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The Craft of Zeal: Crusades and Sacred Violence
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9798187994069
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 19 2026
Pages: 428
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 19 2026
Pages: 428
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Every age is certain that its great convulsions were written in the stars. Afterward the survivors and the chroniclers agree, almost without discussion, that it had to happen. This book is an argument against that comfortable certainty, and an instrument for seeing straight through it.
Beneath the crusades runs a machine that does not care what banner it flies. A society stores up more restless, armed energy than it can spend at home. An ideology arrives to hand that energy a target and a clean conscience. An authority discovers that it profits by aiming the surplus outward. A small, almost accidental spark lights the whole thing, and if the first attempt happens to succeed, that piece of luck is quietly rewritten, ever after, as destiny.
Beneath the crusades runs a machine that does not care what banner it flies. A society stores up more restless, armed energy than it can spend at home. An ideology arrives to hand that energy a target and a clean conscience. An authority discovers that it profits by aiming the surplus outward. A small, almost accidental spark lights the whole thing, and if the first attempt happens to succeed, that piece of luck is quietly rewritten, ever after, as destiny.
Following the crusading world from an improbable sermon in 1095 to the last tower falling at Acre in 1291, The Craft of Zeal shows the same engine turning over beneath the early Islamic conquests, the Reconquista, and, with a secular creed swapped in for a sacred one, the mass movements of the modern age. Then it rotates the lens toward the grievances and feeds of the present, and at last toward the reader's own life, which pools its energy, is aimed by its own quiet routers, locks onto a path through a single early accident, and afterward calls that accident fate.
No equations and no jargon, only language, story, and a way of asking, of any mobilization whatever: who loaded this, who aimed it, and who profits from calling it inevitable.
The book is based on academic paper: Kriger, P. (2026). Charged Systems and Contingent Sparks: Formal Models of Contingency and Inevitability in the Crusading Phenomenon. IIIR Computational Humanities and Cultural Systems. https: //doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21435866 Keywords: crusades; sacred violence; philosophy of history; contingency and inevitability; mass movements; ideology and belief; self-knowledge
No equations and no jargon, only language, story, and a way of asking, of any mobilization whatever: who loaded this, who aimed it, and who profits from calling it inevitable.
The book is based on academic paper: Kriger, P. (2026). Charged Systems and Contingent Sparks: Formal Models of Contingency and Inevitability in the Crusading Phenomenon. IIIR Computational Humanities and Cultural Systems. https: //doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21435866 Keywords: crusades; sacred violence; philosophy of history; contingency and inevitability; mass movements; ideology and belief; self-knowledge
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