Book Review, 21 July 2006
Reviewed by Jonathan Riley-Smith

Knight's tales: beoynd the bluster

God’s War: a new history of the Crusades
Christopher Tyerman
Allen Lane, £30
Tablet bookshop price £27 Tel 01420 592974

I wish publishers would calm down and provide us with more helpful guides to the books they market. The publicity material for God's War describes Crusaders as "warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust" and it includes a puff in which a distinguished scholar (not well known for his expertise in this particular field) asserts that the Crusades constituted "a bizarre centuries-long episode in which Western Christianity wilfully ignored its Master's principles of love and forgiveness". It is a relief to be able to report that God's War in no way corresponds to this overheated and blimpish rhetoric.

Christopher Tyerman distances himself from self-righteous judgementalism, and his measured and sensible account suggests that while bluster may be needed by sales managers there is now a consensus on what the Crusades were and on how we should treat the many men and women, from intellectuals and saints to peasants, who were attracted by them. There seems to be general agreement that the Crusades cannot be confined solely to the fraught history of relations between Christianity and Islam and that outright condemnation does not help us to face up to and explain their appeal.

General histories of the Crusades are in fashion - Dr Tyerman has himself written three of them - and God's War is longer than most. The intention was clearly to find a replacement for the three volumes of Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, which were published half a century ago, and were written in a mannered style which has not aged well. In the past 50 years the subject has been developing too quickly for any history, let alone one on Runciman's scale, to have much of a shelf life; and Tyerman, who has already demonstrated his skill as a writer of synthesis in his England and the Crusades, seems to have decided on a compromise between a multi-volume history and something more modest, but still large-scale, which could be completed in a relatively short space of time. He has written a narrative account of medieval crusading from a Western angle, incorporating a generally trustworthy summary of the discoveries of the last 40 years. He seems to have read very widely indeed, although new research on the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 and the Barons' Crusade of 1139 came too late for him, as did the redefining of the Fourth Crusade, which emerged from a large number of papers delivered to conferences in the anniversary year of 2004.

He writes fluently and well, but not ambitiously. There are few original insights. Apart from reiterating his belief that crusading regularly "reinvented" itself - a doubtful argument, since nothing he describes, whether in terms of legal definition, taxation, recruitment or strategy, suggests anything as strong as reinvention - he avoids controversy. He includes sections on crusading in the Iberian peninsula and the Baltic region and in the interior of western Europe, but his chief interest lies in crusading to the eastern Mediterranean region. Although he recognises that the thirteenth century was "the golden age of Crusading", 60 per cent of the book is devoted to the period before 1204. Only 11 per cent deals with the period after 1300, in spite of the fact that he has researched most deeply into the fourteenth century, and very little is offered on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

There is only a cursory treatment of ideas, of the theology of war and penance, of heresy and of institutional developments in crusading and in the settlements of the Latin East, subjects in which Dr Tyerman does not seem to be very interested; in this he is not unlike Runciman. His understanding of the Levant and of Islam is also rather sketchy, but it is asking a lot of an author that he should be a polymath.

This is a serious, competent and well-written survey of the existing state of knowledge, with respect to the narrative of the crusading movement.

On the other hand, Sea of Faith is not a serious book. Its publishers do at least acknowledge that it is "popular history", although they add predictably that it is "epic". Stephen O'Shea had the good idea of telling the story of the relationship between Islam and Christianity from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries through a series of battles: he has chosen Yarmuk, Poitiers and the Muslim occupation of the Iberian peninsula, Manzikert, the invasion of Sicily by the Normans, Hattin, Las Navas de Tolosa, the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the Siege of Malta.

The engagements are described in a lively and generally accurate way, within the limits set by the survival of evidence. The history of the relations of Christianity with Islam, inserted between these set-pieces, is quite skilfully incorporated into the narratives. But the book is grossly over-written and Stephen O'Shea has a penchant for dreadful metaphors: "Like the millstone of the Council of Chalcedon in the sinking of the Christian East"; "that sempiternal light [Christian Constantinople] was flickering".

Many events are distorted through exaggeration. A good example is the report of Crusader cannibalism at Ma‘arrat in 1098. As told by eyewitnesses, such was the starvation in the Crusader army that some of the poor who accompanied it resorted to digging up the bodies of newly buried Muslim dead and devouring them. This is horrifying enough, but in Stephen O'Shea's hands it becomes truly apocalyptic: "The Latin warriors killed all of the townspeople and then set about roasting and eating them. The slain children, apparently, were a delicacy."

Exaggeration also leads to sweeping and erroneous assertions, such as that the events of 1054 marked the definitive breach between Catholicism and Orthodoxy or that the Emperor Frederick II "may well have been the first Orientalist". The author is attracted to old-fashioned interpretations, as in his treatment of the careers of Reynald of Châtillon and Raymond of Tripoli. Issues of great importance to an understanding of Islam or Christianity - on dhimma, on jihad, on the Crusades, on Catharism, on the filioque clause - are reduced to superficialities. Popular history of this sort may be fun, but it is not enlightening.

Back to homepage

© The Tablet Publishing Company