By the time the First Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, Christendom had been at war with Islam for almost 400 years. In the view of Al- Qa’eda the crusades are on-going; however, Barnaby Rogerson’s Last Crusaders are not George Bush and Tony Blair, nor even Jan Sobieski who raised the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks in 1683, but King John the Bastard of Portugal – who captured Ceuta in 1415 – and the last king of the Avis dynasty, Sebastian, killed on a disastrous campaign in Morocco in 1578. Between these two minor crusades we have the major set-pieces — the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453; the taking of Granada by the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 and the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.
The Last Crusaders is the product of considerable research, and differs from other histories of the crusades in telling the story not just from the Christian but also the Muslim point of view — something, Rogerson writes, ‘that has never been attempted before’. He is well-equipped to do this: earlier books have been about North Africa, the Prophet Muhammad and the Caliphs who succeeded him. He writes well and, by and large, he is even-handed in his treatment of the rival religions, having found that the ‘brightly-coloured heroes and villains’ on both sides take on varying shades of grey that leached towards a darker-hued evil’. Like Gibbon, whom he quotes, Rogerson seems to see history as ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’. The adjective ‘murderous’ is well-used: ‘the murderous crimes of the Fourth Crusade’; ‘the murderous English’; ‘murderous invaders’.
This moral disdain, perhaps excusable in Gibbon writing in the 18th century, seems misplaced post Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
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