God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The exercise is hardly straightforward. The judgemental confidence of a Macaulay – or a Runciman – is warranted neither by modern fashion nor by the discipline of the subject. All historical investigations remain contingent on surviving evidence. One of the regular temptations seducing historians and their audience is to imagine knowledge of the past. Most has been lost, by nature, accident or design. The muddle of existence is simplified both by the historians’ craft, which is at root that of selection, and by the gaps in evidence. To illustrate the tenuous links that inform our knowledge, two of the most vivid, full and important contemporary narratives of the Second Crusade (1146–8) survive in a single manuscript each. Without them, our view of that remarkable event would be entirely different. Most of the evidence that once existed for the history of the crusades has been lost. Conversely, what does survive inevitably favours certain perspectives over others for which less evidence has survived. The story of the most familiar episode of all, the First Crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem (1095–9), is based on a remarkably narrow twelfth-century historiographical tradition which may, but equally may not, reveal what was of greater or lesser importance at the time. Thus any modern historical account can only be to some degree tentative. If the requirements of the narrative obscure the delicacy of the interpretive choices reached here, this in no way suggests they were easy, simple, straightforward, necessarily incontrovertible or even conclusive. They merely represent what the author, to the best of his understanding, now thinks.

The crusades were and are controversial and contentious far beyond the academic community. More than any other incident of medieval European history they have entered the sphere of public history, where the past is captured in abiding cultural myths of inheritance, self-image and identity. Many groups and nations find their memory awkward, even distressing. The massacres of Palestinian Muslims and Jews at Jerusalem in 1099 or of Greeks at Constantinople in 1204; the butchery of Rhineland Jews in 1096 or 1146, or English Jews in 1190; the defeats of Latin Christians by great Islamic leaders, Saladin and Baibars; the expulsion of western conquerors from the mainland of western Asia in 1291; the long triumphs of the Christians in Iberia, of the Germans in the eastern Baltic or the Turks in Asia Minor, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean; all these aspects of crusading history have left a residue of resentment, pain, anger, guilt and pride, depending on which legacy, if any, modern observers wish to claim for themselves. Therefore, for any historian the perspective taken is of importance. Yet to look at a subject from a particular vantage point is to adopt a position in order to more clearly inspect the view. It does not mean taking sides.

My perspective is western European. This accords best with my own research experience. More importantly, it matches the origins, development, continuance and nature of the phenomenon. Although having an impact far beyond western Europe, the crusade as an ideal and human activity began and remained rooted in western European culture. By adopting this stance in no way implies approval of crusading. It does not ignore the sources generated by the opponents and victims of crusading. Nor does it privilege the value or importance of the experience of western Europeans over others involved, as will be apparent in what follows. However, it is a necessary device to see the subject clearly through the fog of ignorance, obscurity, the passage of time and the complexity of surviving sources. A history of the crusades could be very different in structure if composed from the viewpoint of medieval Syrian, Egyptian or Andalusian Muslims, or European or Near Eastern Jews, or Balts, Livs or Prussians. However, the essential contours of the subject would, if observed dispassionately, look much the same, because this study is intended as a history, not a polemic, an account not a judgement, an exploration of an important episode of world history of enormous imaginative as well as intellectual fascination, not a confessional apologia or witness statement in some cosmic law suit. Readers will decide whether the view is worth the journey.

Introduction: Europe and the Mediterranean