‘It sounds absolute balls’: Crusaders, History writing and the nature of Film

Volume 4 | Issue 3 - History in the Public Eye

Article by Adam Riley. Edited and researched by Rob Russell.

So goes the quote of Jonathan Riley-Smith, a leading British Scholar on the Crusades, regarding the plot of Sir Ridley Scott’s 2005 historical epic: Kingdom of Heaven. Summed up, the film follows the development of events leading up to the crushing defeat of the Crusaders at the battle of Hattin in 1187, and the subsequent recapture of Jerusalem for the Muslims by an enlightened Saladin (ca. 1137 – 1193). To do this Scott takes the viewer on a narrative journey which follows the crusading lord Balian of Ibelin (d. 1193) in order to illustrate, in vivid CGI, life in the ‘Outremer’ – the fancy word for the Crusader States in the near east which coalesced more or less around Jerusalem in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – during this tumultuous period. Described as ‘historically accurate’ by the filmmaker through his spokesperson, Scott asserted in a statement that the film was ‘designed to be “fascinating history lesson”’.

Fascinating? Perhaps not if we consider that the lesson being expounded here is a relatively simple one: tolerance and religious pluralism are good and anything to the contrary is bad. This lesson is only interesting insofar as it accords a glimpse into the moral universe of Ridley Scott and the society within which he grew up. Little attempt is made to determine how medieval people may have understood what aspects of behaviour could be defined as ‘good’ or ‘bad’: instead they are portrayed as acting in accordance with very modern understandings of what either of these ideas should connote. Amin Maalouf wrote that ‘it does not do any good to distort history, even if you believe you are distorting it in a good way. Cruelty was not on one side but on all’. Similarly Riley-Smith points out how certain aspects of the film reek of pure invention: ‘there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense’. The danger of the moralising approach to filmmaking where historical epics are concerned is that even in distorting the historical evidence for apparently benign purposes, the complexity of past events are consequently reduced to simple portrayals of modern righteous protagonists, in this case represented overwhelmingly by the Muslims under Saladin, and barbaric, irrational, antagonists, represented here by Reynald de Chatillon (d. 1187), the Knights-Templar and Guy de Luisignan (d. 1194) as emblematic of a brutal Western crusading Christianity.

Distortion and invention. These are the ideas which are frequently invoked in the condemnation of historical films such as Kingdom of Heaven. Their apparent ideological biases also form the subject of severe criticism. Riley-Smith asserted that Ridley Scott was, wittingly or not, creating a vision of the past which pandered ‘to the Osama Bin Laden’; insofar as it appears to implicitly countenance the idea that there is a parallel to be found between the actions of crusaders of nearly a thousand years ago in the Holy Land and modern western interventionism in the Arab world. Yet, a number of these criticisms ignore, or seem to take for granted, that for all the similarities between films and academic history writing – Hayden White argued that they both constitute differing ways of telling much the same stories; they are both ‘poetic acts’ – filmmakers and historians are motivated by different aims to produce their works in the first place. Indeed, a number of these arguments appear to fall into the ‘waaah, that’s not how it actually happened’ school of thought of film criticism.

Generally speaking the ‘Middle Ages’ as an arbitrarily defined historical epoch have particularly suffered as a result of their incorporation into simplified grand narrative views of history. Peter Burkholder placed the blame for the perpetuation of misconceptions of the medieval period squarely at the feet of an ‘irresponsible, opportunistic entertainment industry that views history as a veritable grab-bag, ripe for commercial exploitation’. This is true to some extent. However, it does not follow that those who are perceived to pervert the historical record in filmic discourse do so either intentionally or always with commercial gain in mind. Often directors are concerned instead to create a story they feel will connect with an audience, viewing themselves as able to impart some kind of message through their artistic vision. Other famous directors, whether tackling such sensitive subjects as ‘the Nazis’ or ‘slavery’, take this to extremes: brilliant, blood-splattered, comic-book stylised fantastical extremes.[1] In some aspects these works are similar to much of the, rather brutal at times, saintly literature of the medieval period. The claim is often made by historians that such works constituted the T.V. of its day. Yet, in making such a claim it becomes apparent that historians for the most part appear uncomfortable with dealing with the T.V. or cinema of our own day. There thus exists a curious disconnect between how historians and others analyse that amorphous blob said to characterise modern civil society as a whole, and the manner by which such historians study past amorphous societal blobs.

Put simply and generally – and at the risk of offending two very large distinctive groups of professionals – directors, as opposed to professional historians, are concerned more often than not to depict what should be, rather than take up as their remit an attempt to distil from the past some pure idea of what once was. The form of the film as opposed to the monograph ensures that this is the end-result – even in the rare instance, such as this one, where the director asserts that he is creating a film true to the history of the situation as opposed to one which overtly privileges any idea of entertaining its audience (– viewers of the extended edition of ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ may sympathise with me here). Perhaps if historians critique films with these ideas even firmer in their minds than they have hitherto now, the nature of how filmmakers engage with historians and the public at large, and vice-versa, could be significantly altered.