conflicts in Syria and Iraq. This is a deeply problematic view of the world - an orientalist one. It dismisses the history of west asia as though it's defined by conflict. The west asian peoples are all cast as war-obsessed people threatening European civilisation (I'm avoiding the term 'arabs', because Kurds, Turks, Iranians and other non-Arabs all coexisted and played a role in these stories).
Phillips probably hasn't said all that. But just by keying into the basic story of the West vs Arabs, he's relying on a racist depiction of West Asia (one of barbaric war-obsessed brown people) as a shorthand to explain the context of the fourth crusade. If he's using current affairs to lay the context, he's doing this very explicity. And that is problematic. It adds into a wider narrative of 'us versus them'. It helps justify statements like, "Well of course there's a war in Syria, they've been tearing at each other's throats since the crusades". It's not only a lazy shorthand, it's a racist one with damaging implications.
You mention this is a book about the fourth crusade, so I assume that this 'clash of civilisations' narrative doesn't take front and centre. I can't comment on the quality of this particular book, not having read it, but I can comment on this narrative. It usually reflects an author who a) is writing about West Asian history without engaging with Arabic, Turkish, etc sources and b) who privileges a European perspective over a West Asian one.
With books on West Asian history in particular, I'd always look at the introduction and find out how the author treats the cultures. Especially if the author is Western. Do they know Arabic, Turkish, or Farsi? Do they show an ability to step beyond their own political context? Or, do they cast their book explaining the eternal struggle between east and west? If the latter, run away, if the former, you're alright.
The other answers here have already dealt with how to read an academic book, but I wanted to talk about *this* book specifically since it’s an important one, and one of the basic texts in my own library (and something I cite frequently on AH).
Phillips’ introduction to the crusades in this book is very brief, but that’s because it’s not a history of all the crusades. It’s a history of the Fourth Crusade, which never made it to the Middle East. It was supposed to attack Egypt, so the Middle Eastern background to the First Crusade is still a little bit relevant. The reference to Osama bin Laden is simply because the book is from 2005, so Phillips must have been researching and writing it in 2001.
September 11 was on all our minds back then because bin Laden and Bush kept talking about the crusades and it seemed like neither of them really understood what they were talking about, so ideally professional historians could clear things up (although as usual, professional historians wildly overestimated how much attention they would be given). A second edition of Thomas Madden’s Concise History of the Crusades was also released in 2005 and his introduction also discusses Sept. 11. This was also when Kingdom of Heaven was released, which was seen as a thinly-disguised comment on current events.
Some other books that mention bin Laden/modern conflicts are Phillips’ own The Crusades: 1095-1197 (2002), Christopher Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (2004), Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam (2010), and Paul Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014).
Riley-Smith was especially critical of Kingdom of Heaven; he wrote at least one newspaper editorial about it, and in 2006, there was a Crusades Symposium at Saint Louis University, where he gave the keynote talk about about pop cultural depictions of the crusades. (Veering into anecdotal territory here, but he went off on an amusing tangent about the movie and declared that it was “rubbish”.)
Riley-Smith died a couple of years ago, but the reason I’m mentioning him here is because he was Phillips’ PhD supervisor. It feels like he was also everybody else’s PhD supervisor too…not quite, but it does seem like almost every British crusade historian was supervised by Riley-Smith or by someone he had previously supervised (like Phillips). His influence is absolutely enormous. He was an amazing historian and he did a ton of extremely important work. His way of looking at the crusades is kind of a reaction to the old way from the 1950s, the way Steven Runciman wrote about them, where they were the barbarous west destroying the advanced civilizations of the east. For example, the reason we now try to understand what medieval crusaders themselves thought about the crusades, and why they went on crusade and what they believed they were doing there…that’s mostly because of Riley-Smith’s work.
So this is all a long way of saying that, for good or for bad, everyone is a student of Riley-Smith in some way, either directly (like Phillips) or indirectly just because of his enormous influence (like me and everyone else).
Now the question is, was Riley-Smith a bit *too* invested in how individual crusaders thought and felt? It’s certainly important to know what motivated the crusaders from their own perspective, but was he perhaps a bit too sympathetic? And are we are all now perhaps a bit too sympathetic? Not to say that the old-fashioned Runciman style is right and they were actually all barbarians frothing at the mouth for land and riches…but maybe the historiography has swung too far in the opposite direction. Maybe now we’re too enamoured with the “clash of civilizations” type of argument with strangely coincidental modern parallels…
This is sort of “inside baseball” about how crusades books are written so a casual reader probably won’t notice any of this. Anyway, the super short answer to your question is that Phillips’ book is about the Fourth Crusade, so it’s not really a history of the crusades in general or the crusades to the Middle East. However he has written a couple of other books about that:
The Crusades: 1095-1197 (Longman, 2002) (as mentioned above) and
Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (Random House, 2010)
And there is certainly no shortage of other books about the First Crusade and the crusades in general. Here are some previous answers of mine that might help: