God’s Battalions

God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades
By Rodney Stark
Published in November 2010
288 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 2/5

God’s Battalions can be understood as a hyperpartisan history of the crusades written by a modern Catholic to justify any and all atrocities committed by Christians at the time.

That being said, there is nothing inherently wrong with a hyper partisan historical text, however its bias must be understood for what it is.

The book itself is a short narrative of events surrounding the rise of Islam in the centuries before the crusade and a milktoast narrative of the first 3 canonical crusades.

Although I finished the book, I didn’t learn all that much from it. I mostly read it to contrast it with pro-Arab hyper partisan histories I am also reading in parallel to this book.

I do not recommend this book, except for the purpose of contrasting it with biased books written from the Arab perspective.

​