Medieval weaponry, mobile siege towers, battering rams, petraries and mangonels to sling giant stones, boiling tar poured from ramparts and then ignited, all was lovingly reconstructed. The wonder was that by the end of the film anyone had survived at all. War tactics of the time, (as indeed, the history of the crusades) seem to have been carefully researched and the battle scenes were an impressive example of the director’s art. Even so, my pleasure at the thought of so many extras earning good money was dampened somewhat when I realised that the extraordinarily vast crowds were, in fact, computer generated.
I had entered the cinema with high expectations and emerged, battered, an eternity later after a prolonged attack on the senses. Ridley Scott’s version of the third crusade is played as a boisterous fairytale, featuring a collection of well-known actors, among them Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons, mostly hamming it up for all it was worth. The central role of an improbable, unschooled, young French blacksmith with an instinct for peace and fair play was taken by Orlando Bloom. The intention was fine but the script was often pedestrian (when the blacksmith urges his troops into battle there were leaden echoes of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V at the battle of Agincourt) and the music was a mishmash of vaguely Arabic sounds and wailing, underlined by a generalised orchestral background sound. In spite of some very handsome landscapes and interiors – the film was made partly in Morocco – the final impression is of noise and confusion.
Nevertheless, a connection is clearly made between the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages and Bush and Blair’s war in Iraq. As a non-adherent to any orthodox religion I find it extraordinary that two professed Christians could so thoughtlessly have instigated a war in which thousands of civilian deaths were inevitable, have suffered so few doubts about their actions and have shown so little remorse for the destruction and violence they unleashed. In search of some understanding of this, I discovered that there are currently at least two excellent works about the Crusades available in book shops: a three volume history of the Crusades1 by Thomas Asbridge, professor of Early Medieval History at Queen Mary’s College, University of London and The Crusades Through Arab Eyes2 by Amin Maalouf. In the epilogue to his book Maalouf writes:
In a Muslim world under constant attack, it is impossible to prevent the emergence of a sense of persecution, which among certain fanatics takes the form of a dangerous obsession. The Turk Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to shoot the Pope on 13 May 1981, had expressed himself in a letter in these terms: ‘I have decided to kill John Paul II, supreme commander of the Crusades.’ Beyond this individual act, it seems clear that the Arab East still sees the West as a natural enemy. Against that enemy, any hostile action – be it political, military, or based on oil – is considered no more than legitimate vengeance. And there can be no doubt that the schism between the two worlds dates from the Crusades, deeply felt, even today, as an act of rape.
However it should also be remembered that Muslims had occupied the holy city of Jerusalem for many years before the first Christian crusade in the eleventh century and that the threat of aggression from the East was always very real. 1. Thomas Asbridge, The First , Second and Third Crusades.