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to have been preconditioned by the newly fashionable Robertsonian view. Lemoine’s entry was not obviously less well written or well researched than the others. He was clearer than the others in his description of the historiographical traditions: medieval writers seeing the crusades in religious terms as legitimate and salutary; later writers regarding them as ‘pious follies’; and, latterly, others, such as Robertson, accepting them as ‘necessary’ and positive in result if not action. That his ultimately hostile assessment received only an ‘honourable mention’ is
argued, the rise in free boroughs in the west. Gibbon used Voltaire’s very words in describing Louis IX, a victim of ‘holy madness’. Even his unusual criticisms of Saladin (‘a royal saint’, ‘in a fanatic age himself a fanatic’) seem forced, designed simply to be different rather than offering a new judgement based on critical consideration of the sources; literary knock-about not measured argument. However, in his summing up ‘the General Consequences of the Crusades’, Gibbon is compelled to take a clear position between what could be called a Humean and a Robertsonian