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God's War: A New History of the Crusades

God's War offers a sweeping new vision of one of history's most astounding events: the Crusades.From 1096 to 1500, European Christians fought to recreate the Middle East, Muslim Spain, and the pagan Baltic in the image of their God. The Crusades are perhaps both the most familiar and most misunderstood phenomena of the medieval world, and here Christopher Tyerman seeks to recreate, from the ground up, the centuries of violence committed as an act of religious devotion.The result is a stunning reinterpretation of the Crusades, revealed as both bloody political acts and a manifestation of a growing Christian communal identity. Tyerman uncovers a system of belief bound by aggression, paranoia, and wishful thinking, and a culture founded on war as an expression of worship, social discipline, and Christian charity.This astonishing historical narrative is imbued with figures that have become legends--Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus. But Tyerman also delves beyond these leaders to examine the thousands and thousands of Christian men--from Knights Templars to mercenaries to peasants--who, in the name of their Savior, abandoned their homes to conquer distant and alien lands, as well as the countless people who defended their soil and eventually turned these invaders back. With bold analysis, Tyerman explicates the contradictory mix of genuine piety, military ferocity, and plain greed that motivated generations of Crusaders. He also offers unique insight into the maturation of a militant Christianity that defined Europe's identity and that has forever influenced the cyclical antagonisms between the Christian and Muslim worlds.Drawing on all of the most recent scholarship, and told with great verve and authority,God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating and horrifying story that continues to haunt our contemporary world.From Publishers WeeklyThis 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.ReviewChristopher Tyerman has crafted a superb book whose majestic architecture compares with Runciman's classic study of the Crusades…He is an entertaining as well as reliable guide to the bizarre centuries-long episode in which Western Christianity willfully ignored its Master's principles of love and forgiveness.--Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Thomas Cranmer: a LifeThis is a magisterial work. In God's War, the Crusades are not just emblematic episodes in a troubled history of Europe's encounter with Islam. Tyerman shows that they are, with all their contradictions—tragedy and tomfoolery, idealism and cynicism, piety and savagery—fundamentally and inescapably human.--Paul M. Cobb, Associate Professor of Islamic History, Fellow of the Medieval Institute, University of Notre DameTyerman's wonderful book is contemporary medieval history-writing at the top of its game. It is also the finest history of the Crusades that anyone has ever written, fully informed by its predecessors and by the excellent scholarship of the past half century. Trenchantly written on the grand scale and full of vivid detail, clear argument, and sharp judgment,God's Warshows how the entire apparatus of crusade became tightly woven into European institutional and social life and consciousness, offering a highly original perspective on all of early European history and on European relations with non-Europeans. It shows no patience with ignorant mythologizing, modern condescension, or cultural instrumentalism.. In short, it constitutes a crusade history for the twenty-first century—and just in time.--Edward M. Peters, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, University of PennsylvaniaAt a time when interest in the Middle East and the Crusades has reached a new height, Christopher Tyerman has made a significant contribution to the ever-growing shelves of books devoted to this subject. Tyerman's well-written book focuses heavily on the development of ideas about holy war from antiquity onward and on the crusade to the East from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It is based on a careful reading of both primary and secondary sources and will prove an important resource for a broad audience of scholars, students, and general readers. The comparison with Runciman's history leaps out from the pages of this large volume and the temptation to address it will no doubt seduce others, but this volume is Tyerman through and through.--James M. Powell, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History, Syracuse UniversityThis is likely to replace Steven Runciman's 50-year-old History of the Crusades as the standard work. Tyerman, 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...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. Challenging traditional conceptions of the Crusades, e.g., the failure to retain Jerusalem, Tyerman believes that it was the weakening of papal power and the rise of secular governments in Europe that finally doomed the crusading impulse. This is a marvelously conceived, written, and supported book.--Robert J. Andrews

Christopher Tyerman

История18+

PENGUIN BOOKS

GOD’S WAR

‘A magisterial new history of the crusades… God’s War is rich is reassessments of individuals and institutions involved’

The Times Literary Supplement

‘A timely reminder of what lies behind current Muslim images of westerners… you will not find a saner or more balanced guide to all this than God’s War’ Irish Times

‘Told with passion and academic flair, Tyerman’s definitive and engrossing chronicle of the Crusades reads like a centuries-old epic of war, arrogance and the clash of cultures. Its place should be assured on the bookshelves of all politicians’ Western Mail

‘Confident descriptions, full of insight… written with dry humour’ Sunday Telegraph

‘This generation’s definitive history’ Chicago Tribune

‘A measured focus on the ideas and actions of people so different from ourselves… Tyerman writes well, sustaining interest as he moves through all the interwoven plot lines’ Financial Times

‘Displays massive erudition and patient synthesis… surely reflects the state of historical knowledge about the Crusades better than any other book’ New York Sun

‘Writes fluently and well… a serious, competent and well-written survey’ Tablet

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Tyerman is a Fellow in History at Hertford College, Oxford, and a lecturer in Medieval History at New College, Oxford. He is the author of England and the Crusades, The Invention of the Crusades and The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction.

CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN

God’s War

A New History of the Crusades

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

First published by Allen Lane 2006

Published in Penguin Books 2007

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction: Europe and the Mediterranean

The First Crusade

1 The Origins of Christian Holy War

2 The Summons to Jerusalem

3 The March to Constantinople

4 The Road to the Holy Sepulchre

Frankish Outremer

5 The Foundation of Christian Outremer

6 The Latin States

7 East is East and East is West: Outremer in the Twelfth Century

The Second Crusade

8 A New Path to Salvation? Western Christendom and Holy War 1100–1145

9 God’s Bargain: Summoning the Second Crusade

10 ‘The Spirit of the Pilgrim God’: Fighting the Second Crusade

The Third Crusade

11 ‘A Great Cause for Mourning’: The Revival of Crusading and the Third Crusade

12 The Call of the Cross

13 To the Siege of Acre

14 The Palestine War 1191–2

The Fourth Crusade

15 ‘Ehud’s Sharpened Sword’

16 The Fourth Crusade: Preparations

17 The Fourth Crusade: Diversion

The Expansion of Crusading

18 The Albigensian Crusades 1209–29

19 The Fifth Crusade 1213–21

20 Frontier Crusades 1: Conquest in Spain

21 Frontier Crusades 2: the Baltic and the North

The Defence of Outremer

22 Survival and Decline: the Frankish Holy Land in the Thirteenth Century

23 The Defence of the Holy Land 1221–44

24 Louis IX and the Fall of Mainland Outremer 1244–91

The Later Crusades

25 The Eastern Crusades in the Later Middle Ages

26 The Crusade and Christian Society in the Later Middle Ages

Conclusion

Notes

Select Further Reading

Select List of Rulers

Index

List of Illustrations

1. Jerusalem and its environs c.1100 (Corbis/Uppsala University Library, Sweden/Dagli Orti)

2. Urban II consecrating the high altar at Cluny, October 1095 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Lat. 17716 Fol. 91])

3. Peter the Hermit leading his crusaders (British Library, London [Ms Eggerton 1500 Fol. 45v])

4. Alexius I Comnenus, emperor of Byzantium 1081–1118 (Bridgeman Art Library)

5. The church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem idealized in later medieval western imagination (British Library, London [Ms Eggerton 1070 Fol. 5v])

6. The front cover of the Psalter of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (British Library, London [Ms Eggerton 1139])

7. Saladin: a contemporary Arab view (British Library, London)

8. The battle of Hattin, 4 July 1187: Saladin seizing the True Cross (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 26 Fol. 140])

9. Frederick I Barbarossa, emperor of Germany, receiving a copy of Robert of Rheims’s popular history of the First Crusade (Scala, Florence)

10. Embarking on crusade, from the statutes of the fourteenth-century chivalric Order of the Knot (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Fr. 4274 Fol. 6])

11. Women helping besiege a city, as at the siege of Acre, 1190 (British Library, London [Ms 15268 Fol. 101v])

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