The Crusades: Introductions

What is the best modern introduction to the Crusades? The traditional answer would be Sir Steven Runciman’s three-volume A History of the Crusades. However, its arguments have been largely revised by recent scholarship, and its celebrated prose is perhaps beginning to show its age. Thankfully, a number of excellent histories of the Crusades have been published in recent years. All of them are completely abreast with modern scholarship, and all can justifiably lay claim to having taken up Runciman’s mantle.

The first is The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge. In this lengthily (it comes in at around 750 pages) but gripping book, Asbridge provides a grand narrative of the conflict between Crusaders and Muslims in the Holy Land between 1095 and 1291. But – crucially – he tells the story from both sides. For example, Part I: The Coming of the Crusades describes the origin of Crusading, the First Crusade and the foundation of the Crusader States from the viewpoint of Western Christendom. But Part II: The Response of Islam switches dramatically to an Islamic perspective and describes the rise of Zengi, Nur ad-Din and Saladin. The effect of this method is that Asbridge not only gives us a compelling account of the Crusades and Outremer; he also tells us how crusading was viewed by contemporary Muslims and how it affected religion and politics in the near East.     

The second is Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades by Jonathan Phillips. The work is, as Phillips states in the introduction, ‘aimed squarely at the general reader’. And this objective amply fulfilled: the book is extremely readable and assumes no prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Holy Warriors differs from The War for the Holy Land in several ways. First, it is more economic and comes in at around 400 pages. Second – and linked to the first – Phillips doesn’t provide us with a detailed, step-by-step history of the Crusades; rather, he focuses on the key events in the history of the movement and makes them understandable by centring his narrative on important (and often telling) individuals. For example, in Chapter 2 Phillips deals with the subject of the ‘relations between Muslims and Franks in the Levant [between] 1099-1187’ by giving the reader biographies of the Damascene legist Al-Sulami, the prolific writer Usma ibn Munqidh and the Spanish pilgrim Ibn Jubayr. Third, its geographical scope is broader: Phillips takes a ‘pluralist’ approach and looks at crusades in Spain, Southern France and Eastern Europe. Lastly, although Asbridge does touch upon the subject, Phillips closes his work with an in-depth account of how the idea of crusading has been utilised in the modern era – the discussion ranges from the damning critiques of Enlightenment thinkers such as Gibbon and Voltaire, to Giuseppe Mazzini’s use of crusading ideology as a means of drawing people to the Young Italy group, to the appropriation of crusading imagery by Arab Nationalists and Islamists, to George W. Bush’s infamous utterance on the south lawn of the White House.

The final book is God’s War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman. This is the longest work of them all: it comes in at 1023 pages, and the typeface isn’t doing the myopic reader any favours. But it is by no means prolix. On the contrary, the book is a dense and taut and brilliant overview of crusading between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the work is of interest to both the casual and the academic reader: Tyerman’s accounts of crusade recruitment and preaching are superb, and his discussion of the crusade of 1248-54 is the best known to me. Unlike Asbridge and to a lesser extent Phillips, Tyerman’s ‘perspective is Western European.’ But what the work lacks in perspective, it makes up for in detail and scope. We are treated to expansive discussions of the origins of the idea of crusading; the Albigensian Crusade; crusading in Spain; society in Outremer; crusading in the Baltic; the crusade against the Hussities, etc. In the preface Tyerman declares that ‘it would be folly…. to pretend to compete, to match, as it were, my clunking computer keyboard with [Runciman’s] pen… to pit one volume, however substantial, with the breadth, scope and elegance of his three.’ One is left thinking this may be undue modesty.    

     

It is impossible to recommend one of these books over the others. They are all excellent. But I hope my brief outline of their content will help readers choose which is most suited to them.