God's War: A New History of the Crusades Read online

  God's War: A New History of the Crusades

  Christopher Tyerman

  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 Weekly

  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.

  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

  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

  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 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 Pennsylvania

  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

  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.

  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

  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 lecture
r 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

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  First published by Allen Lane 2006

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  Copyright © Christopher Tyerman, 2006

  All rights reserved

  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])

  12. Joshua, in the guise of a Frankish knight, liberates Gibeon from the Five Kings, from an illuminated Bible c.1244–54 (Piermont Morgan Library/Scala, Florence)

  13. Military orchestra of the kind employed by Turkish, Kurdish and Mamluk commanders (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Arabe 5847 Fol. 94])

  14. Pope Innocent III (Scala, Florence)

  15. Venice c.1300 (Bodleian Library, Oxford/The Art Archive [Bodley 264 fol. 218r])

  16. Innocent III and the Albigensian Crusade (British Library, London [Ms Royal 16 GVI Fol. 347v])

  17. Moors fighting Christians in thirteenth-century Spain (The Art Archive/Real Monasterio del Escorial, Spain/Dagli Orti)

  18. A clash between Frankish and Egyptian forces outside Damietta, June 1218, from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora c.1255 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 16 Fol. 54v])

  19. The capture of the Tower of Chains, August 1218, and the fall of Damietta, November 1219, from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora c.1255 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)

  20. Frederick II, emperor, king of Germany 1212–50 (AKG Images)

  21. Louis IX of France captures Damietta, June 1249, from a manuscript produced at Acre c.1280 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Fr. 2628 Fol. 328v])

  22. Outremer’s nemesis: mamluk warriors training (British Library, London [Ms Add 18866 Fol. 140])

  23. Outremer’s nemesis: A Turkish cavalry squadron (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Arabe 5847 Fol. 19])

  24. The battle of La Forbie, October 1244 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 16 Fol. 170])

  25. Matthew Paris imagines the Mongols as cannibalistic savages, Chronica Majora, c.1255 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 16 Fol. 166])

  26. The fall of Tripoli to the Mamluks, April 1289 (British Library, London [Ms Add 27695 Fol. 5])

  27. Charles V of France entertains Charles IV of Germany during a banquet in Paris in 1378 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Fr. 2813 Fol. 473v])

  28. Andrea Bonaiuti’s fresco ‘The Church Militant’, in Santa Maria Novella, Florence (Scala, Florence)

  29. The failed Ottoman Turkish siege of Rhodes, 1480 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Lat. 6067 Fol. 80v])

  30. Mehmed II the Conqueror, by Gentile Bellini, 1480/81 (National Gallery, London)

  31. The battle of Lepanto, 1571 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

  List of Maps

  1. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the First Crusade and Preaching Tour of Pope Urban II 1095–6

  2. Asia Minor and Syria 1097–99

  3. The Siege of Antioch, October 1097–June 1098

  4. Palestine 1099

  5. The Siege of Jerusalem, June – July 1099

  6. Syria in the Twelfth Century

  7. Palestine and Egypt in the Twelfth Century

  8. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Second Crusade and Bernard’s Preaching Tour 1146–7

  9. The Hattin Campaign, July 1187

  10. Saladin Captures Jerusalem, September – October 1187

  11. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Third Crusade

  12. Syria at the Time of the Third Crusade

  13. The Siege of Acre 1189

  14. Richard I Captures Cyprus, May 1191

  15. Palestine with the Campaigns of 1191–2

  16. Europe and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century

  17. Constantinople at the Time of the Fourth Crusade

  18. Languedoc, France and the Albigensian Crusade

  19. The Spanish Reconquista

  20. The Baltic

  21. Syria in the Thirteenth Century

  22. Palestine and Egypt in the Thirteenth Century

  23. Acre in 1291

  24. Crusades in Europe

  Acknowledgements

  This book has taken longer than even the most sluggish crusade to prepare and complete. I must record my thanks and gratitude to the Trustees of the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fe
llowship for the year 1998–9, which allowed me to begin to marshal evidence and ideas for this project. My agent Jonathan Lloyd has proved a tactful and potent warrior in my interests. The invitation to write this sort of book came from Simon Winder, who could not have imagined how long, in many senses, it would turn out to be. His patience and encouragement have been wonderfully sustaining. Indirectly, I have been thinking, working, teaching and writing towards this book for thirty years. Inevitably the debts to friends, colleagues, pupils and other scholars are legion and irredeemable. In particular, I should like to register my obligation for discussion, ideas, criticism and opportunities to air views to Malcolm Barber, Toby Barnard, Peter Biller, Jessalynin Bird, the late Lionel Butler, Jeremy Catto, Eric Christiansen, Gary Dickson, Barrie Dobson, Jean Dunbabin, Peter Edbury, Geoffrey Ellis, L.S. Ettre, the late Richard Fletcher, John Gillingham, Timothy Guard, Bernard Hamilton, Ruth Harris, Catherine Holmes, Norman Housley, Colin Imber, Kurt Villads Jensen, Jeremy Johns, Andrew Jotischky, Maurice Keen, Anthony Luttrell, Simon Lloyd, Jose-Juan Lopez-Portillo, Dominic Luckett, John Maddicott, Hans Mayer, James Morwood, Alan Murray, Sandy Murray, Torben Nielsen, the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education Crusades class of the summer of 2003, David Parrott, Jonathan Phillips, the late John Prestwich, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Miri Rubin, Jonathan Shepard and Mark Whittow. The intellectual vibrancy of my colleagues and pupils in Hertford College and New College provide the most stimulating of creative environments. The Principal and Fellows of Hertford gave me academic shelter for many locust years. Toby Barnard and Peter Biller have long provided personal support and intellectual stimulus with rare companionability. The responsibility for introducing me to the crusades rests with the improbable quintet of the late Ralph Bathurst, David Parry, Eric Christiansen, Maurice Keen and the late Lionel Butler, alike in little except inspiration and civility. I alone can be held accountable for the errors that stubbornly remain like mouse hairs in medieval bread. Simon Winder, editor nonpareil, and his team at Penguin UK have proved a revelation of amenable, intelligent and efficient publishing. I am grateful to those who have pointed out errata in the First Edition, in particular Paul Cobb and Eric Christiansen. For tolerating the distraction of what must at times have seemed another sibling, the book is dedicated to those most healthily but supportively sceptical of the virtues and merits of this work and its author, Elizabeth, Edward and Thomas, with love.