Kingdom of Heaven’s Holy War on History
There’s something missing from Kingdom of Heaven, Sir Ridley Scott’s new historical epic about the Crusades. Namely, the history.
For some people, this will not much matter; they are only interested in whether Scott has crafted another of his cinematic masterpieces. And the answer to that question is yes.
Aesthetically, Kingdom of Heaven is on par with the finest of Scott’s works, and thus will be justly praised. Action film fans have plenty to chew on, as they did in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.
But unlike his previous efforts, this apparently isn’t a film that Scott expects to stand on its artistic merit alone. On the contrary, he has boasted “authenticity colored every facet of the production” — a bold claim considering the impact it is likely to have in the current geopolitical climate.
And it appears that climate was not far from the minds of Scott or screenwriter William Monahan, since the movie often feels more like propaganda than entertainment, and its “authentic” elements are as elusive as the pillars of Irem.
Kingdom of Heaven butchers the biographies of all its historical characters, and – perhaps worse – comes close to reversing the political realities of 12th Century Jerusalem, seemingly for the purpose of drawing modern political analogies.
Some of the changes and omissions are baffling; details that could have produced great drama and given the audience compelling insight into the story’s characters are nowhere to be found.
For instance, in real history, Balian of Ibelin (portrayed by Orlando Bloom) was a survivor of the battle of Hattin, who took refuge in the city of Tyre. While there, he asked Salah al-Din (the show-stealing Ghassan Massoud, delivering what may be the most humanistic portrayal of a Muslim warrior ever committed to film, at least among us Franj) for permission to travel to Jerusalem and fetch his wife to safety.
In exchange for granting this request, Salah al-Din secured from Balian an oath that he would not bear arms against the sultan, and would spend only a single night in the holy city. Once there, however, Balian found the citizens begging him to help organize a defense from al-Din’s impending siege. Being a man of honor, Balian felt torn between his oath to Salah al-Din and his duty to Jerusalem. Unwilling to break his word to either party, Balian turned to Salah al-Din himself for advice.
The sultan released Balian from his oath, thus freeing him to fulfill his prior duties to the holy city. And because Balian would now be too busy organizing the city’s defense to adequately protect his own wife, Salah al-Din provided an escort to take her safely to Tyre.
This story is nowhere to be found in Kingdom of Heaven, despite the fact that it highlights the honorable, chivalrous character of its twin protagonists. Indeed, the corrective surgery the script inflicts upon history makes this story impossible. Balian’s whole biography has been expunged to such a degree that he becomes a completely fictional character, rather than a merely fictionalized one.
He begins the film as a lowly blacksmith in France, unknowingly the bastard son of a crusader knight named Gregory of Ibelin (Liam Neeson). His father appears for one night, and in short order, whisks Balian away to the Holy Land, seeking absolution for their sins through crusading. Balian’s character arc takes him on a journey exploring the conflict of faith and politics, of fanaticism and tolerance, and in many ways, it is a moving romantic adventure tale.
But “authentic,” it is not.
In reality, Balian of Ibelin was not an immigrant to the Holy Land. He was born and raised there, the son of Balian the Elder (not “Gregory,” who is a fabrication); he was a landed noble, the lord of Nablus, and married to Maria Comnena, grandniece of the Byzantine emperor and widow of Amalric I, former king of Jerusalem. After Salah al-Din’s capture of the kingdom in 1187 sparked the Third Crusade, Balian served with distinction in the army of Richard the Lionheart, and three years later played a key role in negotiating the truce between the English king and the Syrian sultan which ended that bitter war. And there is no evidence that he ever pursued a romance with Sibylla of Jerusalem (Eva Green).
Somehow, it seems the above stories would have been more compelling – especially in the hands of Ridley Scott – than the ones that Kingdom actually delivers. They’re replete with romance, intrigue, action, honor, faiths of both tolerant and fanatical varieties (on both sides), and have the added benefit of being true. It’s difficult to believe that such omissions made the story any stronger, but unfortunately, the world will never know. And these aren’t the only odd changes made in this supposedly “authentic” movie.
Among its many other deletions and inexplicable revisions:
— the leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton) had been dead for over year at the time the events of this story take place;
— there is no mountain in the middle of Jerusalem;
— Count Raymond III of Tripoli, a key ruler of the crusader states and a significant check on the influence of Guy de Lusignan (Martin Csokas) and Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson), is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that he was a vital ally of Balian during the court intrigues that followed the leper king’s death;
— Salah al-Din’s chief general (embodied in the film as Nasir, played by Alexander Siddig) was a Coptic Christian, not a Muslim;
— nothing is depicted of Salah al-Din’s tactics at the Battle of Hattin, nor of his siege and occupation of the town of Tiberias, which prompted the battle; and,
— no mention is made of the Hashashin (aka, the Assassins), the notorious radical Ismaili Muslim sect who often sided with the crusaders against the Sunni emirs of the day.
But, the biggest and most misleading change of all is found in the entire premise of the film’s plot, a gross oversimplification and misrepresentation of the religious politics of the Crusades.
In Kingdom of Heaven, the court of Baldwin IV is portrayed as a party of reformers, who have fought hard to make Jerusalem a “kingdom of conscience” in which men of all faiths may live together in peace. Their enemies in this effort are the fanatical Knights Templar and the distant papacy, bent on resuming the old ways of constant war between Christian and Muslim.
The viewer is left with the distinct impression that the leper king’s tolerant Jerusalem is an idealistic departure from a century of unremitting hatred and enmity, threatened by the forces of the old establishment.
This is a reversal of reality. In truth, the “tolerance” of crusader rulers had become the status quo within two decades of the First Crusade, and the Christian nobles of the crusader states were treated as legitimate rulers almost immediately after their arrival.
As early as 1108 – less than ten years after the First Crusade left Jerusalem back in Christian hands – crusader rulers had forged alliances with local Muslim emirs against other Muslim rulers, who had themselves made allies among still other Christian crusaders. And there is at least one known instance of a combination mosque/church built by crusaders of the period.
In other words, rule by Christian crusaders in the Middle East was as tolerant as that of the surrounding Muslim culture.
The tolerant policies portrayed in the film as radical and enlightened were, in fact, mainstream and unexceptional among crusader rulers of the day, for whom the necessity of placating the public demanded such policies. Jews and Muslims under Christian crusader rule enjoyed as much general freedom of worship as did Christians and Jews under Muslim rule, practically right from the beginning. In fact, the crusaders modeled their religious legal codes on those of the Muslim conquerers who preceded them in the region.
By modern standards, neither form of “tolerance” would garner much praise; indeed, most would rightly identify them as forms of religious apartheid. But 1000 years ago, Christian and Muslim conquerers of a diverse Holy Land forged such laws out of necessity, trying to reconcile the realities of governance with their respective ideologies of divine right. For their time and place, both legal codes were progressive, tolerant – and, by the 12th Century, unremarkable to anyone but foreigners, be they French or Turkish.
Kingdom of Heaven also gives the viewer an inaccurate impression of what the Crusades were fundamentally about, telling them through the voice of the knight Tiberias (Jeremy Irons) that the wars boiled down to a grab for “land and wealth.” In a word, colonialism.
No one in the film mentions how the First Crusade got started at all (with a plea for help from the Byzantine emperor to the Pope, begging for aid in repelling the unprovoked invasion of his country by the Turks), let alone the fact that most pilgrims to the Holy Land – whether warriors or penitents – starved on the way, that the Church garnered little wealth from the campaigns, or that even the Christian kings of the region remained impoverished compared to their counterparts back home.
In addition, the film oversimplifies the religious divisions so severely as to make them borderline fantasy, with united Muslims on one side, and bickering Christians on the other. There is no discussion of Salah al-Din’s conquests of fellow Muslims, of his suppression of the Shi’a (he was a Sunni), or of his many less than saintly actions (he was, as the film seems to forget at times, only human), let alone of the reputation he earned among local Arab and Turkish emirs as a wishy-washy Kurdish tyrant with a soft spot for Christians.
No mention is made, either, of the conflict between Latin Roman Christians and Greek Orthodox ones, nor of the long and deep political ties between the Byzantine empire and the Shi’a Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt (subjugated by Salah al-Din in the 1170s).
And though Jews are often mentioned in the film, they never appear, despite the fact that Salah al-Din’s court physician (and thus a potential major supporting character) – Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, more widely known as Maimonides – was one of history’s most celebrated Jewish philosophers.
In short, Kingdom of Heaven reduces the rich, dramatic and complex tapestry of the 12th Century Middle East down to a simple formula of greedy Christian fanatics endlessly provoking humble Muslim natives who would otherwise leave the world in peace, with a small cadre of reluctant warrior agnostics caught in the middle.
This reductio ad absurdum ultimately undermines the film’s message about the dangers of holy war – a threat looming at least equally from within Islam as from Christianity, even in the Middle Ages – by laying all the blame at Christian feet. No one in the film — not even the fanatical Christian villains (who could get away with saying it, being the bad guys and all) — ever mentions that medieval Islam was spread chiefly through conquest, or that by the start of the Crusades in 1099, Muslim armies had invaded and conquered European territory on two fronts (the Iberian peninsula and the island of Sicily), and had begun an offensive in the East against the Byzantine Empire.
All of these changes would be forgivable, were it not for the fact that Scott and Monahan are clearly trying to say something about the modern world. Distorting history to make a point the facts don’t support is dishonest, as well as disrespectful to the audience. It’s also a betrayal of one’s own artistic integrity.
Scott had the opportunity here to say something truly prescient, and to confront viewers from all religions with equal amounts of courage about the dark side of their traditions. He could have given us, for once, a vision of the Crusades as they really were, with heroes and villains on all sides, a tale of deeply flawed but decent men like Balian and Salah al-Din, trying to transcend the madness of their times, and struggling for some truth in the hell of moral ambiguity that religious war always ironically conjures.
Instead, he has squandered his talents on a pedantic morality play peopled by caricatures who speak in platitudes, where all the villains come from Europe and there are apparently no bigots from the Levant. And in doing this, he has harmed not only public discourse, but – arguably a worse sin for a filmmaker – the dramatic potential of his own story.
As good a film as Kingdom of Heaven is, it could have been all the better had Scott and Monahan been more concerned about exploring the humanity of their characters (warts and all, all around) and less about impugning the motives of modern politicians.
Somehow, the effort seems beneath the auteur of Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise.
For those interested only in entertainment value, Kingdom of Heaven is a rousing, action-packed adventure tale well worth the price of admission. Just don’t expect to learn anything.
