Stories from the Crusades — Inside the Classic

Waiting and Departure as Structural Motifs

Each story begins with a figure poised between stasis and action. Peter the Hermit is introduced as a boy who “liked always to do or to hear something new” but is confined to a “very quiet” home. The narrative then shifts abruptly to his adult preaching, skipping the transition. Similarly, Barbarossa’s tale ends with the emperor imprisoned in a castle, waiting “until his country needs him.” The crusading kings Philip and Richard “were stayed by a storm” on an island, losing time and friendship. These pauses create a rhythm of anticipation that Kelman uses to underline the gap between crusading ideals and human frailty.

The Geography of Encampment and Siege

Kelman repeatedly describes the physical layout of camps and sieges to dramatize the crusaders’ predicament. At Acre, the Christian camp “lay round the landward walls of the city,” but beyond it stretched the Moslem camp, so that an attack on the city left the tents vulnerable. This spatial trap mirrors the moral one: the knights are caught between their vows and their quarrels. The text notes that during lulls, “warriors from the Moslem camp and the crusading knights held tournaments and dances in the open spaces between the tents.” These interstitial zones—neither camp nor city—become stages for strange friendships and forgotten goals.

Recurring Images of the Body and Relics

Kelman weaves bodily details into her narrative of faith and failure. The crusaders believe that since the loss of the True Cross, babies have had “only twenty-two teeth instead of thirty-two.” This peculiar physiological claim is presented without irony, as one of the “queer things” people believed. Later, Richard’s anger at delayed ransom leads him to “slay five thousand prisoners,” a mass killing that contrasts with the earlier focus on relics. The body of Barbarossa, too, is imagined as a dormant presence: “no one has seen the red glow of Barbarossa’s beard in the dimly lighted hall.” These images tie the abstract cause of the Crusades to tangible, often grotesque, human forms.

Shifting Allegiances and the Failure of Unity

Kelman emphasizes how quickly crusader solidarity dissolves. Richard and Philip, once friends, “quarrelled so fiercely” that their deeds were “marred by bitter hatred.” During peace, both kings “were more friendly with Saladin than they were with each other,” accepting food and doctors from him while suspecting each other of poison. Saladin himself rides into battle “with the badge of chivalry on his breast,” a detail that blurs the line between enemy and ally. The common soldiers, Kelman writes, “did not know what to think,” as their masters seemed more eager to exchange gifts with Moslem leaders than to take Jerusalem. This confusion is the emotional core of the narrative.

Kelman’s stories are best read as a series of moral tableaux rather than a continuous history. The reader should attend to the spaces between events—the waiting, the encampments, the uneasy truces—where the author’s commentary on human ambition and idealism emerges most clearly. The illustrations by L. D. Luard, listed in the contents, likely reinforce these contrasts between stillness and action.

That waiting in Kelman’s stories—the stillness between camps—stayed with me long after I closed the book. It felt less like history and more like a shared, quiet ache. I found that same unhurried ache in The History of the Crusades (vol. 3 of 3) — Inside the Classic, where dreams and selfishness settle into the same shadow, and I kept thinking about it days later.