Customer Reviews

God's War: A New History of the Crusades

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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."

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.

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), [...]

In this book, which should surely be the standard history of the Crusades for some time, the full history of Crusading, its theology and ideology, as well as its force of arms and great extant is fully explained, analyzed and told. This is not popular history and the depth of study and great breadth of research covered surely dispels any thoughts that this is 'fun' history. It is not the story of slashing swords and knights and men. Instead this volume seeks to fill a great gap in the history of the Crusades by giving us a revised and new understanding of them.

The books central thesis is that the Crusades deserve to be understood as they were from the period they occurred in, rather than be viewed by present day analogies such as through the prism of 'racism', 'Colonialism' or 9/11. In one of the more poignant paragraphs the study states "One of the odder myths concerning the middle ages is of intolerant Christendom corrupting tolerant Islam". This book finally dares to go against the last 40 years of interpretation of the Crusades and challenge myths that claim the Crusades were all about profit or that they were precursors to colonialism and racism. Instead the Crusaders mostly lost money and lives and in fact there was much more nuance in the Crusader states, much more tolerance, than previously thought. In addition there was no difference between the Crusades and the Muslim Jihad that had been practiced since the 7th century and which had colonized part of Europe, in a similar manner of the Crusaders.

The book finally fills a great gap in Crusade history by examining the role of the Crusades in the 'reconquista' of Spain and in the Baltic region as well as crusades against Southern France and elsewhere. This is a great read, truly visionary and vast, however it is not history for everyone, it requires some general knowledge and is a lengthy text.

Its greatest contribution will be its ability to not be overly cynical and full of propaganda about the Crusades and finally examines much of the role of the church and theology in Crusading. Muslim and Jewish sources are employed in order to shed light on the Rhineland pogroms and the Latin States. There is great insight into the role of the diversity in the Middle East into how the Crusaders were actually accepted and allied with the Fatimids and others.

Seth J. Frantzman

The review from OP Filmmaker says it best but those thoughts are worth repeating so that the glowing reviews do not mislead. This is not a "history" in the style of most history books. It is an examination of the European social, religious, and political contexts of the crusades. The spotlight is on Europe, not the middle east, and on ideas, not events. What actually happened in the Holy Land is described briefly, in passing (to illustrate some point that Tyerman is making about European events), or not at all. On the other hand, the usually-ignored Albigensian and Baltic crusades are essential to the thesis and are discussed at length.

This is also not a military history. A couple of sieges are describe in some detail but the conduct of war and battle is really not part of the story Tyerman is trying to tell.

That story is enlightening and the book is useful as a companion to some other work - Runciman, for example - that recounts the historical events, or for those already familiar with them. But by presenting this as a "new history" rather than as a specialized work, the publisher has done a disservice to the author and the public. The book will disappoint those who start the struggle through Tyerman's unfortunately tendentious and clumsy prose expecting to be told "what happened" and get instead 900 pages about the background of why it happened.

First, I must add the disclaimer that I read this book over several months, in 5-25 page bits, so my experience may be different from yours. Having said that, this is a great work of history, Tyerman leaves out no detail, and maintains fantastic writing, including a great vocabulary with many words I had never even seen before, throughout this 1000+ page text. Some other reviewers have accused him of composing a boring work, and to a degree this is true; Tyerman goes into politics that can be tedious at times, and he deals with royal families that can be as large as they are repetitive. However, if you manage to go through this book deliberately, there is plenty of information and analysis to be had. For those of you looking for stories about Richard the Lion and romantic Curasade stories, this simply isn't your book. While Tyerman does touch on the these areas, he also discusses Crusades in Iberia, the Baltic, Anatolia, Egypt, and Cyprus, offering a perspective much broader than a focus simply on the Holy Land could muster. Finally, I would like to comment on the balance in sources Tyerman brings as an historian. He leaves no source unchallenged for bias, constantly seeking affirmatory or conflicting accounts, and more importantly he has a great command of the Arab and even Mongolian perspective of the Crusades, with many primary and secondary sources to back him. Overall, I recommend this book to any student of history, especially those with a few months to spare.

All I can say to this book's critics is that they should stick to, say, Tom Clancey. I teach and write military history for a living and consider God's War one of the finest works in the field to appear in a generation. It is long, but the subject is complex and covers far more than the battles in the Holy Land. Tyerman is one of the "new breed" of British historians working on the Middle Ages and has given the subject of the Crusades a state of the art treatment. It covers the story at length - good if one is interested in the subject - and does so with splendid empathy. If one doesn't read books because they won't fit in your shirt pocket, perhaps one should pass on this one. Of course, such a person would also pass on some of the masterpieces in various fields. (One thinks of "Citizen" by Simon Schama - brilliant, but long.) This is a truly great work and will stand as the central reference in English for two generations at least.

This book comes none too late to combat the prevalence of the postmodernist myth of the Crusades having been a conflict between intolerant Christianity and cosmopolitan Islam. Tyerman's introduction illuminates a central flaw in the modern West's view of its past:

"A familiar but baneful response to history is to configure the past as comfortingly different from the present day. Previous societies are caricatured as less sophisticated, more primitive, cruder, alien. Such attitudes reveal nothing so much as a collective desire to reassure the modern observer by demeaning the experience of the past."

With God's War, Tyerman brings to modern discourse on this most controversial and formative periods of the European past something that has been missing for centuries: objectivity. As Tyerman himself will readily admit, complete objectivity is impossible, and therefore he begins and ends this work in full recognition of its Eurocentric point of view. But unlike many commentators, Tyerman refuses to fall into the trap of issuing a moral verdict on the actions of his ancestors and their enemies. His mission is simple and pure; he comes to tell us a story of what happened and do so as honestly and directly as he can. He does not read cynicically into the motives of the actors and levies skepticism and criticism only where it is positively backed by the historical record. To these qualities I must also add that it is entertainingly written--a hundred Hollywood film scripts could come from this book. It is a long book, though, and those who are uninterested in details may want to stick to Wikipedia articles. If, however, you really want to learn just what was behind this bizarre alliance of Christianity and militarism, I highly recommend this excellent book.

This book is very complete, well researched and informative. Tyerman is obviously a first rate scholar with a very good command of the source materials. The book covers not only the well known middle-eastern crusades but also lesser known crusades in central and eastern Europe as well as France and Spain. It is difficult to think of a significant event not covered in depth by the book.

The book further is very evenhanded in its treatment of the subject. Various atrocities committed by each side are presented straightforwardly and put in context with the standards of conduct and warfare at the time. If Tyerman views one side more favorably than the other, it is impossible to tell which one from reading the book.

The only real draw back to the book is that Tyerman is just not a good story teller. He is not a bad writer. The book is clearly written and very readable. But the book is not a good story. Tyerman does not have a great eye for detail. He doesn't do a particularly good job of fleshing out the characters in the book or telling the story in a compelling way.

Overall this is a good book that is incredibly informative and worth having around. But be forewarned, it is not an easy read and is a bit of a slog to get through.

God's War is one of the best, and most in depth, histories I have ever read concerning not just the Crusades but also their influence on Medieval Europe. The Crusades were not only a series of wars but also a decisive point for European society on all levels. God's War explains how the Crusades, pushed by the Papacy but also by secular rulers for their own benefit, contributed not just to Islam's current state but also to the Europe we see today.

It should be noted that the Crusades not only targeted Muslims but also pagans in the Baltic as well as "heretics" in Southern France, Eastern Europe, and even the Holy Roman Empire itself. This fact alone cannot be ignored because too often the Crusades are regulated to a mere conflict between Christians and Muslims as if that were the only issue at stake during the centuries they were fought. While not going into quite as much depth as with the main offensives against the Holy Land, God's War gives a short but strong description of these smaller wars for the cross and their end results.

The most important aspect of this book is the social implication that the Crusades placed upon those who were either involved directly or indirectly. While the Crusades had an important impact on the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and the Baltic, they also had an impact in regions such as France, England, Burgundy, Sicily, the Holy Roman Empire, and other regions that produced many of the Crusaders. The most important area would be in terms of faith itself and how Christianity was seen through both secular and Church rule. Also affected were more domestic issues such as how kings could rule their lands and how the common men and women found their own world being changed through a new dynamic of faith crossed with the sword.

I am not surprised that some will see this work as either too slow in reading or even biased. In the first area, I would have to agree that the reading it slow during some points and perhaps over detailed. In regards to the second, I believe the only real bias is held by those who still see the world in draconian religious world views that perhaps are not too different from the mentality that drove the crusades themselves. A sad fact that is especially being played out in both Christian and Muslims worlds even today and indeed perhaps some of those who are currently alive would fit quite well into the world of the original crusades.