God's War is an ambitious undertaking, and Christopher Tyerman is to be commended for having the courage to attempt it. He focuses primarily on the sweep of the half-millennium of Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean that has commonly been labeled “crusades,” but he also devotes space to their eleventh-century background. This early coverage is most welcome. Far too many histories of the crusades, both scholarly and popular, begin with 1095, thereby rendering the whole phenomenon incomprehensible and contributing to a profound misunderstanding of crusading in particular and of Christian-Islamic relations in general.
Other areas of crusading, as generally recognized today, are less well-represented: crusading in Spain, in the Baltic, and in southern France each rate one chapter, with some discussion of extra-Mediterranean crusading occurring in the last two chapters as well. This is unfortunate but, given the need to control the length of a book that already exceeds 1,000 pages, perhaps inevitable.
Such a titanic undertaking invites comparison with Sir Steven Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–1954). Though Tyerman himself rejects such a comparison, writing in the preface that it would be “folly and hubris to pretend to compete” with Runciman's magnificent literary style, a blurb on the dust jacket, from a well-known church historian, claims that God's War “compares with Runciman's classic study.” The comparison is, perhaps, inevitable.
Certainly, an updating of Runciman's History is long overdue. It was fatally tainted by a prejudiced and famously judgmental view of crusaders, which has been challenged by the past forty years of crusade research. Runciman himself characterized what he had created as primarily literature, not scholarly history, and he was right. If God's War were to be judged solely as a work of literature, and pitted thus unfairly against Runciman's History, it would lose the contest. God's War is well-written, but it is not a landmark work of literary brilliance.
But if one compares the accuracy of the scholarship and analysis in the two books, Tyerman's achievement becomes clearer—in this important respect, God's War is much to be preferred over its more eloquent predecessor. Tyerman generally displays a masterful grasp of current crusade scholarship (despite his disagreements from time to time with scholarly consensus in the past) and a deep familiarity with the primary sources, and he integrates that scholarship into a coherent narrative with a generally sure touch that belies the inherent difficulties involved. As a summation and synthesis, God's War is an impressive and welcome overall success. A few examples of its strengths may suffice.
In company with other crusade historians, Tyerman rejects the view that crusaders were motivated primarily by greed, cruelty, and wanderlust, or that their ranks consisted primarily of landless, unruly younger sons of nobility. It is refreshing to see this deeply rooted popular misconception so plainly contested. Tyerman correctly notes that crusading was difficult, dangerous, and prohibitively expensive and that “to become a crucesignatus was to invite the torments of the cross” (399). He manages to convey the fervor of the faith that motivated most crusaders without either identifying himself with it or denigrating it—no mean feat. Tyerman also rejects the prevalent false notion that the crusades were somehow responsible for modern confrontations between Islam and the Christian (or post-Christian) West. They were not, as he makes clear.
Tyerman's understanding of the events and personalities surrounding the battle of Hattin (1187) and the Third Crusade (1188–1192) is exceptionally good. Runciman painted crusader leaders such as Reynald of Châtillon and Guy of Lusignan as two-dimensional, black-hatted “bad guys”; Tyerman presents a carefully nuanced picture of them and their actions, rehabilitating the political and military reputations of characters who have been and still are unjustly maligned. He notes, for example, that Reynald of Châtillon recognized the danger of Saladin's sophisticated geopolitical and public opinion strategies, and moved to counter them in ways that were as effective as Reynald's means allowed. (Saladin noted this as well, which explains his murder of Reynald after Hattin.)
As with all works this ambitious, God's War contains points on which one might disagree, sometimes strongly, with the author. Again, a few examples may suffice.
Despite providing an excellent overview of the eleventh-century background to the crusades, and despite noting that “the memory of the long struggle with Islam from the seventh century was not lost 400 years later” (50–51), Tyerman does not adequately trace the conflict between Christianity and Islam that began in 634 and extended into the eleventh century and beyond. Unless the crusades are placed firmly in this context, it is impossible to understand them well or fully. God's War would have profited from treatment of that 461 years of Muslim-Christian conflict before Clermont (though in fairness, this might have created a book of truly unmanageable length).
Perhaps because of the lack of long-term background, God's War sometimes seems to overlook the essentially defensive nature of crusading, something Jonathan Riley-Smith and others have clearly demonstrated. Correspondingly, significant misunderstandings of just war theory appear in the first chapter—the idea, for example, that there are conditions in which it is virtuous for a good man to put a wicked one to death is not an eleventh- or twelfth-century “redefinition” of Christian doctrine (27); rather, it is an idea integral to just war theory that may be found in the writings of both Ambrose and Augustine (the works of James Turner Johnson would provide useful correctives here). Other caveats of a similar nature could be raised.
On the subject of the Fourth Crusade, God's War is in many ways preferable to its predecessors. Tyerman rightly notes that, contrary to the standard accusations, the Fourth Crusade did not “precipitate the triumph of the Turk” (560). He does not seem, however, to be aware of Thomas Madden's trenchant criticism of Nicetas Choniates's account of Greek reaction to the Fourth Crusade, or of other recent scholarship which strongly suggests that most Greeks (other than Choniates) did not view 1204 as constituting a major rupture in Greek-Latin relations until centuries after the fact. In addition, Tyerman repeats the myth that Pope John Paul II “apologized” for the Fourth Crusade in 2001 (560). John Paul did not, nor did he apologize generally “to the victims of the crusades” (917). Rather, he apologized for crimes possibly committed by Christians during the course of the Fourth and other crusades. The difference may seem slight, but it is profoundly significant; and the record badly needs straightening on this point.
Dust-jacket blurbs, already noted above, are not generally the fault of an author. But the blurb in question contains a statement that could mislead readers about the book and that is so egregiously wrong-headed that it seems irresponsible not to contest it: the crusades are described as “a bizarre centuries-long episode in which Western Christianity willfully ignored its Master's principles of love and forgiveness.” I cannot think of any serious crusade historian—Tyerman included, judging from the contents of God's War—who would agree with that statement. Its author, whose specialty lies elsewhere than the crusades, is apparently unaware of the most basic crusade historiography, such as Riley-Smith's seminal article “Crusading as an Act of Love” (History 65 [1980]: 177–192). One may hope that the blurb will be dropped from the paperback edition. Other minor problems exist, such as the occasional demonstration of prejudice against certain modern political and religious institutions, but to nitpick one's way through 922 pages of text would be both tedious and ungenerous, and there are mercifully fewer of these prejudices in God's War than in either Runciman's History or more tendentious recent popular histories.
At whom is this book primarily aimed? Not crusade historians, who are presumably familiar with most of the monographs and articles on which Tyerman draws, and who will probably be annoyed to find that the publisher has turned the footnotes into endnotes, and then compounded the offense by neglecting to provide any cues in the headers as to how to locate the endnotes for a given chapter. Those who are afraid of footnotes will not read this book, so why frustrate those who will read it by creating a need for three hands to simultaneously hold the 1000-page book, keep the place, and turn to the endnotes? The intended audience is surely not the general public, either; concealing the footnote apparatus cannot hide the author's erudition, the level of scholarship, nor the book's length, which exceeds the capacity or interest of most casual readers.
Despite the fact that the book does not seem intended for specialists, it is hard to imagine a crusade historian who would not want such a significant and comprehensive history on his or her study shelf. Those whose specialties lie elsewhere, but who find themselves teaching a course on the crusades, will find it very useful; God's War would provide an excellent framework for creating such a course, and its historiography, with some exceptions, is generally trustworthy and up to date. Serious “lay” readers with a general knowledge of medieval history also will find the book a reliable guide for delving further into crusade history. Regretting the absence of Runciman's eloquent gift for story, and having noted other shortcomings, I would still steer such a reader toward the more reliable God's War.
