The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 [Paperback]

Jonathan Riley-Smith (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521646030 | ISBN-13: 978-0521646031 | Publication Date: November 28, 1998

Much has been written about the crusades, but very little about the crusaders. What moved them to go? What preparations did they need to make? How did they react to their experiences? This book comes up with detailed answers to these questions, and offers the first systematic reading of a large cache of contemporary source material. The author identifies family clusters of crusaders across Europe, whose collective commitment manifested itself in support for the new settlements in the East.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...remarkable and remarkably fine book....There were times I simply could not put this book down. It is an astonishing achievement." William Chester Jordan, Studies in Christianity and Culture

"Riley-Smith has made a new range of source material available for the study of the First Crusade and the early years of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem." Bernard Hamilton, The International History Review

"There can be no doubt that a volume so rich in ideas and documentation will inspire many to pick up where Riley-Smith has left off." Michael Gervers, Canadian Journal of History

"Riley-Smith's expertise enables him not only to make a convincing argument for the importance of blood relationships to the dominance of families like the Montlhérys but also to offer a variety of incidental clarifications and insights." Speculum

"The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 is a mature work of a leading scholar in the field of Crusade history that displays the results of years of detailed research and thought. Such thorough and extensive use of cartulary evidence is surprisingly rare. The result is a largely fresh view of the old topic of the Crusaders' motivation and a vastly more detailed portrayal of the mechanics and logistics behind the First Crusade. Riley-Smith is careful to include the basic explanations that make this book accessible to beginning students and scholars in other fields. This would be an excellent book to help those outside the field of Medieval West European history to understand how the Crusade movement made sense. It would also help students become acquainted with the European primary sources for the Crusades." International Journal of Middle East Studies

Book Description

Much has been written about the crusades, but very little about the crusaders. What moved them to go? What preparations did they need to make? How did they react to their experiences? This book comes up with detailed answers to these questions, and offers the first systematic reading of a large cache of contemporary source-material. The author identifies family clusters of crusaders across Europe, whose collective commitment manifested itself in support for the new settlements in the east.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (November 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521646030
• ISBN-13: 978-0521646031
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,055,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written and thoroughly researched, May 24, 2004

By 

Ariel Sweet (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Hardcover)

This book provides a balanced and very well researched account of the men and women who participated in the First Crusade. From the amount of information that Riley-Smith includes in this work, it is clear that he really knows his stuff. Sometimes the detailed accounts of the crusader's lives is a little hard to slog through, but it definitely helps support his argument. I would have liked a more general overview of the First Crusade towards the beginning of the work. I don't know much about the history of the Crusades, and I had to piece together the sequence of events as Riley-Smith mentioned them throughout his work. But besides this complaint, the book was a good read.

4.0 out of 5 stars The importance of kinship among early crusaders, January 10, 2012

By 

Actinograph - See all my reviews

This review is from: The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Paperback)

Jonathan Riley-Smith's writing style exhibits a degree of militancy that makes one wonder if the Crusades themselves have not influenced his prose. On numerous occasions throughout The First Crusaders, 1095-1131, he switches to the first person in order to embolden his declarations, making statements such as "I have records of over forty other families in each of which at least two members took the cross for the First Crusade," as if anticipating that the reader will ask him to produce these records immediately. The eagerly persuading element of his personality, which Terry Jones' 1995 documentary The Crusades captured on film, emerges in the text of this work.

Yet his rather pugnacious style does not overshadow the effectiveness of his argument and methods. Those records which one can imagine him waving at an interlocutor are primarily a large number of charters relating to property exchanges arising from preparations for early crusades. Using letters and narratives when possible to sketch a fuller picture of individuals mentioned in the charters, Riley-Smith compiled a computer database of hundreds of early crusaders, their backgrounds, and their activities. The database allowed him to evaluate relationships among crusaders, leading him to conclude that the crusading movement was especially susceptible to takeovers by family networks during its early stages, with the Montlhéry kin group as his early crusader family par excellence.

Although the first three chapters of his book contain background information and interpretations of the crusades which exist elsewhere--evident in his frequent citation of secondary sources during these early chapters--for the rest of the book Riley-Smith delves into his database to support his more novel argument in earnest. His large collection of computer-organized data allows him to note that crusaders tended to occur in clusters, sometimes within specific geographical areas due to local patronage networks, but more often within kinship networks. This pattern suggests that family networks rapidly transmitted the call to crusade to their members and that if one member of a family network took the cross, others were likely to follow. Family trees made possible through the database also show that women, who bound two families together through marriage and childbirth, often spread the crusading impulse from their father's to their husband's family. However, here a weakness emerges in Riley-Smith's work which is a product of his heavy reliance on charters: while the charters suggest that women influenced their relatives to take the cross, they reveal no details of this process. At a broader level, nor do they reveal why some families were prone to crusading while others were not. Charters are useful in that they document actions, but they shed little light on motivations. Riley-Smith conjectures that family traditions of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, support for the reform papacy, and veneration of saints related to pilgrims or crusading could motivate family members to go on crusade. But he admits that families with these traditions were often not involved in the crusades, and even by the end of his book the phenomenon of certain families being "collectively predisposed" to crusading never receives satisfactory explanation.

What he does explain, however, is why kinship networks might have taken a large enough interest in the crusades to dominate the movement once their members began to join. Gathering funds and supplies for a crusade, combined with arranging for the protection of one's property, family, and soul while away all required intrafamilial cooperation. For although taking the cross was very much an individual choice, fulfilling one's vow required major group support. Even when the flow of new crusaders shrunk following the First Crusade, group support networks arranged along the original lines of kinship remained and continued to support their members who had remained in the Holy Land.

Riley-Smith's key to elevating the family network from having been merely an influential unit in the Holy Land to having been the potentially dominant unit in the Holy Land rests in downplaying the role of church support for crusaders. This seems counterintuitive at first, considering that the church pledged to support crusaders in such ways as looking after crusaders' possessions while they were away and liquefying assets for them through land sales. Because ecclesiastical records rarely show secular land transactions, Riley-Smith surmises that those secular transactions which do appear may be "the tip of an iceberg," despite their relative rarity. If this is true, financial support from the church would not have been so prominent. He also recounts an episode in which a major bishop, Ivo of Chartres, failed to protect a crusader's interests at home during a legal battle. Using these and similar pieces of evidence, Riley-Smith reduces the importance of church support. Family support became the backbone of the crusading movement and thus families might rise to prominence through activity in the Latin East.

Riley-Smith cements the plausibility of his argument by showing how the Monthléry family did just that. Members of the family settled in the Latin East and gained influential positions after the First Crusade, invited new settlers from the family to join them, and eventually installed one of their own, Baldwin of le Bourcq, as king of Jerusalem in 1118. This family was of the middle-nobility, and ultimately, The First Crusaders' worth lies in its treatment of this group during the early crusades--a group which many scholars tend to ignore in favor of magnates or popular crusaders. It also deserves praise as a model for using computer technology to help identify patterns in large amounts of qualitative data. Yet if Riley-Smith succeeds in identifying and applying patterns, he flounders when it comes to explaining their origins.

5.0 out of 5 stars The First Crusaders, 195-1131, March 8, 2008

By 

G. Oosterhoudt "genealogy buff" (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Paperback)

The First Crusaders, 1095-1131
Amazingly detailed and researched, but I would expect nothing less from Jonathan Riley-Smith. (He also wrote the book The Crusades.) This book lists every possible participant in the First Crusade, complete with documentation and, if at all possible, the location of origin of each. If you need to know about a particular ancestor who may have fought in the First Crusade, this would be your absolute best source with which to start - Mr. Riley-Smith lists in complete detail all of his original source material, along with a lengthy bibliography. You can't do better than this as a start in your search for ancestors in the First Crusade.