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Sandra Gorgievski, Representing the Crusades: from Medieval Imagination to Contemporary Popular Culture, Jefferson, McFarland 2023, 277 p., 38 illustrations, McFarlandBooks.com, 49,95 $

John Engle
p. 233-237

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1The storytelling that constitutes “history” and the later responses to its often slippery narratives are, of course, necessarily conditioned by a wide range of other, more contemporary political, economic, philosophical, and cultural forces and events. This is the core subject of Sandra Gorgievski’s brilliant Representing the Crusades: From Medieval Imagination to Contemporary Popular Culture (McFarland, 2023). Associate professor at the Université de Toulon, Gorgievski deftly juxtaposes 12th and 13th century European and Middle Eastern representations of the period’s then seemingly endless religious wars with portrayals drawn from modern and contemporary written, celluloid, and digital media. The result is a fascinating lesson in optics, in how internalized pressures as widely diverse as fervent faith, cultural imperatives, economic pressures, international power dynamics, and modern entertainment norms shape the way different groups have over a millennium come to view the Crusades.

2Cogently ordering—without oversimplifying—Gorgievski has structured her argument to draw the reader’s eye to three curiously complementary aspects of her vast subject. Roughly 250 pages in length, the book begins with dueling, shifting portrayals of the Other across the Mediterranean basin from the Middle Ages through the 19th century before turning in its second section to the mirrored creation and uses of European and Arab heroic figures, as well as the differing meanings of combat up through contemporary graphic novels and video games. Devoted exclusively to contemporary representations, Part III draws intriguingly on these earlier dichotomies to examine, among things, the subgenre of uchronia, or the writing of “alternate history,” in contemporary novels, comics, and gaming.

3There’s a great deal going on here, and unless one knows all the players—a daunting task in a work referencing both al-Harîrî and Assassin’s Creed—it can be challenging at times to follow the intricacies of Gorgievski’s arguments. Clearly aware of such difficulties, the author carefully builds a foundation for later discussion in Part I, “Constructing Memory,” a densely researched examination of early Eastern and Western representations of geographical space as well as the funhouse-mirrored forces of attraction and repulsion to play out on both sides of the Mediterranean over the centuries to follow. Drawing upon ancient Greek and Persian sources well before their European counterparts, Arab geographers as of the 9th century began sketching out an evolving, if always Muslim-centric, vision of the known world increasingly responsive to emerging travel narratives and based, variously, on esoteric grids, color codes, and “climates.” Of particular significance was the 12th century meeting of East and West in the figure of al-Idrisi, who first brought Arab cartography to Europe from his place in Richard II’s Sicilian court; translated to Latin and Italian, his atlas Nuzhat joined the rediscovery of Ptolemy as a key incitation to early modern sea exploration. Al-Idrisi’s work and personal example would influence Western mapmaking while, importantly, helping to establish a dual vision of the Mediterranean as a space simultaneously of political and military conflict and of freely circulating populations, scholarly knowledge, and economic exchange.

4Versions of this tension act as a recurring background for the detailed, thoughtful analyses of texts and iconographic images that constitute Representing the Crusades. On one hand we have fascination for the “Wonders of the Orient” as lavishly presented in Western voyage chronicles and such richly illustrated Arab texts as the Maquâmât, with its rollicking Chaucer-like jumble of characters and adventures. On the other we have, say, a full corpus of plushily illuminated “recovery treatises” making not only the case for religious war on behalf of an idealized Western Christendom but plotting military routes through half-imagined landscapes to help realize that goal. One of the pleasures of the book is the degree to which Gorgievski pays close—at times, minute—attention to the European and Arab iconography of the period. Her study is abundantly illustrated with period reproductions. Within the limits of the edition’s page size and black and white format, the relatively sharp images stand up well both to their rich contextualization within larger bodies of work and to the exceptionally close “readings” the author provides.

5In Part II Gorgievski takes another split-screen look at competing, complementary representations of the Crusades with a nearly fifty-page focus upon the paired heroic figures of Saladin and Richard. A rough pattern is clear, that the two opposing traditions tend to present both their hero and his leading adversary as generally noble embodiments of the knightly ideal, in large part, as Gorgievski observes, because idealizing “the opponent as a paragon of virtues matching those of the hero valorizes the one who defeats the other” (81). Saladin’s glowing central appearance in a number of medieval Arab texts is matched by illuminated Christian manuscripts like those of Guillaume de Tyr who, perhaps not surprisingly, then alters Middle Eastern color and iconographic norms to conform to those of a European chivalric tradition. Pertinent and tightly focused in her analysis, Gorgievski guides the reader slowly through a series of telling images drawn from sources up through the 15th century. Her succeeding examination of Richard’s medieval representations certainly insists upon presentations of the King’s legendary courage and cunning, yet, varying somewhat from the consistent praise of Saladin, a slight note of ambiguity occasionally creeps in. Both Arab and European sources at times suggest in Richard a comparative lack of knightly courtesy and decorum, French texts motivated not surprisingly by dynastic tensions, Arab sources such as those of Bahâ ad-Dîn more substantively by the reported slaughter of prisoners after the 1191 siege of Acre. In any case, on into the 19th century and its Gothic revival it is Saladin who wins the reputational war as the symbol of Arab unification and as the gracious, tolerant Orientalist sultan.

6In a fascinatingly detailed sub-chapter Gorgievski goes on to address the cinematic representation in West and East of these two iconic figures. Again, the portrayal of Saladin largely cleaves to that of the wise, generous leader cementing his people’s identity, an image for modern entertainment audiences often bled of any overt religious signification and one forged by political events—such as the rise of Nasser and the 9/11 terrorist attacks/Iraq War—into that of either the early pan-Arab paragon of political unification or the tolerant victim of Western aggression. In cinematic worlds only too content to replace religious motivation with lavish sets, rich Orientalism, and exciting adventure, Richard seems to come off as everything between roughly uncouth and admirably chivalric. While Gorgievski covers an impressive range of films and directors—from Cecil B. DeMille to Ridley Scott to Youssef Chahine—she might have done well to include the seemingly slight Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I would personally have enjoyed her reaction to Kevin Reynolds’s 1991 box-office hit. Among other things, its mini-hagiography of a largely absent King Richard backgrounds the action (including the assimilation of a Muslim warrior into Robin’s merry band). In a scene-stealing, film-ending cameo, the King is memorably embodied by Sean Connery.

7Yet, while the eye turns frequently to the oversized figure of such heroes, the sheer violence and human suffering of the Crusades are impossible to deny. Pitched battles, long wars of attrition: the result was the same: both European and Arab casualties running nearly at 50%, half from direct injury, half the result of ancillary infection and malnourishment. Gorgievski devotes a sizeable section of her study to what she calls the “rhetoric of violence,” its treatment from medieval representations, often exaggeratedly caricatural and propagandistic in nature, to a certain young male comic book delight in the bloody particulars of graphically violent acts, to the co-optation of the term Crusade itself to justify warfare as smug moral self-defense on both sides of Western-Middle Eastern conflict leading up to and after the events of 11 September 2001. She concludes by rightfully regretting the return, in a contemporary atmosphere of terror and paranoia, to a crude, fundamental dualism not unlike that spurring the “original” Crusades. Gone today, it seems, is the “cross-cultural sharing of idealized, chivalric heroes and worthy opponents . . . in a nuanced presentation of conflict” (158).

8Part III continues this emphasis upon contemporary representation of the Crusades, here focusing successively upon a number of recent novels, visual design in comics and graphic fiction, and the current video gaming scene. In a renewed display of her extensive research and encyclopedic knowledge of the field, Gorgievski begins with distinctions between traditional historical fiction and so-called “uchronia,” or the writing of alternate histories. While such distinctions remain slippery—all historical fiction necessarily takes liberties with conventionally recorded history—the “what if?” question lies at the heart of uchronic narrative, opening the door to intriguing reflections on past/present parallels and, indeed, the very nature of storytelling. Álvaro Pombo’s La quadrature du Cercle, for example, returns to the Second Crusade to “dehistoricize” medieval figures as mirrors of the present and deconstruct heroic myth in the dissonance between brimstone sermons and troubled individual conscience. José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon makes an intriguing whole of the fantasy proposition of an unassuming proofreader who finds that by changing a word here or there he can change the course of occurrences during the 12th century siege of Moorish Lisbon. Amongst other things, Saramago’s Sterne- or Eco-like play with fiction and history suggests a critique of historical reinvention only decades after Salazar’s dictatorial reign, while its narrator’s construction of a fictional tower to end the siege self-reflexively examines the very act of storytelling.

9To its credit Representing the Crusades refuses any sort of “high culture” bias, devoting its closing chapters to the pop cultural realms of comics and video games. While Gorgievski stretches at times to ascribe motives to narrative constructions that may simply be drawn to the Crusades because of their exotic setting and visually exciting medieval military imagery, her detailed analyses are often fascinating. Turning to the graphic elaboration of Middle Eastern space, she echoes the study’s opening emphasis upon geographic representation, observing, for example, that the comics series Croisade juxtaposes wildly diverse aesthetic and historic architectural elements in what is perhaps an attempt to, as she writes, “reflect contemporary difficulties in recognizing a unified view of the world” (203). Something of that same contemporary indeterminacy and fluidity is implicitly present in the new form of mediation with (or appropriation of) the past that is the video game industry. To a fully multicultural community of gamers, for example, a production like the popular Assassin’s Creed resolutely refuses to favor any particular religious, national, or political identity. A vastly successful consumer product, it presents to players a stable, inoffensively non-specific cosmology against which to stage heroic personal challenges, ending with an evocatively picturesque Oriental panorama and the eminently vague—and commercially viable—suggestion that such conflict, past or present, is to be avoided.

10Here as throughout the book, Representing the Crusades addresses an imposingly vast subject with style, intelligence, and extraordinary diligence. As we have seen in recent decades, the trope of the Crusades remains vividly—and at times, distressingly—alive even today. Directing the reader’s attention to the varied, shifting meanings of its heroic and tragic elements, Gorgievski performs an important service, reminding us through her thoughtful analyses how what we too often thoughtlessly consider as unchallengeable reality is in fact simply social, political, and cultural construction.

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John Engle, « Sandra Gorgievski, Representing the Crusades: from Medieval Imagination to Contemporary Popular Culture, Jefferson, McFarland 2023, 277 p., 38 illustrations, McFarlandBooks.com, 49,95 $ »Babel, 46 | 2022, 233-237.

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John Engle, « Sandra Gorgievski, Representing the Crusades: from Medieval Imagination to Contemporary Popular Culture, Jefferson, McFarland 2023, 277 p., 38 illustrations, McFarlandBooks.com, 49,95 $ »Babel [En ligne], 46 | 2022, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2022, consulté le 08 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/babel/14214 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/babel.14214

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