Christopher Tyerman has had a long, distinguished career as the skeptical conscience of “crusade studies.” In many of his later publications, particularly 2011’s The Debate on the Crusades, he urged his readers to take nothing on faith and to question all assumptions, interpretations, and conclusions of what writers on the crusades have written since these expeditions to the Eastern Mediterranean first occurred up to and including the period of his own work. In that book he managed to indict or criticize just about every important historian of the crusades or their interpretations. Thus Tyerman became less one of the jewels in the crown of the field and more like an errant sharp point, skewering the hand of anyone brash enough to touch it. Yet he has functioned as a necessary corrective that all academic disciplines require, to remind its practitioners not to take themselves or the products they create with too much reverence or awe.
In keeping with that intellectual vein, then, this edited collection from former students and senior peers strays way beyond its title in subject and approach, perhaps ironically pushing the envelope of what “crusade studies” might be. Many of these contributions say little about crusading, yet those who judge this volume by its title would miss some important work. The editors (both past students of Tyerman) and several other former students who contributed have themselves become noted researchers and writers. Thus Tyerman’s influence on shaping the current state of the discipline goes beyond his own scholarship to the inspiration and mentorship he has offered to those now working in the field.
The volume contains two preliminary chapters: one an introduction by Lippiatt and Bird, and the other a personal reminiscence of Tyerman by former colleague Toby Barnard. The other eleven chapters are divided into four parts. Part I, “Defining Europe,” contains two articles. Mark Whittow takes on a historian even bigger than Tyerman, Henri Pirenne--or, perhaps more accurately, Whittow argues for the continued efficacy of the “Pirenne Thesis,” that it was the Arab/Muslim conquests that forged Europe. By the late eleventh century, Latin Christians on their way to what became the First Crusade wrongly imagined an unbroken Christian Roman Mediterranean going back to at least Constantine and only discovered their mistake--that in the intervening centuries Islam had changed the political, religious, and cultural landscape dramatically--only when they got there. Guy Perry tries to explain why Louis IX’s second crusade was diverted to Tunis in his chapter. Perry argues that Tunis was supposed to be an easy victory; not only as experience for the French monarch’s army, but, more importantly, as a morale booster before moving on to Egypt. The king also hoped that the ruler of Tunis, rumored to be not anti-Christian, might be persuaded to convert if that meant his territories could be spared a long siege and its concomitant destruction.
Part II, “Imagining the Crusades,” has three contributions. John France strays beyond his usual lane of military history to intellectual history in his chapter. Here he tries to refute Carl Erdmann’s 1935 The Origin of the Idea of Crusade to support Jonathan Riley-Smith’s thesis that crusading was fundamentally a religious idea, not a land grab. France quips that crusaders should not be seen strictly as barbarians in the china-shop (74). He suggests that Urban II’s appeal at Clermont was new: he was asking Latin Christians to engage in a righteous conflict for which one was forgiven one’s sins (89). Kevin James Lewis’ chapter is a historiographical primer on the growing Christian aversion to circumcision, beginning with Saint Paul’s dispensing of the necessity of it for Christians. While Christians came to abhor circumcision, it became routine in the Islamic world, despite the fact that it is not mentioned in the Koran, though it is in the hadiths. Christians saw it as a remnant of Judaism, whereas Muslims came to believe their practice of it came from Abraham, not from Jewish tradition. Lippiatt’s chapter, on the connections and chronological overlap between the Albigensian Crusade and the Fifth Crusade, is surprisingly novel. Typically scholars, myself among them, conveniently tend to overlook one when discussing the other. In essence he argues that, although the Albigensian Crusade did divert some resources and men, this was not debilitating to the Fifth Crusade, noting how many of those who served on the Albigensian Crusade at one time or another eventually made their way to Egypt.
Part III, “Implementing the Crusades,” contains three chapters. Jessalynn Bird describes and analyzes how the Victorines, headquartered in Paris, got deeply involved in crusade planning from the Fourth Crusade and after, a fact not emphasized by previous scholars. Helen Nicholson’s chapter is an agricultural analysis of Templar estates based on English inventories and records drawn up soon after their estates were confiscated in 1308. The Templars were in some ways a remarkably conventional religious order, yet their unique military mission meant that their European estates were supposed to produce a profit or surplus to support their ongoing efforts in the Holy Land. Nicholson believes they did so effectively, but at the same time made substantial contributions to local economies within England and Wales. In his chapter, Timothy Guard argues that “charity,” broadly defined, was the most important source of revenue for crusading besides taxes. Certain orders like the Hospitallers gained a bad reputation in England for aggressive alms-raising tactics.
Part IV: “Implementing the Crusades,” has three contributions by senior scholars in the field. Peter Edbury argues for the strategic importance of the siege of Tyre in 1187. Saladin’s failure to take Tyre proved he could be beat. Qualitatively both Arabic and Christian sources do not differ substantially from each other in pointing this out. This unsuccessful siege acted as the foundation and catalyst for the Christian counter-attack of the Third Crusade. Nicholas Vincent’s chapter is especially timely in its use of the phrase, “fake news.” Vincent examines how a letter originating in Provence made its way into English chronicles in the thirteenth century. Vincent suggests that the author of the Provence letter wrote it as parody, a genre increasingly employed to mock over-enthusiastic movements, crusading in particular. Especially interesting though, is Vincent’s conclusion about why a letter or piece of literature written in southern France made its way to and appeared in an English source at all. He suggests that English writers had to work harder to collect information because of how far they were from the Latin Christian world’s cultural center, and that this resulted in better “news-gathering,” or news drag-net, in this case picking up a piece of fiction. In his way, Vincent manages to criticize crusade studies à-la-Tyerman, since his own piece ranges so widely across a bunch of “specialisms,” among them literary theory. Edward Peters too moves beyond history to literature, in a chapter on Dante’s influences for the Divine Comedy. Peters argues that in The Divine Comedy Dante used his crusader-ancestor, his great-great grandfather Cacciaguida, to describe a Florence 150 years before Dante’s: a better one, where men of virtue crusaded. Dante lamented that the world he lived in was one that had lost many of its former qualities, virtue among them.