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. Also, Rogerson’s low opinion of his historical protagonists is sometimes based on questionable psychological speculation: did Christian kings really permit the sacking of cities ‘to enable the most vicious and ambitious men from the peasantry and the impoverished gentry ... to play out all their otherwise unattainable erotic dreams and desire for power’? He finds it difficult
to extract any sense of a religious morality from the actions of either the Muslim or Christian leadership. However, what they had in common was an ability to harness the religious passions of their people for their own ends.
Is this true? Rogerson himself tells us that Queen Isabella of Spain — the prime mover, together with her husband King Ferdinand, in the conquest of Granada, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, and the founding of the Spanish Inquisition — was a devout Catholic. He describes her grandson, the Emperor Charles V, as ‘a serious, pious and reserved young man who kept his own counsel and was constantly aware of the need to guard himself from . . . sexual passions.’ In fact Charles was more complex and contradictory than this suggests: when he came to Spain to claim the crown after the death of his grandfather, King Ferdinand, he fathered a child by his step-grand-mother, Ferdinand’s young widow, Christiane de Foix. He had four other illegitimate children: one of them, Don John of Austria, commanded the Christian fleet that finally ended the Turkish maritime power in the Mediterranean at the Battle of Lepanto.
But Charles was also, like his grand- mother Queen Isabella, a committed Catholic who, had he been as cynical and self-serving as Rogerson suggests, would have ditched the Pope and reached an accommodation with the Protestant princes in Germany. Equally, if he had not insisted upon respecting Luther’s safe-conduct after the Diet of Worms, he might have saved western Europe from the wars of religion — as Richelieu was later to point out. This is no doubt why he was so emphatic, later in life, in advising his son, King Phillip of Spain, to be ruthless in the suppression of heresy.
Of course Rogerson, as a bien-pensant Englishman not wholly emancipated from the Whig view of history, execrates the Spanish Inquisition: yet with a modest body-count (‘lower than in any provincial court of justice in Spain or anywhere else in Europe’ — Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition), it did save Spain and Portugal from the slaughter and iconoclasm that followed the Protestant Reformation in other parts of Europe. And it is thanks to the devout Queen Isabella that women can now sun-bathe wearing bikinis on the Costa del Sol.