Read Online God's War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman - Free Book Online
Authors: Christopher Tyerman
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of aristocratic engagement with crusading, echoed in sources from the First Crusade onwards, the poignancy of these sentiments comes from the testimony of tens of thousands of corpses of men and women of all social stations. However wasteful of life and treasure, however narrow the original and sustaining aspiration to physical possession of the Holy Places, this was an ideal that inspired sacrifice at times on an almost unimaginable scale and intensity.
Yet sentimentality will not do. It hardly encompasses the subject. Too many died in the pursuit of sectarian ambition. Yet motives, like actions, can contradict without hypocrisy. While it is usually fruitless for historians to pursue the will of the wisp of private emotions, the question of what caused so many to change their lives so decisively persists. It is a fond myth of the religious that piety excludes greed, coercion, conformity and lack of reflection, that it is freestanding. The language of transcendence should not distract or dupe. Neither should it insist on judgement. Fighting for the cross was not necessarily more glamorous than paying taxes for it, only more strenuous. Both activities are open to reductive interpretations of unavoidable cultural or social compulsion. However, there can be no clear or sonorous summing-up. Wars destroy and create, even if in unequal measures for participants, victims and home communities. Explicable in collective terms as an expression or expressions of belief, anxiety, religious or social obedience, moral andmaterial self-advancement, corporate solidarity and identity, solipsistic intolerance and expansive aggression, for each individual any choice involved in the crusade may or may not have caught ‘the hidden wishes of God’. External manifestations 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.
Select Further Reading
This is far from an exhaustive bibliography, merely an indicative one, primarily of obvious sources and secondary works in English. For more detailed pursuit of the subject, the notes should be consulted.
General
Sources
J. Bédier, Les Chansons de croisade (Paris 1909)
J. Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary Survey (Milwaukee 1962)
F. Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (London 1984)
J and L. Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality (London 1981)
Secondary
M. Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge 1994)
J. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison 1969)
K. Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of the Crusade , trans. M. W. Baldwin and W. Goffart (Princeton 1977)
J. Flori, La Guerre sainte (Paris 2001)
A. J. Forey, The Military Orders (London 1992)
J. Goni Gaztambide, Historia de la bula de la cruzada (Vitoria 1958)
C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh 1999)
P. M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London 1986)
B. Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission (Princeton 1984)
M. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven 1984)
H. E. Mayer, The Crusades (2nd edn Oxford 1988)
J. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels (Liverpool 1979)
J. Richard, The Crusades (Cambridge 1999)
J. Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? (3rd edn London 2003)
J. Riley-Smith (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford 1995)
S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge 1951–4)
F. H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1977)
K. Setton (ed.), A History of the Crusades (2nd edn Madison 1969–89)
E. Siberry, Criticism of Crusading 1095–1274 (Oxford 1985)
C. J. Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago 1988)
C. J. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke 1998)
C. J. Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the
Yet sentimentality will not do. It hardly encompasses the subject. Too many died in the pursuit of sectarian ambition. Yet motives, like actions, can contradict without hypocrisy. While it is usually fruitless for historians to pursue the will of the wisp of private emotions, the question of what caused so many to change their lives so decisively persists. It is a fond myth of the religious that piety excludes greed, coercion, conformity and lack of reflection, that it is freestanding. The language of transcendence should not distract or dupe. Neither should it insist on judgement. Fighting for the cross was not necessarily more glamorous than paying taxes for it, only more strenuous. Both activities are open to reductive interpretations of unavoidable cultural or social compulsion. However, there can be no clear or sonorous summing-up. Wars destroy and create, even if in unequal measures for participants, victims and home communities. Explicable in collective terms as an expression or expressions of belief, anxiety, religious or social obedience, moral andmaterial self-advancement, corporate solidarity and identity, solipsistic intolerance and expansive aggression, for each individual any choice involved in the crusade may or may not have caught ‘the hidden wishes of God’. External manifestations 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.
Select Further Reading
This is far from an exhaustive bibliography, merely an indicative one, primarily of obvious sources and secondary works in English. For more detailed pursuit of the subject, the notes should be consulted.
General
Sources
J. Bédier, Les Chansons de croisade (Paris 1909)
J. Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary Survey (Milwaukee 1962)
F. Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (London 1984)
J and L. Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality (London 1981)
Secondary
M. Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge 1994)
J. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison 1969)
K. Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of the Crusade , trans. M. W. Baldwin and W. Goffart (Princeton 1977)
J. Flori, La Guerre sainte (Paris 2001)
A. J. Forey, The Military Orders (London 1992)
J. Goni Gaztambide, Historia de la bula de la cruzada (Vitoria 1958)
C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh 1999)
P. M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London 1986)
B. Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission (Princeton 1984)
M. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven 1984)
H. E. Mayer, The Crusades (2nd edn Oxford 1988)
J. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels (Liverpool 1979)
J. Richard, The Crusades (Cambridge 1999)
J. Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? (3rd edn London 2003)
J. Riley-Smith (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford 1995)
S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge 1951–4)
F. H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1977)
K. Setton (ed.), A History of the Crusades (2nd edn Madison 1969–89)
E. Siberry, Criticism of Crusading 1095–1274 (Oxford 1985)
C. J. Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago 1988)
C. J. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke 1998)
C. J. Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the
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