God's War: A New History of the Crusades [Paperback]

Christopher Tyerman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2009

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.

(20060724)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Christopher 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 Life (20060915)

This 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 Dame (20061019)

Tyerman'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 War shows 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 Pennsylvania (20061101)

At 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 University (20061029)

This 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. (Publishers Weekly (starred review 20061209)

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 (Library Journal 20061017)

Christopher Tyerman, who teaches medieval history in Oxford, offers in his new and massive study of the Crusades as a whole a welcome synthesis for the general reader...Full of fascinating detail...God's War is a first-rate, scholarly, up-to-date, and highly readable survey of the entire crusading movement...In the gullible age of The Da Vinci Code, Tyerman offers a sane, informed, and gripping account of one of the most characteristic and most extraordinary manifestations of the Christian Middle Ages.
--Eamon Duffy (New York Review of Books 20061211)

Tyerman, an Oxford scholar, combines vigorous argument and nuanced analysis in this deeply learned chronicle of the Crusades...It's the best single-volume treatment of this still-controversial and fraught subject.
--Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz (The Atlantic 20070301)

A magisterial work...it is a shoo-in to become this generation's definitive history of the original Crusades, a series of military expeditions that temporarily returned the Holy Land to Christian rule in the Middle Ages. Hefty, encyclopedic and a darn good read, Tyerman's book has the rarest of virtues among myriad treatments of the subject: It doesn't bend history to preconceptions.
--Ron Grossman (Chicago Tribune 20070701)

Anyone who likes knights, castles and battles as much as I do will enjoy Christopher Tyerman's masterpiece God's War, a history of the Crusades written with great breadth, clarity and human sympathy: one of the achievements of the year.
--Dominic Sandbrook (Daily Telegraph )

With rekindled controversy about Western invasions of the Middle East, the Crusades of the late Middle Ages take on unanticipated relevance. It is thus a real boon for this strikingly effective book to appear at this time. The key to Tyerman's signal success is his ability to explain both the vicious brutality and the serious Christian altruism that were so intimately intertwined in the crusading experience and that have left such a tangled legacy for Muslim-Christian relations to this day.
--Mark A. Noll (Christian Century )

God's War is a long but highly readable account of this extensive back-and-forth struggle. It is an impressive achievement, a work that manages to tie together an extraordinary number of threads across nearly half a millennium of European history. Although it can be taken as a response to Pope Benedict XVI's comments at Regensburg, it is more properly read as an extended rejoinder to Steven Runciman's classic three-volume History of the Crusades, published in the early 1950s, a long and colorful account that is nonetheless studded with judgments that now seem prejudiced and amateurish. Tyerman, by contrast, is never amateurish. His knowledge of the period is encyclopedic, and his judgments are sharp, astute, and fair--which is to say unsparing--to both camps. He neither vilifies Islam nor engages in the easy Euro-bashing that is the obverse of Islamophobia. With so many people succumbing to subjectivism these days, it is bracing to come across a historian who remains resolutely above the fray, who insists on viewing the conflict as a whole and who always has the broader context in mind.
--Daniel Lazare (The Nation )

Christopher Tyerman's God's War is comprehensive, fascinating, and timely. It deflates comparisons of current U.S. strategies with the Crusades. True, the participation of religious in battle (like Odo on the Bayeux Tapestry) is noteworthy, but so is Tyerman's questioning of the cliché 'Age of Faith.' Indeed, while these books make the Middle Ages seem real, they also make it seem different, and our capacity to entertain the differences is morally crucial.
--Tom D'Evelyn (Providence Journal )

Christopher Tyerman's God's War: A New History of the Crusades is a doorstop of a book, a mammoth effort to retell, based on modern scholarship, the story of how Western Christendom made war to wrest the Holy Lands from Muslim hands. As we all know, this isn't considered ancient history in the Middle East.
--Fritz Lanham (Houston Chronicle )

This thick book compares favorably to Sir Steven Runciman's three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951-54), but where Runciman, writing a half century ago, saw the Crusades as Christianity's moral failure, Tyerman sees a violent era: neither Christians nor Moslems were peaceful, and both faced dangerous enemies...In addition to persuasive revisionist interpretations of individual crusades, Tyerman treats the broader scope of crusading, including Spain, the Balkans, and the Baltic. Most importantly for historians, the author sees nothing in the Crusades than can inform modem politics.
--W. L. Urban (Choice )

God's War is the new standard in the field...Adjectives for [it] almost fail. "Comprehensive," "monumental," and "epic" come to mind, and they are appropriate but scarcely adequate. In brief, this is a work by a master historian.
--Alfred J. Andrea (CT Review )

Christopher Tyerman...has written a tome that...draws on the most recent scholarship and offers fresh insights, demolishing myths galore.
--A. G. Noorani (Frontline )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1040 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (February 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674030702
• ISBN-13: 978-0674030701
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #296,042 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

149 of 158 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The definitive study of the crusades, November 10, 2006

By 

Loren Rosson III (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God's War: A New History of the Crusades (Hardcover)

With the insights of Jonathan Riley-Smith and ambition of Steven Runciman, Christopher Tyerman has written the definitive study of the crusades needed for a long time now. It's heavy reading at times, but well worth it and fun, a fascinating account of an alien era. I agree with the forecast that this will replace Runciman's hostile and misleading (if elegant) classic from the 50s.

Tyerman draws on corrective scholarship, demolishing myths about crusading motives, which had nothing to do with colonialism. Most crusaders expected to return home, and they knew they would take heavy financial losses. Nor was the papacy driven by economic interests: Urban II exploited the Byzantine request for military aid by working a new idea of holy war into his reformist agenda. Alongside the pacifist movement, the abolishment of simony, concubinage, and lay investiture, the crusades represented an attempt to secure papal leadership and power over secular authorities. "The crusade is impossible to understand outside of this wider context of church reform." So while it's true that the First Crusade was a defensive war only in a superficial sense -- Catholic territory wasn't threatened, and the Latins were hardly motivated to help the Greeks out of altruism -- there was no materialist agenda on the part of the papacy.

As oxymoronic as it sounds, the crusades were part of the reform movement stemming from puritan-radicals who took over the papacy in the 1040s. The Peace of God movement at home and holy wars abroad went in tandem, the former playing right into the inception of the latter. Christian knights had been living in contradiction, taught that violence was intrinsically evil even when necessary. What better way for the church to exploit this by channeling such aggression into a radically new cause which made warfare, for the first time ever, and under the right conditions, sacred? Crusaders were driven by religious zeal, the desire to protect holy places and secure their salvation; the papacy by reform and power-politics.

Tyerman also dispenses with lazy comparisons to the Islamic jihad. Unlike the crusade, the jihad was enjoined on the entire faith community (all able-bodied Muslims), and it was fundamental to faith, an actual sixth pillar of Islam. The crusade and jihad were both driven by militant zeal, but other commonalities are superficial.

The crusading phenomenon wasn't born overnight. It evolved, and this book has the length and patience to illustrate how. The success of the First Crusade didn't usher in a "new age" of crusading, especially since with the capture of Jerusalem there lacked an ongoing perceived threat. Enthusaism waxed and waned according to volatile perceptions (it hit a major low between the Second and Third Crusades, during which time holy wars were often mocked and dismissed as foolish and wasteful). Crises like the loss of Edessa in 1144 and Jerusalem in 1187 called forth sudden massive responses, a couple of papal bulls, and minimal doctrinal guidance. Only after the Fourth Crusade, and thanks to the ambitious vision of Innocent III (1198-1216), did crusading really come into its own as an established institution and public devotion, with all the logistics formalized. Now the crusades touched the daily lives of Europe's laity in the form of public processions, special prayers at mass, taxation, alms-giving -- all of this reinforced by popular stories and songs.

Particularly refreshing is Tyerman's analysis of historical figures, who come across as realistically complex. There's no clear division of good and bad guys here. Bohemund of Taranto wasn't the demon he's made out to be. Raymond III of Tripoli, far from a wise and cautious tactician, proved treasonously incompetent, and his rival Guy of Lusignan has been overly maligned. The outrageous Reynald of Chatillon, usually perceived as destructive to his allies as much as his enemies, might have actually been good for the crusader kingdom if not for his sixteen-year absence in a Muslim cell. Tyerman challenges assumptions often made about these people, and you're often unsure whether to dislike or warm to them -- or both.

When you've finished this 1000+ page tome, you'll feel like you've heard the papal bulls and gone on crusade yourself. It's amazing how the more we learn about holy wars the more difficult it becomes to judge them. As Tyerman concludes, "the personal decision to follow the cross, to inflict harm on others at great personal risk, at the cost of enormous privations, at the service of a consuming cause, cannot be explained, excused, or dismissed either as virtue or sin. Rather its very contradictions spelt its humanity."

97 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Folly and hubris; not quite ..., December 9, 2006

By 

OP Filmmaker "modulator" (imaginary zone) - See all my reviews

This review is from: God's War: A New History of the Crusades (Hardcover)

Christopher Tyerman writes "It would be folly and hubris to pretend to compete, to match, as it were, my clunking computer keyboard with his [Runciman's] pen, at once a rapier and a paintbrush; to pit one volume however substantial, with the breadth, scope and elegance of his three." This volume is a tremendous work of historical criticism, commenting on the entirety of the Crusades from the solid vantage of an accomplished and admired scholarship. But caveat emptor: it is commentary and criticism, not historical narrative in the style of Runciman. In Runciman's volumes, the people, times and places spring vibrantly to life. In Tyerman's, they are vehicles for making various points. Many of his points are perspicacious, but this is a specialist's book, meant for those already well-acquainted with the Crusades. You will want to have read a work like Runciman's _History of the Crusades_ first, before you read a commentary like this book.

53 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars unsurpassed, the new gold standard, January 17, 2007

By 

Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God's War: A New History of the Crusades (Hardcover)

Magisterial in scope, meticulous in detail, cautious in its conclusions, breathtaking in its bibliographic command of the original sources, and sparkling with literary style, the Oxford historian Christopher Tyerman has written what many medievalists have hailed as the single best book on the Crusades, one that is sure to supplant if not surpass Steven Runciman's three volume A History of the Crusades (1951-1954) as the new gold standard on the subject. Along the way he debunks numerous "glorious misconceptions," both scholarly and popular (eg, that an intolerant and hostile Christendom that was ignorant of the Middle East corrupted a tolerant Islam), about these iconic events of history where like no others "the past is captured in abiding cultural myths of inheritance, self-image, and destiny."

Tyerman cautions against two common responses to our historical past. One is "condescending historical snobbery"--to caricature the past as "comfortingly different" from the present, and to dismiss our forbears as less sophisticated, more cruel, credulous, and hypocritical than we are today. Two hundred million deaths to war in the last century belie that error. Another mistake is to use the past as a "mirror to the present," as if the atrocities of the Crusades presaged today's massacres. Tyerman does not exonerate Christendom from its sanctification of slaughter, but he reminds us that Christians did no more than what many religions have done in demonizing its enemies, taxing its citizens to kill them, redrawing maps to conquer and dominate sacred space (cf. Israel in 1948, he suggests), and even allowing those whom they conquered to live in peaceful co-existence under their new rule.

Until the time of Constantine, many Christians rejected the notion of war. Tyerman traces the subsequent changing attitudes from reluctance, to accomodation, to a "gospel of indiscriminate hate," and finally to the "irreconcilable paradox" whereby followers of the prince of peace who taught the Sermon on the Mount unleashed a fury of carefully orchestrated butchery, barbarism, and bigotry. The scale, scope and complexities of the Crusades are almost unimaginable--the recruitment, military logistics, preaching tours, propaganda campaigns, technologies of warfare, financing, sea-faring, international trade, treaty-making, etc. For 500 years, from Urban II's preaching campaign in 1095-1096 to "the last crusader" Pope Pius II (1405-1464), from Greenland to Iberia and from England to Iraq, the church not only justified organzied violence but sacralized it and declared it meritorious. Nordic pagans, European Jews, Muslims in Spain and the Middle East, and fellow Christians in Constantinople or France (the heretical Cathars) were all exterminated at various times. When the slaughters ended, Tyerman shows how the crusader mentality had permeated public consciousness so broadly and deeply that it expressed itself in literature, liturgy, art, architecture, and even in wills that left inheritances to fund crusades.

"External manifestations" of the Crusades, writes Tyerman at the end of a thousand pages, "can be observed. Yet the internal, personal decision to follow the cross, to inflict harm on others at great personal risk, at the cost of enormous privations, at the service of a consuming cause, cannot be explained, excused or dismissed either as virtue or sin. Rather, its very contradictions spelt its humanity." For a shorter and more popular version of the same material see Tyerman's Fighting for Christendom; Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford, 2004, 264 pages), [...]