ABSTRACT
This was Riley-Smith’s inaugural lecture for The Royal Holloway College, University of London, in May 1979 (published in History 65 (1980):177-92). In that same year the publication of Edward W.Said’s Orientalism made clear to many as never before that the Crusade has been a major factor in the centuries-long distrust between East and West, particularly in the Middle East. Today’s charged connotations for the word “Crusade,” along with the fact that our own recent anti-war movements have had slogans like “make love not war,” means that calling “crusading” “an act of love” is highly ironic. With such irony, however, Jonathan Riley-Smith quickly convinces his audience of a profound insight all too easily missed: Crusades unlike wars today were not motivated by governmental policy, but by many individual, personal decisions to take the sign of the cross.
