Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one, and Christopher Tyerman, who devoted several pages to lurid details of the massacre of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, dismissed the massacre of Antioch in four words. Karen Armstrong devoted twelve words to reporting this massacre, which she then blamed on the crusaders since it was their dire threat that had created a “new Islam” with a “desperate determination to survive.” Armstrong also noted that because Baibars [the Mamluk commander] was a patron of the arts, he “was not simply a destroyer . . . [but also] a great builder.”

This excerpt from page 232 of Rodney Stark’s God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, is characteristic of his approach to his subject. He takes a hard look at the bulk of recent historiography on the Crusades, and finds most of it shamefully biased.

He identifies four great lies that have become common wisdom in recent decades, all of which (he insists) are demonstrably false:

-That the Crusades were unprovoked assaults on a peaceful, enlightened, highly sophisticated Muslim civilization,

-That they were “the first round of European colonization.”

-That they were conducted for the purpose of conquest, riches, and the forced conversion of Muslims,

-That the Crusaders were brutal barbarians assaulting highly civilized Muslims who were culturally superior in every way.

It cannot be denied that some of the Crusaders committed atrocities, and that a number of them were fools. But the picture presented by too many historians today, of armor-clad wolves descending on inoffensive Islamic sheep, is grossly unjust.

Islam, Stark demonstrates, did not (in spite of what you’ll hear on National Public Radio) expand peacefully. The nations of the Middle East, most of which had formerly been Christian, were conquered by force of arms, and only Islamicized over a period of centuries. Most of the great “achievements” of Arabic civilization that we read so much about were, in fact, the accomplishments of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who lived in second-class “dhimmi” apartheid, serving Muslim masters who took credit for their work. (History books often criticize medieval Christian philosophers for their uncritical embrace of Aristotle. But the Christians were positively free-wheeling in their interpretation compared to the Muslims, who gave the philosopher’s books the same authority as the Koran, and forbade the tiniest deviation from them.)

An interesting point, which tells us much about this book and the argument as a whole, is that Stark makes no mention at all of Richard the Lionhearted’s massacre of prisoners after the siege of Acre, an event most historians love to dwell on. Instead, he describes the many massacres carried out by Richard’s opponent Saladin, who has gotten (Stark believes) an undeservedly good press almost since the time of the Third Crusade.

The fact of the matter, Stark explains, is that massacre was an accepted part of warfare in those days. The rule was that if a garrison defended a castle to the end, they would be massacred as a lesson to others. Christians did it; Muslims did it. Modern historians tend to dwell on massacres by Christians, while overlooking or justifying massacres by Muslims.

One of the chief crimes of the Crusaders, in my own thinking, has always been their association with massacres of Jews. One book I read left me with the impression that Godfrey of Bouillon ordered the first of these pogroms. In fact they were mostly renegade events, reprehensible but not the fault of the Crusade leaders or the Church (which often tried to protect the Jews).

The sack of Constantinople, frequently cited as evidence of Crusader perfidy and barbarism, is in fact pretty understandable, in light of the serial double-dealing, lies and betrayals of the Byzantines. Nor was this event either unique in the city, or uniquely brutal.

I could go on and on. God’s Battalions is not the final word on the subject, nor (I think) is it meant to be. It’s a shot across the bows in a scholarly counterattack, as the Crusades were a counterattack against Muslim expansionism and colonialism. The book has flaws. Even I (only an amateur historian concentrating on a limited period) identified a couple factual errors (the one I remember is that Stark confused Norway’s King Sigurd the Crusader with his father, Magnus Barefoot).

But it’s a book anyone interested in the period ought to read, if only for the sake of balance.