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Kingdom of Heaven, the historical epic about the Crusades which opens Friday and stars Orlando Bloom, might be fine entertainment, but is it history?

Three scholars came to the film's junket to speak on the movie's historical veracity or lack thereof. Nancy Caciola is a historian with the University of California, San Diego, and author of Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages; Hamid Dabashi is a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University in New York and author of Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future; and Donald Spoto is a full-time writer and former professor of theology whose books include Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi.

What follows is an edited transcript of their panel discussion.

Who's going on these Crusades?

Nancy Caciola: Just about anyone who can afford it, and in fact many people who can't and who are just struggling to get overseas. When Pope Urban II calls the First Crusade in 1096, he's urging anyone who can possibly go to participate in this particular enterprise. It's understood as being both a military expedition but also something that is sort of good for your soul. It's a way of doing penance for your sins, as we see at the beginning of the movie. So I think there is a mingling of motivations here. People are sincerely pious and religious, people are at the same time seeking their own material best self-interests, and people are quite frankly concerned about the situation in Jerusalem—they want to regain this city, and they want to defend it after they do regain it in 1099. So it's a very mixed motivation, and it's an enterprise that attracts people who are highly committed.

Were the European leaders using the Crusades to distract people from their poverty?

Caciola: Europe is actually relatively prosperous in this time period. There are very good crop yields; we know that the weather was very good at this particular period of time, so there isn't huge famine; there aren't huge plagues. The 12th century in particular is considered a sort of early Renaissance moment in European history. One of the things that it does do, is it draws off an element of history that is destabilizing, and that is these younger sons who are brought up with certain expectations of a certain lifestyle, and then don't really have the ability to maintain it as they achieve adulthood. If you don't have an estate, if you don't have a means of material self-support, you cannot marry and have a family and children, so you're kind of condemned to eternal bachelorhood and being on the fringes of the society you grew up in. Many of these people become robbers and outlaws, and one of the things that the Crusades do accomplish is they give these people a purpose that is sanctioned by the Pope and the leadership of society and that is seen as productive, although we from our perspective might quibble about how productive a major war is.

What is the significance of Jerusalem to the Muslim world?

Hamid Dabashi: First and foremost, I am here as a fan of Ridley Scott's cinema. I think it is extremely important, when you talk about historical issues such as the Crusades, to make a distinction between events that were happening at the time of the Crusades, between 1095 when the First Crusade is launched, and 1202 when the Fourth Crusade is launched. It has happened, it is an historically relevant matter, but it is only tangentially relevant to Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. As a work of art, it is located between historical events and contemporary issues. One should make these three distinctions quite significant. We must locate Kingdom of Heaven in his other works and not just look at it in isolation. So whatever discussion about history we have, one should not reduce this or assimilate it backwards into history. This is not a documentary; this is a work of art by a major filmmaker.

The significance of Jerusalem for Jews and Christians is obvious. So far as the Muslims are concerned, according to their religious belief, the prophet ascended to the heavens from the site of where we now have the Dome of the Rock, and in the 7th century, a monument was built on that site, which is called the "noble sanctuary." As a result, if you were to visit Jerusalem today, it's very difficult in fact to separate the Jewish sacred sites, the Muslim sacred sites and the Christian sacred sites. The religious significance is one thing, but it has also historically been at the main conjunction of a trade route, and has always been significant economically as well as religiously. And in fact, after the First Crusade and the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, initially of course there is a bloodbath that follows, but soon after that, Jerusalem emerges as a cosmopolitan centre in which Christians and Muslims and eventually Jewish communities live side by side.

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Director Sir Ridley Scott, a self-described agnostic, and leading man Orlando Bloom, discuss their new film about the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, opening in theaters Friday