The Crusades: War and Coexistence

The military expeditions known as the Crusades, and the establishment of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, are usually studied from one dominant perspective, either Western or Islamic. The greatest drawback of this approach is not factual distortion concerning specific events. Modern monographs of the crusades successfully filter the partisan accounts into a balanced overview. Much more significant is the type of distortion in which Muslims and Westerners concur, i.e. presenting the Crusades as a story of war. For, in fact, the Crusades are to an even greater extent a story of the coexistence, for almost two centuries, of Latins, Muslims, and multiple Eastern-Christian communities. In the seminar we will try to reconstruct a more balanced view of the interfaith coexistence in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.