ABSTRACT
Many images and interpretations of the Middle Ages and of the crusades that were created in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries still haunt us today. One of the most important insights from constructivist approaches to history is that history only exists if someone in the present tries to make sense of what happened in the past. This chapter shows that 'reconfigured' and residual older interpretations (diachronic layers), other disciplinary perspectives as well as explanatory models derived from other fields (synchronic layers) can be identified as the major challenges and provocations which crusade historiography has to deal with today. The 'structural amnesia' inherent to historicism, obliterating the connections and continuities on the three above-named levels, may be identified as one of the major causes for the fierce struggle over the meaning and nature of the crusades today.
