– but, despite centuries of inter-marriage, the Arabs remained an aristocracy, thinking of themselves as lords, knights, emirs and rulers over a broad population of subservient serfs – and these serfs remained predominantly Christian – these Christians had suffered under the lordship of the Muslim Arabs who came rampaging out of Arabia in the 700s and quickly conquered north up the coast of Palestine into Syria, eastwards conquered the old Persian Empire, and westwards conquered Egypt and beyond The Nubians were Christians, as were the majority of Egyptians (p.235)
(p.208)įive hundred years after the Arab conquest, Egypt was still a substantially Christian country (p.211) – even as late as the First Crusade (1095-99) the majority population of the Levant, of Jerusalem and all the other holy cities, let alone of Anatolia and even of Egypt – were Christians:Ĭhristians had remained the majority at Damascus until the tenth century and maybe into the eleventh. – they were a rational response to repeated pleas for help from figures like the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Emperor of Byzantium – the Crusades were not an unprovoked outburst of Western, racist, colonialist, greed and violence Again and again he drums home a handful of key points.
This comes over most obviously in the very unacademic use of repetition. The book has notes on every page and an excellent bibliography at the back, and yet it sometimes reads like the opinions of a crank, determined at any cost to convince you of his deliberately revisionist point of view. The Tragedy of the Templars signals its unorthodox approach by going back not ten or thirty or fifty years before the founding of its ostensible subject, the Order of the Knights Templars (in 1139), but by going back one thousand four hundred years earlier, to the conquests of Alexander the Great – and then giving a sweeping recap of all the wars and vicissitudes which struck the Middle East from 300 BC through to the eruption of the Muslims from Arabia in the 630s AD. Nonetheless, that big reservation stated right at the start, this is a very interesting and thought-provoking book. He has certain hobby horses, vehement ideas – about the central role played by the Templars in the crusades, and about justifying the crusades by completely rethinking their context, portraying the crusades not as violent attacks against peace-loving Arabs, but as justified attempts to help oppressed Christians in the Holy Land – which he gives vent to repeatedly and almost obsessively so that, eventually, the detached reader can’t help having misgivings about the objectivity of what they’re reading. Haag’s book is opinionated in a very unacademic way. The Turks were aliens the crusaders were not.