This is an interesting volume but one perhaps a bit unsure of its audience. Christopher Tyerman is one of the pre-eminent historians of Christian holy war in medieval Europe and the author of no fewer than eight other books related to the subject. This book, however, is a bit different, signaling its academic seriousness by its heft and the rigor of its analysis but also written in a tone that a general audience would find welcoming. In addition, the book contains a staggering (and wonderful!) 171 full-color images, figures, and maps. There is a chronology that begins in 400 CE with Augustine and ends in 2014 with ISIS, as well as a list of rulers, and a glossary of key terms. Although generally written in a lively style, it can be dense in detail at times. Its thoroughly end-noted, but only has an abbreviated bibliography that seems more like a "further reading" list. In the middle of the chapters are 39 "Crusades in Detail" text boxes, sort of similar to call-outs in textbooks, that interrupt the narrative and are sometimes a few pages long in and of themselves.
So then, is this then a textbook? Is it for a more general readership, including undergraduates? I am not entirely sure and it is this in-betweenness that creates certain problems for the reader.
Across thirteen chapters, a preface, an introduction, and a postscript, Tyerman moves through medieval Europe in a manner familiar to anyone who has read his other outstanding work. It opens with a "Crusades in Detail" about the Holy Sepulcher, signaling to the reader that expeditions to the East will be the primary focus of what follows. The Introduction then asks "What Were the Crusades?" and answers (in the first sentence) that they were "holy wars fought, adherents insisted, in response to the will of God on behalf of the Christian faith in defence [sic] of lands, people and religion" (1). This is, of course, both an expansive and narrowing definition. What, for example, makes this different from just "holy war?" The rest of the Introduction answers that by linking this type of holy war to Urban II and the Holy Sepulcher, as a culmination of certain trends in Christian thought after Constantine through the reform papacy of Gregory VII. Carl Erdmann casts a long shadow indeed.
Chapter 1 is about the "Mediterranean Crisis" as background, how the Byzantines, Fatimids, Abbasids, and Umayyads all seemed to be coming apart at the end of the eleventh century and how the expanding economic involvement of Western Europe in the Mediterranean world led to increased cultural concern for the East. Chapter 2 is about the Jerusalem war of 1095-1099, beginning as Urban IIs plan to help Byzantium and ending with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. Chapters 3 and 4 revisit the Latin East, so-called Outremer, to discuss settlement and relationships between Christians and others, as well as the various military actions that occurred until 1187. Saladin, the reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187, and western response are Chapter 5.
Chapter 6 signals a shift. The books attention to Palestine shifts first to Egypt, including expeditions to Constantinople and Damietta. Then, in chapter 7, we move out gaze to Iberia ("Spain") and holy war from the early eleventh to the sixteenth century, while the focus is the Baltic in chapter 8.
The centerpiece of chapter 9 is the thirteenth-century Albigensian campaigns but the chapter blossoms outwards as that war "let the genie out of the bottle" (350). This narratively leads to a very brief section on "criticism and opposition" and the subject of chapter 10, which is the "End of the Jerusalem Wars" towards the end of the fourteenth century. Smartly, Tyerman characterizes this as the end of a tradition, which is I think precisely the correct term to use here. With the advent of the Ottomans, the subject of chapter 11, things really were quite different according to the author. The papacy, but also European rulers more generally, shifted "From Crusade to Realpolitik" (414-421). Chapter 12 continues, calling the "End of Crusading" the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Reformation and new Atlantic World are the primary foci here.
The final chapter and postscript move the reader out of the European Middle Ages. Chapter 13 bursts across modernity, how the medieval Christian holy wars were made materialistic, were swept up into an Enlightenment ideal of progress, how they were subsumed into nineteenth-century French and German (the English get a bit of a pass) visions of empire. Then, ideology returned with Erdmann and Steven Runciman and the chapter concludes by thinking about modern politics and how the medieval has been deployed to suit contemporary interests. There is a troubling subtext here, continued in the Postscript, that "the West" understands the medieval world "correctly" as something that happened in the past and whose impact should no longer trouble modernity, while the rest of the world--Russia, the Baltics, the Middle East--continues to wrongly elide past and present. This is particularly curious claim given that all medievalists surely know of Anders Breivik, of the neo-Templar imagery across Central Europe in response to Syrian refugees, of the "Deus Vult" scrawled on mosques in the lead-up to Brexit and then on signs in Charlottesville, Virginia, of the names and dates of long-dead Christian warriors written on a gun in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The immediacy of these images and evocations returns us to the question of audience for the book, both intended and unintended. Although it can be (and has been!) done with much more economy and verve, the volume here attempts to be comprehensive in its more than 450 pages of text, to span "The World of the Crusades." As such, the book could well be used in a college classroom and could be picked up by a general, interested reader. It might be useful to an interested Europeanist who does not know much about the subject, or to other scholars whose focus is on the more global medieval. Indeed, the Postscript is entitled "Do the Crusades Matter?" The answer--and I agree!--is "yes" but the "World of the Crusades" is much bigger, much more immediate than what the book seems to allow.
And that, I think, has to do with the problem of its in-betweenness. There are dozens of quite solid narratives of the events in English, almost all (at least after 9/11, and certainly after Jonathan Riley-Smiths 2011 The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam) with some sort of concluding statement about modern legacies. In doing this work, The World of the Crusades stands on solid ground. Where it stumbles lies in the fundamental paradox of studying the medieval holy war, how to explain a phenomenon that is distinctly past but unbearably present. It tries to relegate the phenomenon to the Middle Ages, to say that they ended long ago. But given the definition of the word offered on page 1--"holy wars fought, adherents insisted, in response to the will of God on behalf of the Christian faith in defence [sic] of lands, people and religion"--we must wonder if that past is really past, and if it is not then what role we play as contemporary chroniclers of the phenomenon.