David Appleby, Twentieth Century Fox Orlando Bloom stars in Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven." Click photo for larger image.

PASADENA, Calif. -- A year after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cambridge's Jonathan Riley-Smith -- the early Ridley Scott critic who is perhaps the best-known living historian of the Crusades -- was invited to Virginia to lecture at Old Dominion University. He also spoke to analysts at both the FBI and CIA about Osama bin Laden's rhetorical use of the Crusades.

Riley-Smith went on to publish a version of his Old Dominion talk as "Islam and the Crusades in History and Imagination, 8 November 1898 -- 11 September 2001."

"One often reads that Muslims have inherited from their medieval ancestors bitter memories of the violence of the crusaders," he wrote. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

What actually happened, according to Crusades historians -- Riley-Smith's analysis draws in part on the work of Carole Hillenbrand of the University of Edinburgh, whose book "The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives" is the pre-eminent work examining the Muslim point of view -- is that after Muslims expelled the Crusaders, they mostly put this unpleasant episode behind them. If they did look back, it was with what Riley-Smith describes as "indifference and complacency." After all, they'd won. They'd faced far greater challenges, among them a frightful onslaught by the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan.

In Europe, the Crusades stayed high-profile. They were romanticized by medieval chroniclers as the height of chivalry, and later portrayed as the precursors of European colonialism.

Through all this, the figure of Saladin, the legendary Kurdish leader Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, became rooted in the European imagination as the worthiest and most chivalrous Crusader opponent, just as he is in "Kingdom of Heaven." In Damascus, by contrast, his tomb was allowed to decay.

Riley-Smith's mention of Nov. 8, 1898, refers to a remarkable manifestation of this contrast. On that day, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany "laid a satin flag and a wreath, with an inscription dedicated to 'the Hero Sultan Saladin'" on Saladin's grave, which he'd apparently had some trouble locating. He then paid to restore the tomb and included "another wreath, this time bronze gilt, and inscribed 'From one great emperor to another.' "

But the Muslim world's take on the Crusades was about to change. It began to look at these ancient wars through the European lens, and what it saw was: colonial oppression.

The head of the Ottoman Empire, which was rapidly losing territory to Europeans, asserted that his foes were engaged in a new Crusade. World War I and its aftermath brought a renewed British and French presence in the old Crusader territories of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria -- "Behold, Saladin, we have returned," one French military governor proclaimed.

The Crusade metaphor was picked up by Arab nationalists. Saladin was revived as an inspirational figure. Later he would be embraced by the likes of Syria's Hafez Assad and Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Radical Islamists adopted the metaphor and extended it. They argued, Riley-Smith notes, that "any offensive, including a drive for economic or political hegemony, against Islam anywhere by those who call themselves Christians" was a form of Crusading, along with similar actions by surrogates such as the "Crusader state" of Israel. Such notions help fuel al-Qaida -- and are widely shared by moderate Muslims who wouldn't dream of initiating violence themselves.

"Since 9/11 I've done countless interviews," says Saint Louis University historian Thomas Madden, and the interviewers often ask "how the Crusades 'created' the situation in the Middle East. My answer is: They had nothing to do with the current situation. But the recasting of the Crusades that came out of 19th-century colonialism -- that's what did it.""My goal here is to see programming that satisfies a broad constituency."