The Capitol Riot and the Crusades: Why the Far Right Is Obsessed With Medieval History | Teen Vogue

These days, Trump’s most ardent supporters have framed him as the messianic savior of America. Matt Gabriele, professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech, tells Teen Vogue that there’s a clear reason why the far right finds it so easy to identify with the Crusaders. “You have scholarly works that are built from an assumption that Europe was ‘under siege’ and needed to defend itself, and that blends with pop-culture fantasy-medieval, like Game of Thrones or Kingdom of Heaven, that portrays these Christian knights as hypermasculine warriors,” he said. Gabriele observes that this patriarchal warrior fantasy is attractive to people who feel that they are “under siege” — and thus easily radicalized. As Gabriele says, these ideals make “it very easy to put a bunch of disconnected historical events — Battle of Tours, [the] Crusades, 9/11, et cetera — next to one another and say they’re all connected.” This perpetuated myth of an ongoing war between civilizations is what Gabriele describes as “bullsh-t history, like a terrible self-published novel, only intended to give a veneer of historical legitimacy to their hate.”

Sierra Lomuto is an assistant professor at Rowan University, whose work “explores the relation between global contact histories and the discursive production of racial ideologies in medieval literature.” Speaking to Teen Vogue, Lomuto said that white supremacists find it so easy to identify with Crusaders because “in modern times, the Crusades have come to represent a narrative of brave martyrdom in the face of dangerous enemies who threaten white, Western exceptionalism.” Lomuto added that this appropriation by the far right also reflects a patriarchal, toxic masculinity: “Think chivalrous knights saving damsels in distress. They imagine themselves as white women’s saviors against hostile outsiders — [i.e.,] anyone who threatens their myth of white supremacy.”

But is this modern misappropriation of Crusader ideology close to the truth? No, Gabriele said flatly. According to Lomuto, “It’s likely that most white supremacists today who wield Crusader imagery don’t know much about the history they are appropriating. They are appropriating the Crusades because of how the Crusades have been represented in Western history books and Western pop culture.”

Nonetheless, the Crusaders, in their “real” context, did in fact enact atrocities upon Muslim and Jewish people, as Lomuto noted. The far right’s “interest in the Crusades as historical events that reflected Islamophobia and hatred against Jewish people is certainly true,” she said. “Crusade ideology was both of these things, just as white supremacist ideology is today.”

For medieval historians, the responsibility is vast. With the rise of the far right a well-documented threat to democracy, they say the need for scholars to continue to provide historical context and accountability is more pressing. Lomuto told Teen Vogue that literature and the humanities “should be valued and funded in our modern society because these are the fields that teach critical reading and thinking skills. We need scholars of the distant medieval past to care about how their work intersects with contemporary politics, even when they think it doesn’t — because it does, whether they like it or not.”

Gabriele agrees, concluding, “We can’t be blind anymore — and never should have been in the past — to how the Middle Ages are being used in the contemporary world.”

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