“The Meeting Place of Muslim and Christian Merchants”: Teaching the Crusades in World History

It’s hard to imagine that Pete Hegseth and Osama bin Laden have much in common, but both regularly invoked the Crusades to justify their worldviews. Bin Laden often referred to the West as “Crusaders.” In his 1996 speech “The Invasion of Arabia,” bin Laden framed recent American military campaigns as Crusades:

This aggression has reached such a catastrophic and disastrous point as to have brought about a calamity unprecedented in the history of our umma, namely the invasion by the American and western Crusader forces of the Arabian peninsula and Saudi Arabia, the home of the Noble Ka'ba, the Sacred House of God, the Muslim's direction of prayer, the Noble Sanctuary of the Prophet, and the city of God's Messenger, where the Prophetic revelation was received.

In his 2020 book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, Pete Hesgeth argued, “Enjoy Western civilization? Freedom? Equal justice under the law? Thank a crusader.” He also has the phrase “Deus Volt” (“God Wills It”) tattooed on his arm. It’s an expression associated with Latin Christian Crusaders.

While Hesgeth sees the Crusades as a positive and bin Laden saw them as a negative, both see the Crusades as a clash of civilizations that influences the present-day. How does that matter to teachers of world history?

Like many topics we teach in world history, there are multiple interpretations of the Crusades. If anything, over the last 900 years, the Crusades may be one of the topics with the broadest range of interpretations, including everything from a clash of civilizations to proto-colonization to genocide to the flowering of medieval cultural and economic exchange. It’s hard to imagine another topic we teach that has that sort of range of interpretations!

Although we probably would question the validity of most of these interpretations, the students in our classrooms most likely have been exposed to these ideas. Teaching the Crusades presents a unique opportunity to have students learn about a topic they most likely already have heard of, but that is also the challenge. Too often, students assume the Crusades were a clash between civilizations. Instead of allowing that flawed assumption to persist, we can use the Crusades to teach students how the Crusaders were a series of travels, encounters, and exchanges. With a wide range of primary sources and learning how to view history through the lens of pluralism, we can help students see these three themes.

Approaching the Crusades