Islam at War: A History by George F. Nafziger; Mark W. WaltonReview by: Matthew BennettThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 592-594Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477948 .

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592 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/2 (2006)

work might have caused, and in a subsequent letter exchange, although they sparred over questions of Biblical interpretation, the two humanists established a cordial tone, Erasmus admitting respect for Sepulveda's Biblical scholarship.This exchange obviously meant much more to Sep6lveda than to Erasmus, who for most of his life had only a dim notion of who the Spanish humanist was; until 1532 he actually thought that "Genesius" and "Sep6lveda" were two different writers. To Sep6lveda's credit, his esteem for Erasmus long outlived that of most Spaniards. By 1557, Erasmus's adherents in Spain were persecuted and his books banned, but Sep6lveda ostentatiously placed his letter exchange with Erasmus in the front of the epistolary he published that year, to highlight their mutual respect.

Erasmus makes an even more striking appearance at the very end of part 1 of Sep6lveda's History.The last four books (11-15) cover a brief span of time (1534-36), focus ing mainly on Charles's military conflicts, especially the conquest of Tunis (1535). Most of the narrative is impersonal, restrained, and scholarly; as in earlier volumes, even where Sep6lveda personally witnessed or participated in the events he describes, he only rarely inserts himself or his political judgments. As Balthasar Cuart argues, this makes his account less lively overall than that of contemporary chroniclers like Paolo Giovio, Sandoval, or Santa Cruz. Sepulveda tended to show less interest in military strategy or political drama than in scholarly questions such as the Latin derivations of place-names. But book 15 (and thus part 1) ends with a surprisingly personal twist. First, Sepulveda concludes his account of the emperor's return to Spain in 1536 by recounting how he himself, sailing to Barcelona with the imperial fleet, narrowly escaped a harrowing shipwreck that drowned scores of helpless galley-slaves. With this news of his own providential rescue (not to mention that of his books-acquired over more than two decades in Italy, this must have been a substantial library) still hanging in the air, Sepulveda then gravely records, in the closing paragraph, the death in Basel of Erasmus of Rotterdam. He eulogizes the great Dutch humanist and praises his erudition, but laments his intemperance and irreverence, and recalls how he tried to counsel Erasmus toward moderation in the Antapologia. If he had only listened to Sep6lveda's own warnings, Erasmus's books would not have been banned-and by implication, Chris tendom would not be so sorely divided. Thus the first half of Sep6lveda's massive History ends with an astonishingly personal "I told you so," which reveals the author's own senti ments more sharply than any other passage of the work.

These two fine additions to the Obras completas should go a long way toward helping to restore the reputation of Juan Gines de Sepulveda, still too often maligned as the narrow

minded nemesis of Bartolome de las Casas, as a talented and many-sided Renaissance humanist.

Islam at War: A History. George F Nafziger and Mark W Walton. Westport, CT: Prae ger, 2003. 278 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-275-98101-0.

REVIEWED BY: Matthew Bennett, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst

For the last three hundred years Muslim societies have found themselves at the receiv ing end ofWestern martial superiority. Of course, it wasn't always like that.Within a century of the Prophet's death Islamic armies had conquered territories from the borders of India to the Pyrenees. Later Muslim victories included the conversion of the world-conquering

Mongols, the conquest of India, and expansion though trade rather than war into Africa and Southeast Asia. The rise of the Ottoman Turks led to their conquest of Constantinople in

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Book Reviews 593

1453, followed by another two centuries of pressure on Western Europe via the Mediterra nean basin and the Hungarian steppe.

But there was another strand of historical development, in which the western Christian nations fought back from ca. AD 1100. The Crusades produced two centuries of colonial rule in the Holy Land and left a legacy which is still being worked out. Also, in northern Spain began a "reconquest" which was only completed in the year that Columbus set sail westward. He undertook his voyage precisely because European powers sought to bypass the Muslim stranglehold over the spice trade which made them so wealthy in comparison. The great adventure in the New World succeeded beyond the wildest dreams. Also, Europe began to build up a technological head of steam which meant that by 1800 the Ottoman Empire had become irrelevant to its designs, although it struggled on as the "Sick Man" for another century.

The industrialized West, after 1870 dominated by the United States of America, found itself drawn back to the core Islamic lands by the essential commodity for technological progress: oil. One of the outcomes of the two great world wars of the twentieth century (which, pace the authors, did involve Muslims significantly), was the creation of a new Jewish state which has become a bone of contention between the Western and Islamic world. The events of 9/11 brought home to the people of the USA that Islamic radicals have identified their country as the sponsor of an evil ideology: a kind ofJewish capitalism that Hitler would have recognized. Understandably, the nation that first defeated the truly evil regimes of Ger many and Japan and then paid for their reconstruction seems bewildered by being character ized as a ruthless and greedy imperialist.

So, is this the time for a book on "Islam at War"? Probably not; or not this book anyway. If the premise is that Islam is, at base, a warlike religion, then it is no more so than Judaism or Christianity. The three closely related faiths espouse defensive and just wars while oppos ing violence as a solution. Terrorism and suicide-bombing are definitively anti-Islamic; but, like the other religions of the book it is possible, through exegesis, to justify actions that are clearly against the spirit of the Prophet's intentions. In turn, America's foreign policy seems predicated on the idea that there is now another evil ideology to be defeated by force of arms.Yet the roots of resistance to progressive Western ideas which have produced wealthy and open societies lie only partly in religion.

The great democratization of the West, beginning with the French and American Rev olutions in the late eighteenth century, took over 150 years to take hold, with emancipation and the full franchise being available to its populations. In the traditional societies of the Islamic world, monarchy, dictatorship, patriarchy, oligarchy, and, it is true in some cases, theocratic tyranny, are the norm. There are examples of modernization, of which Iraq, prior to 1979, was one, which might promise a more open society. Education is crucial and yet

many Muslim countries have staggeringly high illiteracy rates.Whole populations have eco nomic or moral grievances (which in the case of land reform are one and the same), but are left frustrated and apocalyptical.Whether apparently neocolonial actions like the occupation of Iraq will remedy the situation remains to be seen.

Understandably perhaps, Nafziger and Walton's survey of military history with an Islamic flavor cannot really answer such questions either. In their concluding chapters they do seek to analyze why Muslim countries are apparently less adept with modern technology. This is mostly in the context of their wars against Israel, though, and the authors correctly identify the lack of a united front as being crucial. For the rest, in some rather disparate chapters the authors record a series of campaigns, across time and geography, in which

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594 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVII/2 (2006)

Islamic armies were involved. Information on naval campaigns or actions, save for the very slight chapter 9, is largely absent, although these were crucial to "force projection," then as now. The chapters are also arranged in an odd order. For example, chapter 12, containing some useful ideas ofjihad, really needs to be towards the beginning of the book, while chap ter 5, which ends with the early twentieth-century Balkan Wars, is immediately followed by the Muslim conquest of Spain twelve hundred years earlier! Admittedly, it is difficult to deal

with such a wide historical span, but any reader unaccustomed to the broad swathe of Islamic history is going to struggle. On occasion, the authors recognize this, apologizing for the catalog of unfamiliar names (for example, 113); but mostly they are happy to dive into such dizzying depths without demur.

Overall, the book looks as if it has been written in a hurry and is sadly lacking in edi torial direction. Sometimes its conclusions are frankly simplistic and verging on the stereo typical, such as when the authors bemoan the absence of front-rank leadership in Muslim armies "in the past two centuries" (178).Tell that to the ANZAC boys at Gallipoli!

A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Mark D. Meyerson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 272 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-691-11749-7.

REVIEWED BY: Horacio Chiong Rivero, Swarthmore College

Elegantly conceived and painstakingly documented, Mark D. Meyerson's A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain stands as a strong and solid contribution both to medi eval Iberian history and Jewish history. Elaborately reconstructing the compelling history of the Jews of Morvedre, a small town in the kingdom of Valencia, Meyerson documents their story from the beginning of the town's settlement in the wake of King Jaume I's reconquista from the Muslims in 1248 until the tragically sorrowful date of their expulsion in the sum

mer of 1492. Rooted in the medieval sociopolitical concept of convivencia, the convergence and coexistence of multiple cultures, languages, and religions in medieval Iberia, the history of the flourishingJewish community of Morvedre in its final century is the focus of Meyer son's well-written and richly detailed scholarly work.

Challenging the long-established historical scholarship that contends that there was a universal decline ofJewish communities in post-1391 Spain-the annus horribilis marked by pogroms and forced baptisms that has been seen as the end of a Jewish golden age of sorts in the Iberian peninsula-Meyerson offers a historically incontrovertible counternarrative to the prevailing story of the Jews in Spain: the last century before the expulsion of the Jews ought not to be considered as one of unmitigated despair and decline, punctuated by relent less oppression and persecution, but rather as a veritable renaissance in the political, eco nomic, intellectual, and social life of the aljama, Morvedre's Jewish quarter.Yet the history of the Jewish renaissance in fifteenth-century Morvedre is deeply marked by a paradoxical rela tionship of kinship and friendship with the conversos, for it is this very socioreligious symbi osis between Jews and Judaizing conversos that would eventually prompt the Catholic

Monarchs to sign the edict of expulsion in 1492. The paradox of kinship is further accentu ated by the paradox of place, for while the Jewish quarter inValencia had been eradicated in 1397, the Jews in the nearby town of Morvedre continued to prosper in relatively stable and peaceful conditions during the last century before their expulsion.

In chapter 1, "On the Edge of Desolation," Meyerson underscores the importance of contextualizing the historical reality of Jewish communities that existed in medieval Iberia

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