Crusades
by Alan Ereira, David Wallace
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DVD details
Actor: Anthony Smee, Marcello Marascalchi, Robin Sebastian, Steve Purbrick, Terry JonesDirector: Alan Ereira, David Wallace
Brand: A&E
Writer: Terry Jones
Cinematographer: David South
Producer: Alan Ereira
Writer: Alan Ereira
Producer: David Wallace
Producer: Laurence Rees
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 200 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-01-02
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: A&E Home Video
DVD Reviews of Crusades
DVD Review: "Bohemond's Breathing..."
Summary: 1 Stars
An atrociously poor attempt to portray history.
The desperately saddening aspect of this DVD is that many people will believe that this is historically accurate.
In essence this documentary selectively uses Sir Steven Runciman's "History of the Crusades". Unfortunately Sir Steven's three volume history has in the last few decades become largely obsolete as many of his interpretations and conclusions have now been proven incorrect by the mass of recent scholarship. Consequently these volumes should be avoided for any serious study.
In addition, Terry Jones's editorial comments and modern approach to a medieval situation detract further from Runciman's work producing a documentary with barely an accurate paragraph.
The Fourth Crusade section in particular is maddeningly and excusably inaccurate with a complete disregard of all serious scholarship over the last thirty years by Prof. Donald Queller, Prof. Tom Madden, Prof. John Pryor and Prof. Alfred Andrea.
Be warned any similarity between the historical facts of the Fourth Crusade and this documentary is purely coincidental.
Admittedly the Fourth Crusade, unlike many of the other expeditions, is incredibly complex and cannot easily be treated without an understanding of the contemporary history of Byzantium, Venice and the Crusader States.
Considering just the Fourth Crusade.
For example:
* Insistence upon the Treason Theory to explain that Doge Dandolo deliberately diverted the Crusade from Egypt to Constantinople as Venice did "Good business with Egypt" & the Doge promised Egypt the crusade would never attack them. What a fantasy! The Treason Theory for the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, first proposed in Bernard the Treasurer's continuation of the Ernoul and discovered by Hopf in 1867, was proved indefensible by Hanotaux in 1876. Egypt did not do good business with Venice as Terry Jones proudly announces. In fact in the late twelfth century they only did about 11% of their trade with Egypt due to Papal prohibitions against trade with Moslem states. They did the majority of their trade through Constantinople at this time, albeit this plummeted between 1171 and 1184, and thus risked a great deal by attempting to replace Alexius III with Prince Alexius Angelus. The Treason Theory is now only entertained by popular historians, not serious scholars, who play upon the conspiratorial aspects to sensationalise.
* That the Crusaders were trapped on the Lido by Doge Dandolo. This is incorrect. Dandolo threatened to cut off the food & water shipments to the Lido. This was not designed to starve the army into submission as such a strategy would only work if the army was trapped on the Lido & yet many were travelling between the mainland & the island by boat. Dandolo's threat makes sense only from a commercial perspective. The Franks' failure to pay for the Venetian fleet meant that the Venetians no longer had a responsibility to feed the crusaders. Cutting off food & water shipments would not starve the Crusade, but it would require the Franks' to decide quickly between what they owed & leaving Venice altogether.
* The Zaran phase is omitted entirely. The Zaran phase was crucial as here Prince Alexius's envoys & the crusade leaders signed a treaty to travel to Constantinople and place the legitimate Byzantine Prince on the throne.
* That they attacked Constantinople because the Emperor Alexius IV had no money to pay the crusaders for placing him on the throne. This is a gross simplification and paints the crusaders as avaricious and motivated solely by profit. In fact the following reasons are some of the complex motives behind why they conquered Constantinople in 1204 rather than simply sailing home to Europe:
* Humiliated & angered by the Byzantines for ten months of treachery & duplicity.
* Removal of the usurper, Mourtzouphlus. Since it was the duty of all crusaders to fight for right & justice (a similar reason why they accepted the Treaty of Zara as Philip of Swabia highlighted to them)
* Anger at eliminating their chance of reaching the Holy Land (in effect by killing Alexius IV). After his death, & the natural death of his father, the promised money & provisions which were essential for their crusade would never be provided.
* Allure of the glory & power of Constantinople; especially for Boniface of Montferrat who had tasted what his erstwhile brothers had no doubt enjoyed as Caesars & wanted his inheritance of Thessalonika.
* The 200,000 marks that was still owed from the Treaty of Zara & the extended Treaty of Venice. Although they considered the Treaty of Zara terminated when Alexius IV, & Isaac II died, they were impoverished & were in great need of money.
* They had no provisions & the area near Constantinople had been foraged to exhaustion.
* The wish to accomplish at least something, rather than returning home in ignominious failure.
To appreciate the crusades requires a great amount of time and effort and a real dedication to understand the motives of medieval men and cannot be adequately treated by a comedian in the time allowed.
Avoid this documentary if one has any interest in the truth.
Read Hans Mayer's "The Crusades", Jonathan Riley-Smith's "Crusades-a short history" or Don Queller's "The Fourth Crusade" instead.
The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople (The Middle Ages Series)
The Crusades
The Crusades: A History
DVD Review: Funny and Informative Documentary
Summary: 5 Stars
This documentary is funny and informative about the Crusades. The narrator (Terry Jones) and his team took a journey following the same path taken earlier by the Crusaders. This documentary shows brutality, horrors, and massacres committed by Crusaders against fellow Christians and against Muslims in Palestine. It is a good documentary telling the story of the crusaders in a non-boring style.DVD Review: Crusades - Review from the other side
Summary: 4 Stars
Nice introduction to this history block. Good use of the the opposing (Islamic) sides views. Nice use of technology and side cultural notes. Disagree with some of his comments; I am not apologist for the pure mercenary members of the Crusades or methods but I see the political side of his view of history. His views are well known about the Global War on Terror from his editorials in the Guardian. He like many Muslims are still hung on the Crusades and use it as an excuse for their presnt actions.DVD Review: A Mythic History of the Crusades
Summary: 1 Stars
Terry Jones's The Crusades is everything that a good documentary should not be. In brief, it is filled with misrepresentations and factual errors, and it perpetuates myths that were discredited long ago--in some cases several generations ago. The video program is based largely on a superficial and somewhat erroneous reading of Steven Runciman's three-volume history of the crusades, which was revolutionary when it appeared over a half century ago but which has been superceded and even discredited, in part, by what has been an almost tidal wave of crusade scholarship over the past 30 years or more.
The worst part of the video program is its treatment of the Fourth Crusade (2002-2004). Put bluntly, Jones gets the story woefully wrong to the point that anyone who views this section of the program uncritically will come away totally misinformed. But even before we reach the early thirteenth century, errors abound. One gets the impression that Jones is not really interested in sober history. Rather, he is content with cheap jokes. When he has to choose between a supposedly funny line or scene or a more prosaic historical fact, he invariably chooses the former.
It is a shame that buffoonery is allowed to trump history. The complex, multilayered story of the crusades is fascinating in its tragedy and even darkly humorous in its ironies. Unfortunately, Jones's attempt at burlesque has led only to distortion.
Actually, I used to have my students in an upper-division, university-level course on the crusades view this program outside of class and to write reviews of it. Their reviews were, on the whole, even more damning than this review.
DVD Review: Holy Hell
Summary: 5 Stars
Since seeing this back in the 90's there has not really been a better way to show biggest holy mess in time itself.
Terry Jones is a class act at taking us though those dark years. Along with France & England and others we see our great knights & local folk take up arms and ride off or walk to destroy all. Really in the end it was mass murder in a scale unseen. Eating babies and drinking horse blood are just some of the tales of wow.
The fine details I leave to Mr Jones to tell you but as history goes it's a must know.
Description of Crusades
One of historys most epic adventures the crusades began as a holy mission to liberate jerusalem and became the largest mass migration in european history. When they ended 200 years later the crusades had created a mythology of knights & left a legacy of distrust between east & west that still shapes our world toda Studio: A&e Home Video Release Date: 01/02/2002 Run time: 200 minutes Rating: NrOf all the wars waged in the name of God, none has ever matched the arrogance and conceit of the Christian Crusades. For nearly two centuries (1095-1291), this medieval "holy war" variously raged, sometimes so spiritually misshapen by rapaciousness, murder, and political greed that to think it all had to do with Christian faith is absurd. And really, there is no one better to dramatize such a theater of holy war than Wales-born Terry Jones, host of The Discovery Channel's Ancient Inventions and an accomplished medievalist. Best known for his absurdist contributions to all things Monty Python--he was a founding member of Monty Python's Flying Circus and cowriter of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, among others--Jones wields an uncanny ability to explain the methodologies and madness of the Crusades while not failing us his sense of humor.
Jones wrote the scripts for each 50-minute presentation in the four volumes of The Crusades, which originally aired on The History Channel. His narration is not without an occasional sardonic air, almost of the roll-your-eyes type, which not only lends a skeptical perspective to a frequently misunderstood era in Western Europe, but also quite frequently editorializes the events that occurred between Pope Urban II's call for liberation of Jerusalem from the "infidels" of Islam and the embarrassing moment when officers of the fourth Crusade are conned out of its divine calling by the Venetians. While Jones's reconnaissance is sometimes oversimplified by casually not mentioning several Crusade sorties after the fourth (there were several, but by the 13th century they had become redolent of ennui and misguided commercial adventure), the technical ingenuity of the production and Jones's use of anecdote backed by academicians and preserved eyewitness accounts cinches a viewer's interest. Medieval "siege machines" are re-created to test their mettle against legends of famous battles, Jones dons real 11th- and 12th-century armor to demonstrate the outlandish appearance of Crusaders in the lands of Mohammed, mosaics come to life with body-painted characters of medieval fable, and computer graphics are deployed to re-create the interior of the great cathedral at Cluny.
All these elements are contrasted with intermezzos of contemporary European and Middle Eastern society and a moving original soundtrack to make The Crusades a thoroughly engaging documentary of the bloodletting of medieval Christian conquests and the ultimate result of Islamic fanaticism born from its crimson tide. In Jones's own words at the end of Volume IV: "It took 200 years for the Crusaders to create [this] Muslim fanaticism. It was the exact imitation of Christian intolerance." To understand the effects of the Crusades is to understand much of today's religious geography, and Mr. Jones and company can fairly lay claim to having helped set the record straight. --Jamie Friddle
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