If recent years reflect a boom in specialized scholarly treatments of the European Crusades, such specialized studies are matched by a parallel boom in narrative introductions to the Crusades aimed at the general reader. Having written two scholarly monographs on the Fourth Crusade, Thomas F. Madden turns his attention to more popular readerly interests in his The New Concise History of the Crusades: Updated Student Edition (2006), updated from its first edition in 1999. By Madden's account, "the heightened public interest in the crusades since 9/11 has created a market for popular histories" but "an interested person who simply strolls into a bookstore looking for a history of the crusades is much more likely to walk out with a book written by a novelist, journalist, or ex-nun than one written by a professional historian and based on the best research available" (viii). As is made clear in his preface and his final chapter, "The Legacy of the Crusades," Madden has a post-9/11 general audience in mind even as his book announces itself as an Updated Student Edition; the possible contradiction or divergent needs of these dual audiences is not addressed.
Structured chronologically according to the "numbered" Crusades, The New Concise History of the Crusades follows a mainly traditionalist account of the crusades, i.e. of the crusades as being tied to Jerusalem as destination, though his added chapters on "Crusading at Home" (chapter 5) and his chapter on crusades post-1291, "The Later Crusades" (chapter 9), revise and expand this traditional account along the lines of new "pluralist" approaches defining the crusades more broadly as penitential war irrespective of theater. In the main body of the text, Madden, a historian in command of the major scholarship in the field, offers coherent, clear and economical prose that is rich with historical detail.
Students and general readers interested in further reading are provided a good bibliographic survey in the "Select Bibliography" at the end of the book, as well as a useful selection of "Sources in Translation" on each of the major crusades treated in the book. These critical apparatuses, appearing along with a Glossary and set of "Discussion Questions" at the book's end, lend the book utility as the "student edition" it aims to be. Unfortunately, as is too often the case with text-book style histories, in the narrative body chapters few citations direct interested students to primary sources, and even fewer direct quotations are offered from these inimitably complex medieval voices.
More bibliographic citation is particularly needful when Madden is treating an especially controversial topic in broad strokes, as when he writes about the massacre of the local population of Jerusalem upon its conquest in 1099. The historiography of this event is highly divergent, and readers interested in its treatment may consult Benjamin Kedar's "The Jerusalem massacre of 1099 in the western historiography of the crusades," Crusades 3 (2004): 15-75. Here Madden alludes to reports of whole-scale massacre of the citizens thus: "By the standards of the time, adhered to by both Christians and Muslims, the crusaders would have been justified in putting the entire population of Jerusalem to the sword. Despite later highly exaggerated reports, however, that is not what happened... Later stories of the streets of Jerusalem coursing with knee-high rivers of blood were never meant to be taken seriously. Medieval people knew such a thing to be an impossibility. Modern people, unfortunately, do not"(34). Madden thus seems to put the controversy to rest, without providing the reader access to any of the documentary evidence from the many available First Crusade sources in translation, Christian and Muslim. By admonishing interpretation to the contrary as misguidedly "modern," Madden does not encourage investigation into the subject.
Other lively scholarly debates, such as the question of the motivations of the Crusaders, are similarly put to rest: Madden adheres to the theory of the pious idealism of most crusader participants--"Christians saw crusades to the east as acts of love and charity" (222)--and dismisses economic theories of motivations as deriving from a "post-Enlightenment" view of religiosity (11). (For a survey of recent theories of crusader motivations, see Giles Constable, "The Historiography of the Crusades," in The Crusades from the Perspective of the Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. A Laiou and R. Mottahadeh, Dumbarton Oaks, 2001, pp. 17-19). Such defense of crusader motivations and war-time behavior fits within the polemical frame of The New Concise History of the Crusades, whose jacket cover promises answers to the question, "How have the crusades contributed to Islamist rage and terrorism today?" Madden addresses the question most directly in his final chapter, "The Legacy of the Crusades," in which in the course of reviewing Crusader historiography, he defends the Crusades against their misappropriation equally by European and Arabs for various anti-colonialist, nationalist, and, more recently, Islamist arguments.
The polemical defense of the crusading endeavor is not confined to the final chapter of The New Concise History, parts of which operate within an identifiably contemporary, post-9/11 view of east-west rivalry if not the outright "clash of civilizations." In his discussion of the origins of holy war, for instance, Madden begins by noting that, "Unlike Islam, Christianity had no well-defined concept of holy war before the middle ages" (1), an unlikely comparative assertion given Islam's origins in the medieval period. Although Madden notes that it is in western Europe rather than Byzantium that "the concept of Christian holy war took root and grew" (4), most of Madden's discussion of Christian holy war is in fact devoted to the rise of Islam rather than to the usual discussion of developments within western Christianity that led to the striking notion of penitential war in the crusader period (the Peace of God movement; previous papal sanctions of campaigns; the Battle of Manzikert, etc). Though Madden stops short of causality--"It would be too strong to say that it was the idea of jihad that later led to Christianity's own concept of holy war" (3)--his text yokes the hot-button terms together without elucidating their relationship or interaction.
As scholars of the crusades from the Islamic perspective like Carol Hillenbrand, whom Madden cites, have shown, Muslim jihad or religious struggle, far from being a perennial motivating force in the Muslim Middle East, waxes and wanes in the medieval period, experiencing a downturn after the initial Islamic conquests, then a gradual resurgence with the Second Crusade and Salahadin's rise, another dying down in the post-Salahadin Ayyubid period, and a final rise from 1260 on in the Mamluk period (The Crusades: Islamic Perspective, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999, pp. 89-255 and especially 246-250). The long periods between jihadist revivals, including the first 50 years of the Latin Kingdom and the some 70 years between Salahadin's death and the rise of the Mamluks--much of the duration of the Latin Kingdom, then--dtente, realpolitik, local alliances and unsteady coexistence characterized the complex relations between the Latin East and local Levantine Muslims, Jews and Christians. These alliances are of course glimpsed equally in the western sources, and in Madden's account of them, including Richard I's treaty arrangements with Salahadin at the close of the 3rd Crusade, Frederick II's negotiation of a ten-year leased return of Jerusalem, and King Louis' complex post-crusade negotiations at the end of the 7th Crusade.
Such treaties and alliances in effect constitute another way of telling the story of the Latin East and the crusades themselves, one highlighting the reality of frequent coalitions across religious lines when necessity or expedience required it; a less ideological and triumphalist, more gritty and gray, story to be sure. This is certainly the pious King Louis' experience in the Levant: the king, having begun his crusade by refusing to negotiate for Jerusalem with "the enemy" Ayyubids, ends by negotiating with the much harder-line Mamluks. King Louis' example shows the room for realpolitik in orthodox medieval minds; Frederick II's example is one of a medieval secularism. The notion of a single "medieval" religious perspective or approach to the East, then, something that Madden at times upholds, risks reducing the complexity of the historical record.
In summary, while The New Concise History of the Crusades tells the story of the crusades as concisely as it promises and in admirable depth and detail, its overall objectivity and scholarly tone is offset by a self-ascribed goal of defending the holy wars from their would-be detractors, past and present. Madden closes his book by warning against the projection of modern values--by which he means Enlightenment, secular, Marxist, pluralist, or anti-imperialist values--upon the medieval actors and events of the crusades. But each age must guard against the danger of its own projections, and perhaps in our current cultural climate crusades historians find themselves in a position to guard against the attractions of a neo-"medieval" anti-modernism.