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Norman Housley, Pope Gregory X and the Crusades, by Philip Baldwin, The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015, Pages 1528–1529, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev263
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Extract
One of the biggest problems facing historians of the crusades is accounting for the final loss of the settlements in the Holy Land in the decades following Louis IX’s failure in his first crusade (1248–54). The old interpretation, based largely on a book by Palmer Throop published in 1940, was that the ideal and practice of crusade were alike the victims of corrosive criticism, which doomed the attempt of Pope Gregory X (1271–6) to mount a military rescue. After Gregory’s failure, the fall of Acre and the other surviving castles and ports was simply a matter of time. In the last four decades or so, Throop’s thesis has itself succumbed to a revisionist surge the protagonists of which have highlighted the fact that his sources were selective and his approach tendentious. But no convincing alternative explanation has been advanced for Catholic Europe’s inability to save the remnants of the crusader settlements. For all the strength and ruthlessness of the Mamluk sultanate, a collective and sustained effort might have turned the situation around. So what went wrong?
