God's War: A New History of the Crusades

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 lecturer 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

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First published by Allen Lane 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1

Copyright © Christopher Tyerman, 2006
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Maps 1 to 17 and 21 to 23 by Reg Piggott are reproduced by permission of
The Folio Society Ltd. Other maps are by Andrew Farmer.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–141–90431–3

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])