As an aid to students, teachers and parents dealing with the challenges of home learning, we have constructed an A–Z of the World taken from E. H. Gombrich’s, A Little History of the World. Day by day, we will be sharing a bite size introduction to a historical figure, event or period – using Gombrich’s magical words – along with links to free resources, so that readers of all ages can discover more. Today, Gombrich covers the Crusades.
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The Crusades
E. H. Gombrich: Under the leadership of a French knight, Godfrey of Bouillon, a great army set off along the Danube in 1096, first to Constantinople and then on through Asia Minor towards Palestine. These knights and their followers had crosses of red material stitched to their shoulders and were called ‘crusaders’. Their aim was to liberate the land in which Christ’s cross had once stood.
When, after long years of battles and unimaginable hardships, they finally reached the walls of Jerusalem, it is said that they were so moved by the sight of the Holy City, which they knew from the Bible, that they wept and kissed the soil. Then they besieged the town. It was valiantly defended by Arabs soldiers, but eventually the took it. Once inside Jerusalem, however, they behaved neither like knights nor like Christians. They massacred all the Muslims and committed hideous atrocities.
The crusaders formed the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem but because it was small and weak, far from Europe and in the midst of Muslim kingdoms, the little state was forever under attack from Arab warriors. This meant that back in England, France and Germany, priests were forever urging knights to go on new crusades. Not all of these were successful.
‘one good thing came out of the Crusades, although it wouldn’t have pleased the knights at all’
However, one good thing came out of the Crusades, although it wouldn’t have pleased the knights at all. In the distant Orient the Christians discovered Arab culture – their buildings, their sense of beauty and their learning. And within a hundred years of the First Crusade, the writings of Alexander the Great’s teacher, the books of Aristotle, were translated from Arabic into Latin and eagerly read and studied in Italy, France, Germany and England.
People were surprised to find how similar many of his teachings were to those of the Church and filled heavy Latin tomes with complicated thoughts on the subject. All that the Arabs had learnt and experienced in the course of their conquests around the world was now brought back to Europe by the crusaders. In a number of ways it was the example of those they looked on as their enemies that transformed the barbaric warriors of Europe into truly chivalrous knights.
Free Resources to Learn More about the Crusades
At the time of publication, these resources were free to use (some for a limited time only, during the COVID-19 pandemic).
BBC Bitesize (KS3)
BBC In Our Time
Khan Academy
Twinkl
The Yale Blog
What Did the Crusades Ever Do For Us? – Roger Crowley
This page provides access to a list of free online resources. It is not intended to endorse any particular resource.
Read all the other parts of An A-Z of the World here.
A Little History of the World
All the descriptions in this A-Z are taken from E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World.
Philip Pullman described the book as, “A brilliant piece of narrative, splendidly organised, told with an energy and confidence that are enormously attractive, and suffused with all the humanity and generosity of spirit that Gombrich’s thousands of admirers came to cherish during his long and richly productive life. It’s a wonderful surprise: irresistible, in fact.”
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The Little Histories are vivid storybook introductions for the young and old alike. Inspiring and entertaining, each short book lays out our greatest subjects in deceptively simple, engaging tones. With charming and personal insights each expert gently takes the reader from ancient times to the present through bite size chapters, ideal as bedtime reading or on the journey to work. Other Little Histories available include, Philosophy, Economics, Science, Literature, Language, Religion and Poetry. More details about the whole series can be found on the Little Histories website.
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The post An A-Z of the World – E. H. Gombrich on: the Crusades appeared first on Yale University Press London Blog.
Suppose that a paint factory releases into a river a chemical by-product that kills salmon in a nearby fishery. From society’s view, the paint factory produces too much paint because it doesn’t take into account of the impact of pollution. Economists recommend all sorts of policies to correct market failures like this. The authorities could put a tax on pollution to encourage the factory to produce less, for example. Markets also fail when people have poor information about what they’re buying and selling. This happened in the run up to the global financial crisis when banks were trading in complicated financial products that they didn’t fully understand. In this case, a serious market failure damaged the health of the entire economy and it cast doubt on the effectiveness of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
Neoclassical economics emerged in the late 19th century and has formed the template for the subject ever since. The earlier classical economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, hailed markets as the route to prosperity. Broad classes of people powered markets: workers, capitalists and landlords. The neoclassical economists instead viewed markets as simply the buying and selling of millions of individuals, individuals who were assumed ‘rational’ in the sense that they made decisions in a consistent, logical way. Today, economists base their theories of the economy as a whole on the behaviour of individuals.
To an economist, cost is more than simply a certain amount of pounds and dollars. The opportunity cost of going to the cinema is the best alternative you give up, going out for a meal, perhaps. What, then, is the cost to society of building a new hospital? You could try to add up the cost of the bricks, cement and steel that went into it. The more fundamental opportunity cost is the best alternative use for those resources – building a new train station, perhaps. Opportunity cost highlights the fact that societies always face trade-offs and choices.
Being thrifty and saving for a rainy day is often considered a virtue. John Maynard Keynes argued that saving could actually be self-defeating. ‘Whenever you save five shillings, you put a man out of work for a day,’ he said. The reason is that incomes depend on other’s spending. When we save more, we spend less. The consequence is that firms aren’t able to sell as much and have to sack workers. Unemployed workers have no money to save and as the total income of the economy plunges there’s less available overall to save than before. The paradox is that when we all try to save more we end up with a lower level of savings. Too much saving and too little spending means the economy is then in danger of stalling.
The quantity theory of money is an old theory that was revived in the 20th century by Milton Friedman. It says that if the government prints more money then prices go up faster. In the 1960s and 70s inflation in many leading economies began creeping up. Friedman said that this was because governments had become addicted to trying to boost their economies by creating too much money and going on spending sprees. Governments should instead commit to a steady growth in the money supply – 2 or 3 percent a year – in line with the growth of their economies. Friedman even suggested closing down central banks and replacing them with robots which would spew out money at the correct rate!
We try to predict the future all the time. How long will it take to get to the airport? What will my Apple shares be worth in a year? Rational expectations is the idea that people use all information available to make the most accurate prediction possible. For example, when deciding when to leave the house I’d take into account of new road works on the way to the airport. When investors have rational expectations it’s impossible to predict movements in share prices because prices reflect all the available information in the market. Rational expectations are an important part of economists’ toolkit. The theory has come in for a lot of criticism, though, for being a rather unrealistic depiction of actual economic decision making.
Karl Marx believed that the value of a shirt is the amount of labour that went into it. Suppose that after five hours of stitching, a worker makes enough shirts to earn the minimum needed for survival. If her shift is twelve hours long then she makes seven hours’ worth of shirts above that minimum amount that she’s paid. Marx called the money from selling the extra shirts surplus value and it goes to the capitalist as profit. Marx said that capitalists squeeze out as much surplus value as possible by making their workers work long and hard hours. Today, economists have little use for the concept of surplus value: for them a shirt’s value isn’t its labour content but simply the price that emerges from market demand and supply.
Teachers threaten students with detention if they’re lazy, but when students don’t do their homework, the teachers let them off because they hate giving out punishments. Knowing this, students don’t study and end up failing their exams. This is the problem of time inconsistency – making a commitment that everyone knows will be broken. Economists argue that governments face the problem when managing the economy. For example, after promising to keep inflation low, perhaps in the run up to an election, governments will be tempted to try to boost the economy, which ends up pushing up inflation.
Conventional economics assumes that people make decisions to maximise their well-being or utility. In the 19th century it was thought that utilities could be measured and compared, like the temperature of liquids. One economist even imagined building a ‘hedonimeter’, a machine that would be able to say exactly how much utility someone gained from a bowl of cherries compared to a bunch of daffodils. Nowadays economists think of utility in a more abstract way. When people maximise utility they’re deciding what to do in a logical and consistent way – they’re being rational. The new field of behavioural economics has found that in reality there are all sorts of quirks in people’s decision making, which means that they’re not always as strictly rational as economists often assume them to be.
In the 1980s when millions in Britain were unemployed, the British politician Norman Tebbit advised people to ‘get on their bikes’ and look for work. There were jobs to be had if people looked for them. Tebbit’s advice echoes an important idea about unemployment: that it’s largely voluntary rather than involuntary. Economists who make this claim believe that the labour market adjusts to eliminate unemployment: wages fall encouraging employers to take on more staff. Unemployed workers are out of work because they refuse to accept jobs at low enough wages. These economists stress the need for labour markets to be free and flexible. Those who say that unemployment is involuntary take their inspiration from Keynes who argued that unemployment is caused when there’s too little spending in the economy and there simply aren’t enough jobs.
How does an increase in petrol taxes or a reduction in health spending affect society’s overall well-being? The field of welfare economics deals with these sorts of questions. Its favourite criterion, pareto efficiency, says that a change is desirable if it benefits at least one person without hurting anyone. This ensures that resources aren’t squandered: it would be a waste for you not to receive a bunch of grapes that you’d enjoy but that everyone else was indifferent to. It’s sometimes claimed that free markets bring about pareto efficiency. Even if they do, we might still consider them unfair especially when they create a big gap between the rich and the poor.
Standard economics assumes that businesses produce using the minimum possible amount of inputs – tools, raw materials and workers. When they do there’s no slack in the system: there are no employees sitting around with nothing to do and no useful machines turning to rust. In fact, firms often operate with a lot of slack. Economists sum up the reasons in the term X-inefficiency. One is a lack of competition: when a firm has a monopoly or is protected from foreign competition then it might feel less pressure to use its inputs efficiently. More generally, people often make decisions according to habit and custom rather than the strict bottom line. An example of X-inefficiency was that of two Ford car plants which had the same design and equipment, one located in Germany and one in Britain. In the 1980s the German plant produced 50 percent more cars using 22 percent less labour compared to the British one.
Governments and firms borrow money from the public by selling bonds, financial securities that pay interest to whoever owns them. Bonds mature after a certain number of years at which point the original loan is repaid. The yield curve shows the relationship between bonds’ rate of interest or yield and their maturity. Usually the curve slopes upwards: it’s riskier to lend money for twenty years than for five so bonds of a longer maturity generally pay a higher rate of interest. Sometimes the yield curve slopes downwards: this can be a sign that the economy is about to enter a recession.
A zero-sum game is a situation like arm wrestling in which my gain is your loss. 
