In its original meaning, a crusade was a Christian holy war, and in that sense it was a contradiction in terms. Christ’s whole teaching was to love thy neighbor, not kill him. But, like everyone else, the early Christians had enemies, whom they needed to fight on occasion. So the Church fathers went to work on the doctrine, and by the eleventh century it was agreed that in certain circumstances God might not only condone war but demand it. Of course, there had to be an important cause. The Church claimed that it had such a cause: Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of infidels. Actually, that had happened more than four hundred years earlier, and in the ensuing period Christians were generally treated far better in the holy city than non-Christians were in Europe. But there was another call to arms: Alexius I Comnenus, the emperor of Byzantium—that is, of Catholic Europe’s Eastern brother—had asked the Pope for help against Muslim forces threatening his borders. Again, however, this was something less than an emergency. Byzantium and Islam did fight, but no more frequently than most neighboring powers of the time.

According to many modern historians, what triggered the Crusades was not an external cause but an internal one: a campaign, beginning with Pope Gregory VII, in the late eleventh century, to reform the Church. This was a two-pronged effort. One goal was to stamp out immorality: get the priests to stop marrying, stop selling ecclesiastical offices, live by their vows. A second, and probably more important, objective was to strengthen the Papacy. In religion as in politics, Europeans of that period had little respect for centralized authority. The Pope’s sovereignty was disputed not just by secular rulers but within the Church. When Urban II, Gregory’s successor, was elected, in 1088, it took him six years to get a rival, German candidate out of the Lateran Palace. (He finally had to bribe him.) This is not to speak of the fact that the Pope had no control over the Eastern churches, the dioceses of the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. Most of these territories were under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine Empire and hence of the Greek Orthodox Church, which, to Rome’s abiding fury, had broken with the Western Church in 1054. The Vatican wanted to get mightier and holier, and Urban II took on the job.

In 1095, he went on a tour of France, and one afternoon in Clermont he gave a sermon calling on Christians to journey to the East and reclaim the Holy Land. “A race absolutely alien to God,” he said, was defiling Christian altars, raping Christian women, tying Christian men to posts and using them for archery practice. None of this was true, but it had the desired effect. First, as the postcolonial theorists would say, it “otherized” the Muslims. Second, it gave the European nobles a cause that could distract them from warring with their neighbors—a more or less daily occupation of knights in that period—and unite them, for a holy purpose. In the months that followed, at convocations across Europe, between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand people came forward and knelt to “take the Cross.”

Thus was launched the crusading movement, whose high tide lasted for two centuries. As time went on, a “crusade” no longer meant just a march against the Muslim infidel. Any perceived enemy of the Church—the Wends, in Germany (pagans); the Cathars, in southern France (heretics)—could be the target of a crusade. But the Crusades against Islam were the model, and the two most interesting were the first (1095-99) and the fourth (1202-04). The First Crusade is important because, apart from being first, it was successful, at least in the Church’s terms: the men recruited by Urban did capture Jerusalem, together with other rich territories in the East, and in consequence—because those lands had to be defended—they made the later Crusades to the East necessary. The Fourth Crusade is famous for the opposite reason. In Christian terms, it was the least successful—indeed, a scandal. The Crusaders never got to Jerusalem; instead, they attacked Christian cities, notably Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which they effectively destroyed. They thus shifted the center of Christian civilization from East to West, and permanently altered the history of the world. These two expeditions are the subject of a pair of recent books, “The First Crusade: A New History” (Oxford; $35), by Thomas Asbridge, and “The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople” (Viking; $25.95), by Jonathan Phillips. Both authors are young lecturers in medieval history at the University of London, both have written previous books on the Crusades, and they think alike.

To the nineteenth century, the Crusades, like most things medieval, were exotic, heroic, and spiritually fine. In Walter Scott’s “The Talisman,” in Verdi’s “I Lombardi,” brave knights, their standards whipping in the wind, ride off to save Christendom from godless people with scimitars. The popularity of the subject was tied to the movements for national unity that dominated the period. On the surface of “I Lombardi,” medieval Lombards are fighting the Saracens; beneath the surface, nineteenth-century Lombards are fighting the Austrians, and Verdi is rooting for them. The theme survived well into the twentieth century. Lloyd George, when he published the speeches he gave during the First World War, called the book “The Great Crusade”; Eisenhower’s memoir of the Second World War was entitled “Crusade in Europe.” Whenever a war needed to be viewed as a sacred enterprise, the word came up. Shortly after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush used it to describe his war on terrorism.

Unlike his predecessors, however, President Bush was quickly warned off that term, which had negative associations for Muslims and, by this time, for others as well. Between Ike’s war and Bush’s, the notion of ideological warfare fell into bad odor with intellectuals. The most important influence here, aside from the Cold War, was the great English medievalist Steven Runciman, whose three-volume “History of the Crusades” was published between 1951 and 1954 and achieved wide popularity. Far from regarding the crusading movement as a noble endeavor, Runciman described it as “a vast fiasco,” whose main result was simply to create an undying enmity between Islamic and Christian peoples. Faith may have inspired the Crusaders, but not for long, Runciman said: “High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God.” That sentence is now fifty years old, but the opinion is still widely held. John Julius Norwich, in his 1995 “Byzantium: The Decline and Fall,” calls the crusading movement “one of the blackest chapters in the history of Christendom” and says that the Fourth Crusade, at least, was basically about loot.

The trend is reversing again, however. Many of today’s young historians in Britain and America are tired of the economic—and therefore iconoclastic—analyses that were so popular with their professors and, perhaps not unaffected by the spectacle of people in the Middle East blowing themselves up for Allah, are returning to the study of ideology as the wheel of history. That, in any case, is what one gathers from recent writings on the Crusades. As Jonathan Riley-Smith, another expert on the movement, sees it, the disasters of twentieth-century history so poisoned ideological warfare in the minds of historians that they could not imagine its being waged even by people who lived eight centuries earlier. They had to believe that the Crusaders were after property, pillage. They could not understand, though the evidence was there, “how intellectually respectable the Christian theory of positive violence was” to the medieval mind. Positive violence—what is that? Just what it says: the idea that killing is virtuous. According to Riley-Smith, a number of historians now accept this belief as key to the Crusades.

Asbridge and Phillips are of that party. Both are writing for the general public, and in their view there are two facts about the Middle Ages that nonspecialist readers must get into their heads. The first is that violence was a normal fact of medieval life. Seizing your brother-in-law’s castle, cutting off his nose—these were unremarkable activities. The second is the pervasive religiosity of the period—above all, the fear of damnation, especially on the part of the knights. They were usually the ones committing the violence. Yet every sermon they heard told them that killing was an abomination to God; every church portal they gazed up at showed grinning devils hauling the violent down to Hell. So they were caught in a vise: the thing they were trained to do was also a thing that was going to cause them to burn for all eternity. They tried to stave this off. They went on pilgrimages; they made donations to monasteries. (The rise of the monastic orders in the Middle Ages owes much to knightly guilt.) Still, they knew they were living in a state of sin.

Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered them a solution. He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it was not a sin—indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins. By the Fourth Crusade, participants were guaranteed absolution of all confessed transgressions—in other words, a ticket straight to paradise. The arrangement that Urban offered to the men of the First Crusade is less clear, but they were promised “eternal rewards.” So it was two in one: the knights could go on slaughtering people and get to Heaven thereby. That was “positive violence,” and, according to Asbridge and Phillips, it was the motor of the Crusades.

Asbridge, in his account of the First Crusade, reminds us of this point continually. But it is just his bass line, not his theme. His theme—unavoidable, in the history of that expedition—is disunity. The First Crusade had no single commander. Basically, the army was made up of four contingents: the northern French, the southern French, the Germans and Lotharingians, and the southern-Italian Normans—all of them, despite their varying origins, called “Franks” by early and late historians of the Crusades. Each group had a different leader and spoke a different language; some hated others, by reason of past conflict. Add to this another contingent, the so-called People’s Crusade, a rabble got up—independently of Urban, and probably to his dismay—by a charismatic French monk, Peter the Hermit, and, in the words of one chronicler, including as many “adulterers, murderers, thieves, perjurers” as it did pious folk. All the divisions travelled separately to the East. The People’s Crusade departed first, crossing Europe on foot and, figuring that the rout of infidels might as well begin at home, slaughtering a large portion of the Rhineland Jews as they passed through that territory. They were the first to reach Constantinople, where Emperor Alexius I took one look at them and shipped them across the Bosporus, into Asia Minor. Probably to the relief of their allies as well as their enemies, they were soon wiped out, almost to a man, by the Turks.

Then the official Crusade reached Constantinople, and began its dealings with Alexius, who must be counted as another competing leader of the expedition. He regarded the Crusaders as his tool—Urban had told him that they were coming to defend his territories—so, after loading them down with gifts, he extracted promises from the leading knights that they would turn over to him any captured territory that had once been part of the Roman Empire, of which, in his view, Byzantium was the continuation. The knights departed and shortly began betraying their vows to Alexius, as he began violating his promise to send them supplies and reinforcements. They captured the important Turkish city of Nicaea (which they did turn over to Alexius). Then they began the gruelling march across Asia Minor. When it was over, half the Crusade’s men, and more than half of its horses, were dead. Whatever their commitment to “positive violence,” the survivors seem to have decided that if they were going to suffer this they should get some material reward. At every subsequent engagement, there were ferocious disputes over booty. The Crusaders spilled each other’s blood, shook hands in the morning, and then took out their grievances on the towns that lay in their path.

Chief among these was Antioch, a great trading city. In order to conquer Jerusalem, the Franks had to take Antioch first, to cover their backs, but the city was well supplied and had seemingly impregnable walls. The siege of Antioch lasted more than seven months, during which period many men deserted and many others died of hunger. By the time it was over, the Crusaders were in no mood for mercy. They killed almost everyone, including the resident Christians. And now the quarrels over who would get what escalated. Jerusalem was three days’ march down the road, but it took the Crusaders half a year to set out on that journey, because two rival knights were fighting over control of Antioch, and neither would leave the city in the other’s hands. Finally, a large contingent left for Jerusalem. Outside the city, they tarried for another month, building war machines and arguing again over the division of the anticipated spoils. Then they attacked. According to contemporary accounts, they left not one Muslim alive. The city’s Jews took refuge in their temple; the Franks barricaded the exits and set the building on fire. At the end of the sack, Asbridge writes, the Crusaders “came, still covered in their enemies’ blood, weighed down with booty, ‘rejoicing and weeping with excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Savior Jesus.’ ” (He is quoting an eyewitness.) They had fulfilled their vow.

The story is not just brutal; it is thick with ironies. By the time the Crusaders got to Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks, their primary enemy, had lost the city to the Egyptian Fatimids, who were in diplomatic negotiations with the Crusaders. So the people from whom the Crusaders took the city were not their foes but their hoped-for friends. Pope Urban II never heard of the victory; he died two weeks after it occurred. Most of the wealth that the soldiers had acquired was spent on their return passage; many arrived home penniless. The Eastern Christian sects—the Armenians and Copts and others whose freedom to worship in the city was one of the Crusade’s foremost stated goals—were expelled from Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the Franks had established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which, despite various losses (notably the city of Jerusalem), did not fall for two hundred years.

Asbridge, in keeping with his aim to produce a popular history, writes with maximum vividness. Some of this gets a little hokey—there are cliff-hangers galore—but I am grateful that he stooped to entertain us. Mad Hugh and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer were fun to read about. Raymond of Toulouse, one of the leading knights, was reputed to have had an eye plucked out in an earlier conflict, and to have carried this shrivelled organ in his pocket afterward, “as testament to his suffering.” Asbridge says that there’s no good evidence for this story, but he includes it anyway. As long as we’re on the gallows, he’ll give us some gallows humor. There is also a note of comedy in the competition among the knights, with their nasty little treacheries, and with the lesser soldiers running back and forth between tents to figure out who’s on top—and therefore whom they should ally themselves with—today.

Asbridge tries to put everything in concrete, practical terms. In particular, he takes pains to explain the actual warfare, which in those days had everything to do with walls. Walls—huge, thick walls—were how a city protected itself, and they were what the besiegers had to breach. The Franks had ingenious machines—the petraria, the mangonella—for catapulting rocks over the battlements. And, when the townspeople retaliated by pouring burning grease and pitch down on the attackers, there were other machines—the vulpus, the testudo—to protect them. Walls were also the stage of medieval warfare’s psychological theatre. The Muslims hung the Christian dead from the top of the walls and left them there, so that their friends could watch them rot. In turn, the Christians, when they beheaded their prisoners, did so in front of the walls, so that the enemy could get a good look. Then they lobbed the heads over the battlements. In the face of such tactics, Asbridge has to work hard to remind us of the holy principles underlying the Crusade.

Asbridge’s problem is small, however, compared with that of Jonathan Phillips, in his book on the Fourth Crusade. As appalling as the First Crusade was, the fourth was far worse. The goal, again, was to recapture Jerusalem, which had been seized by the Turks in 1187. This time, the leaders of the expedition decided that everyone must go together, by sea. In 1201, a delegation was sent to Europe’s mightiest seafaring power, Venice, which was ruled at that time by a bold, crafty man, Doge Enrico Dandolo, who, though he was blind and probably over ninety years old, was to become the chief policy-maker of the Fourth Crusade. The delegates told Dandolo what they needed: enough ships to transport thirty-three thousand five hundred soldiers and their horses, enough men (it turned out to be thirty thousand, the equivalent of half the adult population of Venice) to rig and sail the ships, and enough food to get everyone through the journey. This was a tall order, and the Doge asked a great price—eighty-five thousand marks. (According to Phillips, that was twice the annual income of the kings of France and England.) The Franks swallowed hard and signed the contract, and the Venetians spent more than a year preparing the fleet. Then, as agreed, the Crusaders mustered at Venice, but instead of the thirty-three thousand five hundred men who were expected—and absolutely needed, for the Doge’s price was to be met by each of the men paying his own portion—only a third of that number showed up. True to form, the European knights didn’t like taking orders. Some preferred to sail, with their forces, from Marseilles or Genoa. Of those who had come to Venice, the rich dug into their pockets, but still they could come up with only a little more than half of what they owed.

What could they do now? To turn back would be a betrayal of their vow, and of their knightly honor. But what could the Doge do? He thought about it, and he came up with an idea. On the Dalmatian coast there was a city, Zara—a rich city, with excellent oak for shipbuilding—that had recently thrown off Venetian control and gone over to the King of Hungary. If the Crusade would agree to besiege Zara and restore it to Venetian rule, the Doge would postpone (not forgive—he drove a hard bargain) payment of the Franks’ debt. For the Franks, this was a shocking proposal. Their mission was to make war on infidels. Zara was a Christian city, and under the spiritual rule not of the Greek Orthodox Church but of the Pope in Rome. Furthermore, the King of Hungary had taken the Cross, which meant that his property was under the protection of the Vatican and could not be legitimately attacked by anyone. That was part of the deal offered by the Church to any Crusader.

Nevertheless, the Franks accepted the Doge’s proposal. The Pope soon got wind of their plans, and as they were camped outside Zara they received a letter from him forbidding them to lay a hand on the city and promising excommunication to anyone who did. At this point, a bitter quarrel broke out among the knights, and a few defected, with their men. (Indeed, as the fleet left Venice for Zara, the putative leader of the Crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, found that he had urgent business to attend to back home in Piedmont. He rejoined the forces at Zara, but only after the city had been taken.) A core group of influential knights decided to go ahead, and make it up to the Pope later. They did not share the contents of the Pontiff’s letter with the common soldiers; they just led them to the walls of Zara and conquered the city in short order. The Pope then fired off a new letter, excommunicating them all.

News of their difficulty spread quickly to the courts of Europe, and reached Alexius Angelos, the crown prince of Constantinople, who at that time was living in exile in the West. Seven years earlier, Alexius’s father, Isaac II, the rightful emperor of Byzantium, had been deposed by his (Isaac’s) brother, now Alexius III, who threw him into a dungeon and had his eyes gouged out. Prince Alexius had been trying for years to induce some European power to help him reclaim his inheritance. Now, like Dandolo, he saw in the Fourth Crusade’s troubles an opportunity for himself, and he sent a delegation to the Crusaders at Zara. Since the Crusade was pledged to the service of God and justice, the delegates said, its duty, clearly, was to make a detour to Constantinople and expel the usurper. If they did so, furthermore, Prince Alexius would pay them two hundred thousand silver marks, provision the entire army, provide ten thousand men to go with them to Egypt (this was another of their planned side trips), and, for as long as he lived, protect Frankish possessions in the East. Finally, he would place the Greek Orthodox Church under the rule of Rome. The last item was crucial, the very thing the Crusaders needed. If they could return proud, schismatic Byzantium to Roman control, this would quickly solve their problems with the Pope. Also, the promised two hundred thousand marks would more than pay their debt to Dandolo. The Doge, who was with them, favored the plan for other reasons as well. Byzantium had threatened Venetian trade routes; if it had a ruler who owed his throne to Venice, this would be good for business. So the offer was accepted. Alexius, who now arrived in person, was taken on board, and the Crusaders, with stops at various Byzantine ports to demand the people’s allegiance and make off with their food supplies, proceeded to Constantinople.

Byzantium at that time was the greatest civilization in Christendom. In 395, the Roman Empire had been divided in two. The Western half—that is, Europe—soon fell to the barbarians, while the Eastern half survived, as the inheritor of the empire and the repository of its culture. Constantinople, its capital, was ten times larger than any city in Western Europe. Situated on the Bosporus, smack in the middle of the trade route between the West and the Orient, it was also far richer than any European city. It had palaces of gold and marble; its basilica, Hagia Sophia, dwarfed any European cathedral and, together with the city’s other churches, housed priceless relics—the Virgin Mary’s robe, the Crown of Thorns, two heads of John the Baptist. The city was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, with luxurious habits. Its ladies, watched over by twenty thousand eunuchs, wore silks and jewels and white wigs. The Constantinopolitans—or Greeks, as they were known—regarded the Europeans as grunting tribesmen. The Franks, in turn, viewed the Greeks as pantywaists, and probably enjoyed the thought of having to rescue them. Arriving in June of 1203, they attacked quickly and in one day put Alexius III to flight. Isaac was brought up from his dungeon and restored to power.

Then a delegation from the Crusade went to Isaac, enthroned among his nobles, and informed him of the bargain that his son had made to achieve this result. (Apparently, the agreement included Prince Alexius’s being made co-emperor, Alexius IV, for that happened soon afterward.) The court was not happy, nor, after twenty years of political unrest, was it in a position to meet the terms. But it had no choice. Oppressive taxes were levied on the people; the silver lamps of Hagia Sophia were taken down and melted into coin. As this went on, the Constantinopolitans came to hate the Franks, and, as the payments started to come late, and then stopped coming at all, the Franks hated them back. Finally, the Franks threatened war. In response, a flotilla of “fire ships”—flaming vessels—was sent out one night from the port of Constantinople to destroy the Venetian ships. (It failed.) Soon afterward, Isaac and Alexius IV were deposed by a Constantinopolitan nobleman determined to get rid of the Franks. Isaac died of grief, probably with some assistance; Alexius was murdered. With the latter gone, the Franks knew that they would never be paid, and they decided to take the city instead. They did so in two days.

Even amid the other horrid events of the Crusades, the sack of Constantinople is notorious. Not only did the Crusaders rape and massacre; they made a party of it. They hatted out their horses in the white wigs of the Constantinopolitan ladies. A prostitute straddled the Patriarch’s throne in Hagia Sophia and sang songs. The Franks gathered up booty wholesale; what they couldn’t carry, they destroyed. The Venetians, who had better taste—and who, in keeping with their still unpaid debt, were allowed two-thirds of the spoils—quietly crated up the city’s finest treasures. As a result, St. Mark’s basilica, in Venice, houses one of the world’s foremost collections of Byzantine art, including the four golden horses that once stood in Constantinople’s hippodrome and were now installed over St. Mark’s main portal. As for the territories, Dandolo shrewdly took what he knew Venice could defend: Crete, Corfu, the ports in the Peloponnese. The huge power of the Venetian republic during the Renaissance owed much to those acquisitions. The Franks took the interior, which they then spent years fighting over with outraged locals and, as usual, with each other. Baldwin of Flanders, one of the Crusade’s leaders, was made emperor of Byzantium. He was captured and killed by the King of Bulgaria within a year. Nor did the Frankish rule of Byzantium last long. The Greeks retook Constantinople a half-century later, in 1261; in 1453, the city, or what was left of it, fell to the Turks, who occupy it still. So a great, ancient civilization was destroyed, in the name of God.

Phillips, even more than Asbridge, is determined to put this story over to the general public. He is not just vivid; he basically storyboards the Crusade, beginning with an elaborate flash-forward to the rugged Baldwin being crowned in Hagia Sophia. (Baldwin changes his woollen hose for stockings of red samite. He receives in his calloused hands a ruby the size of an apple. He thinks of his wife, a denizen of “cold, marshy” Flanders, whom he must now summon to be the empress of Byzantium.) And that’s just the prologue. These scenes are exciting, but Phillips’s most substantial achievement is his analysis of the Realpolitik of the Fourth Crusade, his effort to show these knights not as greedy cynics, which is what Steven Runciman called them, but as men impelled by many conflicting motives, among which, like Asbridge, he places religion very high. At some points, he has trouble with this argument. For example, in the matter of the knights’ worries about Zara, he writes that damnation was “the greatest possible concern to all medieval people.” Clearly not, however, for the knights ignored the Pope’s threat of excommunication—that is, damnation—and attacked Zara anyway. It gets a little confusing. Nevertheless, that is often what people’s decisions are like when their backs are to the wall, and one has to admire Phillips for trying to juggle so many causes.

We are left with one question about these two books. The insistence on the Crusaders’ sense of religious duty, as opposed to bloodlust and greed, comes across as a justification. However much the authors may historicize it, it starts to sound virtuous. Does this mean that Asbridge and Phillips think the Crusades were O.K.? Not according to many of their statements, particularly about the sack of Jerusalem and of Constantinople. But before those events, as the Franks are lobbing the stones and mounting the battlements, our chroniclers are full of admiration for them. Asbridge praises the “inspired and audacious” tactics of the leaders of the First Crusade, their “military genius”; Phillips roots for the men of the Fourth Crusade as, with their boats swaying beneath them and with scores of Greek bowmen firing at them, they climb their ladders and jump out onto the walls of Constantinople. Later, the authors bemoan the slaughter, but what did they think the audacious tactics were for? There is a curious amorality here. It may be endemic to military history. (What an exciting battle! Oops, what a lot of dead people!) Still, it is strange.

And it is even stranger in relation to current events. Asbridge never mentions the war in Iraq. Phillips gives Al Qaeda a few sentences in his introduction. But these two books are aimed at the common reader, and the authors know very well that their customers will be thinking about what is now happening in the Middle East. (Or Asbridge knows it. In the American edition of his book, a new subtitle has been added: “The Roots of Conflict Between Christianity and Islam.”) And if I have noticed certain resemblances between the Crusades and the war in Iraq—the exaggeration of the threat, to get the war going; the enormous financial cost to the attacking country; the mixture of idealistic and commercial motives; the surprise of finding that the liberated may not thank you, indeed, may attack you—Asbridge and Phillips have surely also noted the parallels. They are silent on the subject, but in the resulting void, and with the constant emphasis on the religious motive, there is a strong suggestion, intentional or not, that we should consider whether today, too, there might be such a thing as positive violence.

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