Historians cite many causes of the crusades -- economic and political, as well as religious. But there is no question about their brutality and their failure, in the end, to achieve anything like the Kingdom some of the Crusaders said they wanted. Mary Alice Williams has a review.
MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: The Council on American-Islamic Relations needn't have worried that the film epic KINGDOM OF HEAVEN would perpetuate the stereotype of Muslims as agents of hell. On the contrary.
The film is, after all, about the Crusades, among Christianity's darkest episodes. The 200-year campaign to retake Jerusalem from those they branded infidels sowed seeds of religious conflict that echo even today.TIBERIUS: God be with you. He's no longer with me.
WILLIAMS: And in it, the Muslims are the good guys -- noble and proud. The Christians are the bad guys -- irredeemably avaricious and blood-thirsty but for three whom history has recorded: the short-lived King Baldwin IV, a leper under whose rule in 1186 Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony in the Holy Land; the king's faithful knight, Godfrey, who envisions
GODFREY: A kingdom of conscience -- a kingdom of heaven;
WILLIAMS: And Godfrey's valiant son Balien of Ibelin who, given the choice, refuses to allow the murder of the next king to take the throne for himself -- even if it means losing Jerusalem itself.
WILLIAMS: While the film lacks nuance, the writing is as blunt an instrument as the film's medieval weaponry. It does mean to illustrate that sometimes, as is the case with the new king, human failings merely masquerade as faith.
WILLIAMS: The film is a reminder, if one is needed, of the dangers of religious fanaticism and of the terrible things people can do in the name of God.
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