The World of the Crusades

April 8, 2019
This entertaining, informative volume from Tyerman (God’s War), professor of the history of the Crusades at Oxford University, considers the Crusades from a human level. Tyerman places the events within a wider context of the material world: whether that be the physical crosses that crusaders possessed; changes in commerce and how campaigns were financed that came about due to the sudden influx of western Europeans in the Middle East; the castles crusaders built or occupied, lived in, and defended or lost control of; or the food they ate. Tyerman proceeds chronologically from the First Crusade in 1096 through later crusade-like wars in the Baltic region and an area that is in what would be present day southern France and Northern Spain, giving the reader a guided tour of the major military conflicts of the medieval period in Europe. Maps and pictures are also included, allowing readers to easily track the campaigns and get a sense of the historical artifacts Tyerman references. Interspersed throughout are brief standalone articles on particular items of interest, such as crusader medicine the Children’s Crusade, and the lingering effects of the Crusades on the contemporary Middle East. Historians and lay readers interested in the history of European conquest in the Middle East will relish this investigation into the grist of the Crusaders’ journey.

Starred review from July 24, 2006
This is likely to replace Steven Runciman's 50-year-old History of the Crusades
as the standard work. Tyerman (England and the Crusades
), lecturer in medieval history at Oxford University, demolishes our simplistic misconceptions about that series of ferocious campaigns in the Middle East, Muslim Spain and the pagan Baltic between 1096 and 1500. Abjuring sentimentality and avoiding clichés about a rapacious West and an innocent East, Tyerman focuses on the crusades' very human paradoxes: "the inspirational idealism; utopianism armed with myopia; the elaborate, sincere intolerance; the diversity and complexity of motive and performance." The reader marvels at the crusaders' inextinguishable devotion to Christ even while shuddering at their delight in massacring those who did not share that devotion. In the end, Tyerman says, what killed crusading was neither a lack of soldierly enthusiasm nor its failure to retain control of Jerusalem, but the loss of Church control over civil societies at home and secular authorities who felt that religion was not sufficient cause for war and that diplomacy was a more rational method of deciding international relations. God's War
is that very rare thing: a readable and vivid history written with the support of a formidable scholarly background, and it deserves to reach a wide audience. 16 color illus.

May 1, 2019
Tyerman has devoted his career to studying the Crusades, those military expeditions sanctioned and blessed by the pope or other high prelate of the Catholic Church, from the First Crusade (1096-9) almost to the seventeenth century (crusading privileges covered the Spanish Armada attacking England in 1588). Crusade objectives included, besides liberating Jerusalem from Muslim rulers, doing the same from Egypt to Turkey, conquering pagans in the Baltic region, evicting the Moors from Spain, and expunging Christian heresies in France, Italy, and Bohemia. The main text of this copiously illustrated volume chronicles all of the Crusades and the waxing and waning of the crusading impulse. Two-to-four-page inserts every few pages home in on a particular person, event, place, practice, or aspect, with titles that state their subjects: Taking the Cross, Interpreters, Jews and the Crusade, Communes on Crusade, The Children's Crusade, Sieges, Maps, and many more. The last chapter, Crusading: Our Contemporary?, surveys the controversial historiography and cultural impact of the Crusades to the present day. An authoritative and beautiful browsing reference.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)