Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South
*Starred Review* In the book prepared from his Bampton Lectures in America, Riley-Smith devotes two chapters each to conceptions of crusading in two periods, that of the original Crusades, 1095–1300, and that of imperialism and nationalism in Africa and the Middle East, 1800–2007. In the earlier period, a crusade was, Riley-Smith unequivocally asserts and demonstrates from the theological and historical records, a “penitential war pilgrimage”; that is, it was a military action waged on behalf of God by soldiers who journeyed to the Holy Land and fought to free it from non-Christian rule in penitence for their sins. In the latter period came nineteenth-century attempts to revive the military religious orders of the Crusades, most notably by a French Catholic archbishop for the defense of missionaries and the abolition of slavery in north central Africa. Overlapping that brief, unsuccessful venture and continuing to this day, interpretations of the Crusades by novelist Walter Scott and historian Joseph-Francois Michaud have been employed to facilitate Western rapprochement with Islam and, contrarily, to formulate the historical-economic interpretation of Western-Islamic relations with which Muslim militants justify violent jihad (the Islamic form of crusade, Riley-Smith says). Full of major revelations for most readers, this richly informed little book should be considered essential for understanding crusading, then and now. --Ray Olson