The crusades are part of everyone’s mental image of the Middle Ages. They extended, in one form or another, from the 11th to the 16th century. Those which reached the Holy Land were fought by men on horseback wearing metal armour and carrying lances and swords, as in the pictures. The onset of gunpowder had not yet spoiled the fun. They were truly international, in their own way emblematic of the myth of a single Christian European polity. They embodied everything that people associate with medieval warfare: reckless courage, murder, loot, adventure and romance.
Christopher Tyerman has been writing about the crusades for nearly 40 years. His work includes the only full-scale study of English crusaders and God’s War, which for my money is the best one-volume history in print. This is quite an achievement, for there is a finite body of material, which is unlikely to expand significantly, and consists mainly of published chronicles. Many people picking up Tyerman’s latest volume may be tempted to think that it simply recycles the material in his last one. They would be mistaken. The World of the Crusades has a mass of new insights, many little-known anecdotes and a fresh approach to the subject which fully justifies its bulk.
Two features of the book are particularly striking. First, instead of just treating the crusades in the standard way as a European Christian movement, Tyerman has placed them in their proper geographical setting, as incidents in the history of the Islamic Middle East. By a fortunate accident, the early crusaders hit the Levant at a time of ferment and instability in the Islamic world. The Abbasid caliphate, essentially a Persian regime based in what is now Iraq, had been in terminal decline for two centuries when the first crusade arrived.
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