ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores most prominently, and perhaps most pressingly, the appropriation of the crusades to justify extremist violence, particularly by jihadists like al-Qaeda and Islamic State. It focuses on the use of the Knights Templar, the medieval military order, by a Mexican drug cartel demonstrates that the twelfth-century Rule of the Templars is sufficiently flexible to serve as a framing device for unexpected identity-construction and discipline. The book considers the use of the rhetoric of ‘Reconquista’ in far-right discourses in Spain, Portugal and, more broadly, in Europe. It provides the memory of the crusades in twentieth-century Catholicism in which he identifies a polarisation of interpretation of the crusades and crusading. The book also considers stamps as projections of national identity; images that convey meaning quickly about what the crusades were and what they mean.
