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Christoph T. Maier, Martin Völkl. Muslime, Märtyrer, Militia Christi: Identität, Feindbild und Fremderfahrung während der ersten Kreuzzüge., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 918–919, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.918
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The history of the crusades is currently experiencing a revival in the German-speaking academic world. In particular, there are a number of younger scholars, like Martin Völkl, who have made aspects of crusading the topic of their Ph.D. theses, thus bringing a distinctly Germanic mode of historical inquiry into a field of study that, in recent decades, has been driven forward and dominated by English-speaking academics. Völkl's study is divided into two main thematic parts. First, he addresses what he calls the identity of early crusaders: on the one hand the ascriptions given by propagandists and commentators of the crusades, and on the other, the self-perceptions of crusaders based on these ascriptions as well as on their own crusade experiences. In the second part, Völkl looks at the conceptualizations and representations of the crusaders' Muslim opponents, who were perceived as enemies and representatives of an alien religion and culture. His main sources are chronicles and letters and, albeit very selectively, charters. Völkl's principal results are hardly surprising, and ultimately there is little that, in essence, has not been said before elsewhere: while propagandists and commentators tended to impose a uniform image of the crusaders as religious warrior pilgrims and soldiers of God fighting for a common cause in the defense of Christendom, individual perceptions and behaviors suggest a much greater diversity of identity among the participants of crusades depending on origin, individual motivation, and personal affiliations while on crusade. The Muslim enemies were generally described using traditional labels of religious foes as pagans and polytheists, and as such, morally and ethically deficient. Fed by crusaders' experiences, a more nuanced picture of the Muslim world as diverse and rooted in monotheism was slow to gain ground and always tended to be overshadowed by crude propagandist messages.
