THE CRUSADE IN THE LATER MIDDLE 'AGES By A. S.
Atiya
CURRENT LITERATURE
The Crusades are commonly thought to have ended with St. Louis in Tunis in 1270, or with the fall of Acre in 1291. But Dr. Atiya in his valuable new book (Methuen; 3os.) shows that the idea of recovering the Holy- Land from the Moslems was popular in Europe till the fifteenth century, and that the Papacy gave steady support both to the propaganda and to the expeditions that from time to time were organised against the infidels. He has already devoted a volume to the last fatal expedition destroyed by the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396, as all Froissart's readers will remember. Here he describes all the fourteenth-century crusading exploits—the French capture of Smyrna in ;1344, the raid on Alexandria in 1365, the Bourbon attempt on Al-Mandiya in Tunis in 1390, and finally Nicopolis. Dr. Atiya, an Egyptian scholar who has used both the Oriental and the Western authorities for the period, reminds us of the primary importance of Egypt in this period. The European expeditions failed partly through lack of discipline and partly because Genoa and Venice, which supplied much of the shipping, thought more of their trade with the Levant than with the Holy Places. Indeed, Genoa did a profitable business in exporting young slaves from Caffa, her Crimean outpost, to Egypt, to serve in the Mameluke army which the crusaders proposed to defeat. Dr. Atiya's book is well documented and illustrated with miniatures, two of them in colour.
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