BOOK REVIEW : The Gore and the Glory: Three Centuries of Mideast Crusades : DUNGEON, FIRE AND SWORD: The Knights Templar in the Crusades <i> by John J. Robinson</i> ; M. Evans; $21.95; 512 pages

“Dungeon, Fire and Sword” is the story of a multinational coalition that sent its armies into the heart of the Middle East to do battle with the forces of militant Islam.

It’s a story of diplomatic intrigue and religious passion, hostage-taking and torture and the struggle between East and West for the making of a new world order.

It’s not a book about Operation Desert Storm: “Dungeon, Fire and Sword” is a history of the Crusades, and all of these somehow familiar encounters between Islam and the Christian world took place a thousand years ago.

John J. Robinson, a historian with a flair for storytelling, insistently reminds us that the conflict between Christianity and Islam in the Middle East is hardly new, and his book is full of linkages between the exotica of the distant past and the clangor of today’s headlines.

For example, Robinson has chosen to tell the story of the Crusades by focusing on the army of “warrior-monks” known as the Knights Templar, a band of Christian knights who dedicated themselves to defending the pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land--and eventually grew into a global order of fabulous wealth and legendary ferocity in battle.

The very name of the Knights Templar, as Robinson points out, derives from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Templars were headquartered. Near this very same temple, stone-throwing by Arab worshipers led to gunfire by Israeli troops in 1990--a reminder that the holy places of three religions are still a flash point of world conflict.

Robinson has delved deeply into the secret (and tragic) history of the Knights Templar, an order with the same “aura of myth and magic” that attached itself to the Jesuits and the Freemasons. But he insists that reality alone is enough to tantalize and amaze us when it comes to the Templars, who were innovators in both international finance and the art of war.

Each member of the order was bound up in a web of secret rites and rituals that were designed to strengthen his vows of chastity, poverty and obedience in his lifelong battle against the infidel.

Unlike other medieval knights, he held no hope of being ransomed if captured in battle, and he was expected to fight to the death. A Templar was forbidden to embrace even his own mother, and he was required to wear a white lambskin girdle at all times “as a reminder of his vow of chastity.”

“That rule did not interfere with bathing, for the Templar was never to bathe his body,” Robinson cracks. “The rule never to remove his sheepskin drawers and not to bathe for years on end in a blistering hot climate may have helped the Templar knight to adhere to his vow of chastity.”

Robinson approaches the inflammatory subject of Christian-Muslim encounters with a certain aplomb. He allows us to understand that the cross-pollination between the Muslim and Christian civilizations began early and continued throughout the Crusades, and he reminds us that muslin, gauze, morris dancing, the cavalry saber and even the name Gibraltar are all borrowings from the Islamic world.

Still, I detected a greater relish for the sensational when it comes to describing the more inflammatory aspects of Islam in conflict with the West.

The brutality of the Crusaders is not ignored: Robinson points out that the Crusaders torched a monastery full of Greek Orthodox monks and threatened their Eastern Orthodox brethren with torture to discover the location of the True Cross. And the Knights Templar themselves ultimately fell victim to the worst excesses of the Inquisition.

But his description of Islamic excess somehow raises more gooseflesh. For example, he lingers on the sexual fantasies of the cult of Assassins, and he gives us several examples of trophy-taking: “Raymond’s head was struck off,” he writes of one Crusader who was taken in battle, “and later boiled and cleaned, so that his gleaming skull could be encased in a beautiful silver mounting to be sent to the caliph of Baghdad as a trophy of Muslim supremacy.”

Precisely because Robinson chronicles three centuries of crusading, he must occupy himself with the drearier comings and goings of the crusaders and their various cohorts.

That’s why we get sentences that may tax the reader’s short-term memory: “In 1145, Queen Melisende of Jerusalem sent the bishop of Jabala to the new Pope, Eugenius III, with a frantic appeal for help. . . .” And the sheer number of kings named Baldwin--five in all--sent me to Robinson’s useful charts, maps and glossaries.

More often, however, Robinson goes for the gore and the glory. He delights in describing battle, torture and intrigue.

“Dungeon, Fire and Sword” is the stuff of romantic fiction of the most lurid kind, and he does not hesitate to make good use of the saga of the Knights Templar and the Crusades to seize and hold our attention.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Not Till the End of the World” by Rebecca Stowe (Pantheon).