It is hard to imagine a contemporary novelist who would do justice to the Crusades.

The reason is simple: Who these days would treat the Crusaders as real people, as individuals rather than mere puppets representing Western brutality, hypocrisy, ignorance, racism, “judgmentalism” and imperialism — everything that fits the modern secular-ist's definition of “sin"?

Even many Catholics are ashamed of the Crusaders. Whenever Muslims or Eastern Christians condemn the knights of the cross, Catholics are ready to chant, “Mea culpa, mea culpa.”

But the obvious fact is that the Crusaders were like us: individuals who justified their actions to themselves, who were neither entirely villainous nor entirely good. In short, they were real people, not caricatures. A true historical novelist would convey this reality. And one of the great, and now sadly neglected, historical novelists of the 20th century is Alfred Duggan — a writer admired by Evelyn Waugh — who does just that.

Duggan, who was born in 1903 and Oxford educated, did not begin his career as a novelist until his 40s, after extensive travel in the former empire of the Byzantines. His first novel, and his most famous, is Knight with Armour: A Novel of the Crusades, recently returned to print by Cassell Military Paperbacks and distributed in the United States by Sterling Publishing.

It is a book I highly recommend. In it, one meets a young, not terribly well-to-do — but very well-meaning — Norman knight who leaves England to serve in the First Crusade. He is a good man but no great shakes as a knight. He fails at romance (to the point of wishing he had taken holy orders) and his courage fails him on the battlefield (his courage is more than once shored up by brave priests). He is in many respects an everyman — the perfect sort of man to make the Crusades real to us.

Through him we get the confidence of the Normans, men who “can march into any strange land, conquer it and settle in it no matter what the customs of the people.” We also see how alien the Eastern Christians were to the Catholics of the feudal West. Catholic Europe was a Europe of oaths — of personal loyalty and reciprocal obligation, of rights and privileges, of Catholicism seeking to create and defend Christ's Kingdom.

THE SANCTIFIED IMAGINATION

Authors who touch on Catholic themes

But the Christians in the East are not suffused with “active” Western Christianity or with oath-bound obligations. They have no knights. They have soldiers, men who serve for pay. They have no feudalism. They are “oath-breakers” — men whose relationships are determined exclusively by the cash nexus. They are men who do not believe in and do not seek a universal Christendom.

As a Catholic priest in the novel notes: “The Greeks say that an infidel will never turn away from his idolatry, but it only shows that they don't try hard enough to convert them. They don't preach, and they won't trouble to learn the local language; in fact, I don't think they really want anyone to be saved who is not a subject of their emperor.”

Though the Crusaders come to defend the Eastern Christians, the Eastern Christians treat them with disdain, as distasteful mercenaries to be kept at arm's length, not as “pilgrims” such as the Crusaders think of themselves. While the crusading knights serve lords (and above them, kings, and above kings, the pope), each of whose authority is inherent, the Eastern emperor has in the Easterners’ own view, “no more right to his throne than [anyone else]. … He had won it in battle and would hold it until he was overthrown by a stronger. No wonder these Easterners needed Normans to defend them, rebels, schismatics and oath-breakers that they were.”

After a slow prelude in England, in which the author's learning is a bit heavily worn, Knight with Armour becomes an excellent account of what it was like to serve in the First Crusade.

We meet knights out to enrich themselves by colonizing the East as feudal lords; knights who are ne‘erdo-well adventurers; and idealistic knights — and common infantry — questing to serve God, rescue their fellow (if schismatic) Christians and reclaim the Holy Land from the infidel.

Every male Jacques and female Juliet among them is a fully drawn individual.

One learns why the staircases in castles curve the way they do (it has to do with attack and defense), feels the physical discomforts of a medieval campaign, and hears musings on the practical and theological pros and cons of wife beating.

Knight with Armour is written with great insight, wit and wisdom. Read it, pass it to your sons and give a copy to any Catholic who would condemn the “pilgrims” who suffered so much and fought so hard in defense of our faith at the pope's command.

H. W. Crocker III is the author of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History.

His comic novel, The Old Limey, has recently been reissued in paperback.

Knight with Armour is available for $9.95 (paperback) in bookshops nationwide.