In October 2000, shortly after the riots on Jerusalem's Temple Mount that began the so-called second intifada, a Jordanian author and activist read poetry to a local audience in the ruins of an ancient theater high above the northern Jordan Valley.

The verses dealt with the disgrace of Islam, whose holy city of Jerusalem was occupied by the enemies of the true faith, and the need for jihad to reconquer them.

They invoked longing for a new Saladin to take up the sword and lead his troops to triumph over the infidels, and they denounced the powers of the West whose crusade against the Muslims must ultimately fail.

The audience acknowledged the poet's speech with cheers and loud applause.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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In today's Arab world, in the minds of its intellectuals and its people, the Crusades are not a closed chapter.

They are a historical reality that is constantly being revised according to how it can be used politically in a current crisis.

It is less about what actually happened than about its mythical interpretation.

Unlike the colonial era, the Crusades ended with a victory for Islam.

This makes them attractive as a point of reference for Muslim fundamentalists of all persuasions.

The expanded perspective is a benefit

The fact that the "Great History of the Crusades" by the Italian medieval historians Antonio Musarra and Franco Cardini devotes only three of the six hundred pages to the Arab perspective on the subject is therefore a mistake - a crucial omission in a book that also has some merits.

Among them is the expanded perspective from which Musarra and Cardini look at their subject.

Unlike the classic historians of the Crusades, who recently added the English medievalist Thomas Asbridge as a latecomer, the two Italians do not limit their overview to the failed expedition of Louis IX.

of France against Tunis in 1270 and the fall of the crusader capital Acre a good twenty years later.

Instead, they trace the development of the crusade idea through the Turkish and Barbary Wars into the twentieth century, in which the Middle East, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the division of its Arab dominions among the victorious powers of 1918, and the founding of the State of Israel, once again fell into the focus of history.

Knight romance with ideological ballast

In doing so, they give almost as much space to the contemporary imaginations and theories of their subject matter as to the history of events, which is also to be welcomed.

This makes it clear, for example, that Pope Urban II's call in Clermont in November 1095 by no means came out of the blue, but had a longer lead-up, for example in the form of papal charters for Italian seaports to hijack their North African competitors.

The term with which conquest and robbery were reinterpreted as a Christian mission is not of medieval but of early modern origin.

At that time one spoke of "officium", "servitium" or "negotium crucis" if one meant armed pilgrimages against unbelievers.

The "crux transmarina", the departure to the eastern and southern Mediterranean, was carefully distinguished from the "crux cismarina", the inner-Christian struggle against heretics and other opponents of the pope.

It was only later, when, after the loss of the Holy Land, the European urge to expand was directed towards the coastal regions of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, did "cruciata", "croisade" and "crusade" become popular everywhere.