I began my career with the study of a military order and then moved in the late 1960s and
early 1970s to the political and constitutional history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the
mid-1970s my interest turned to the teory of crusading, which involved me in theology and
canon law, and the role of popes as preachers. This led to a concern with the responses of
lay men and women to ideas of crusading. I have now returned to the history of the military
orders.
Dr. Riley-Smith was born in June 27, 1938 and is married with three children. Early in his career, from 1964-1972, he was employed by the University of St. Andrews. In 1972 he joined the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and has remained there until the present day. He is a founding member [1980] of the Society for the Study of the Crusades in the Latin East and served as its President from 1987-1995.
During this lengthy period of scholarship, a large number of medievalists have studied under Dr. Riley-Smith and have gone on to teaching positions at major research institutions around the world. They include scholars such as Peter Edbury, Norman Housley, and Michael Lower. This is important because they have also carried the influence of Dr. Riley-Smith's perspectives of the crusading era into the scholarly world and insured a deeper penetration of Dr. Riley-Smith's views.
Undergraduates are usually introduced to the scholarship of Dr. Riley-Smith through his massively popular textbook on the crusades titled, The Crusades: A Short History [1987]. As reflected by his textbook, Dr. Riley-Smith is a major proponant of the idea that the crusading movement included efforts in Europe against northerners, heretics, and Muslims in Spain, rather than only the crusades to the East. On a related note, he also argues that for a military expedition to be properly understood as a "crusade" it must be called for by a Pope.
Dr. Riley-Smith's works are greatly at odds with many popular perceptions of the crusades. His scholarship, once considered revisionist in light of the popular works of older scholars like Sir Steven Runciman, is now mainstream in the scholarly community. Dr. Riley-Smith has effectively demonstrated that the crusaders were largely sincere and motivated by piety, rather than the common popular accusations of widespread greed as a motivation of the crusaders. Such a view has its roots in the anti-religious writings of the Enlightenment.
Dr. Riley-Smith has also shown the great personal sacrifice involved for each crusader and his or her family, demonstrating the enormous amount of wealth that flowed from West to East, rather than the other way around. He also has contributed substantially to undermining the so-called "younger sons" theory of crusade motivations in his work The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1991). In the work, he demonstrates that heads of families often went on crusade, and that younger sons seeking land of their own were a tiny minority of crusaders.
Concerning the real motivations or causes of the crusades, he notes that they were fought ultimately as a response to the aggression of Islam.
Indeed, it is conceivable that a situation could arise not unlike that in the 50 years or so before
the proclamation of the First Crusade. After a period of quiescence, fanatical Muslims, Turkish
religious warriors in Asia Minor and Berber zealots in Spain were destabilising the frontiers
between the religions. The development of crusading was in part a response to a huge loss of
Christian territory in the east.(1)
Such claims have yet to penetrate the popular view of the crusades, as it is not uncommon to hear the traditional view of the crusades as driven only by greed and hate. These views are perpetuated by untrained historical writers like the former nun Karen Armstrong and the movie director Ridley Scott, whose recent movie on the crusades titled Kingdom of Heaven drew a harsh rebuke from Dr. Riley-Smith who referred to the film as "absolute balls" and complained that it "pandered" to Osama bin Laden's version of history. For a synopsis of Dr. Riley-Smith's views on the motivations of the crusaders and the circumstances that influenced their actions, see the available online articles linked to below.
A select bibliography of Dr. Riley-Smith's works on the crusades is provided below.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, c. 1050-1310 London, 1967.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. "A Note on the Confraternities in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem." Bulletin of the Institute
of Historical Research 44 (1971), 301-08.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, "Government in Latin Syria and the Commercial Privileges of Foreign Merchants." in
Relations Between East and West in the Middle Ages. Edited by Derek Baker, 109-32. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1973.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1174-1277.London: Macmillan, 1973.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, "The Survival in Latin Palestine of Muslim Administration," in The Eastern Mediterranean
Lands in the Period of the Crusades, ed. P.M. Holt, 9-23. Warminster, England: 1977.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. "The Templars and the Teutonic Knights in Cilician Armenia." In The Cilician Kingdom of
Armenia, ed. T. S. R. Boase. Edinburgh: 1978.
Pope Gregory VIII. Bull Audita tremendi (October-November 1187). In Crusades: Idea and Reality 1095-1274.
Documents of Medieval History, 4. Edited by Louise Riley-Smith, and Jonathan Riley-Smith. 63-67. London:
Edward Arnold, 1981.
Riley-Smith, Louise and Jonathan Riley-Smith. Crusades: Idea and Reality 1095-1274. Documents of Medieval
History, 4. London: Edward Arnold, 1981.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, The Crusades: A Short History, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, ed. The Atlas of the Crusades, New York & Oxford, Facts on File, Inc., 1990
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, What Were the Crusades?, 2nd ed., London et al., 1992.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. "History, the Crusades and the Latin East, 1095-1204: A Personal View." In Crusaders and
Muslims, ed. Maya Shatzmiller. Leiden: Brill, 1993.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, New York: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. "The Crusading Movement and Historians." In The Oxford Illustrated History of the
Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith. 2-12. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. "The Minds of Crusaders to the East, 1095-1300." In The Oxford Illustrated History of the
Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith. 66-90. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. "Revival and Survival." In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan
Riley-Smith. 386-91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kedar, Benjamin K. and Jonathan Riley-Smith, eds. Montjoie : Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans
Eberhard Mayer, Variorum, 1997
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusaders, 1095-1131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. Hospitallers: The History of the Order of St. John, Hambledon Press, 1999.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. "Rethinking the Crusades." First Things March, 2000: 20-23.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. A History of the Crusades, Los Angeles: Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 2000.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, Balard, Michel, and Kedar, Benjamin Z(eds.). Dei gesta per Francos: Etudes sur les
croisades deditees a Jean Richard, Brookfield VT: Ashgate, 2001.
*Some additional online articles by J.R-S. are available below.
Curriculum Vitae- Jonathan Riley-Smith
Faculty of History- Cambridge University
Peter Edbury- Crusades-Encyclopedia
Norman Housley- Crusades-Encyclopedia
Michael Lower- Crusades-Encyclopedia
Jonathan Riley-Smith Rethinking the Crusades First Things- With Later Correspondence
Jonathan Riley-Smith Religious Warriors: Reinterpreting the Crusades Reproduced from The Economist With Later Correspondance [The author seems to forget about the Arab conquests of Spain, Sicily, etc...]
Jonathan Riley-Smith Truth is the First Victim [Review of Kingdom of Heaven] U.K.Times Online May 5, 2005
Jonathan Riley-Smith Jihad Crusaders: What an Osama Bin Laden Means by "crusade" National Review
Interview with Jonathan Riley Smith Holy Violence Then and Now : A Historian Looks at the Causes and Lingering Effects of Christian Warfare. [Partial Transcript] Christianity Today
U.K. Telegraph- Ridley Scott's New Crusades Film Panders to Osama Bin Laden
SSCLE Website-Society for the Study of the Crusades to the Latin East
(1) Jonathan Riley-Smith Religious Warriors: Reinterpreting the Crusades The Economist December 23, 1995