All too often when the subject of the Crusades is raised, both scholars and interested lay persons turn their attentions to the grand spectacle of Christian knights marching, fighting, and dying their way across the Levant, all eyes on the prize of Jerusalem. So much of the public perception of the Crusading period (generally defined as running from 1095 to 1291) is focused on its martial aspects that the greater questions of how one actually organized, planned, and supported a Crusade go largely unanswered. Christopher Tyerman’s How to Plan a Crusade makes these logistical and infrastructural problems the centerpiece of a very well-researched and greatly informative study. Transcending the immediate subject of preparing armies for long campaigns in hostile environments, Tyerman confronts more telling questions of how Crusading itself was a cultural and economic phenomenon with far-reaching influences on Western European society. Along the way he deconstructs many of the prevailing stereotypes employed by historians since the mid-nineteenth century. Far from being brutish and opportunistic killers, for example, Tyerman evocatively describes the average knightly participant as being well read, not only in their own vernacular and in Latin, but in several other languages as well, and versed in the various ethical, legal, and administrative doctrines of the day. Violence may well have been their stock and trade, but even in conflict with Muslims, this was tempered by their own dominant tendencies to respect moral and intellectual authority.

Following the introduction and opening chapter where he lays out this revised construct of the medieval knight and the society they created, Tyerman divides his book into five critical themes: “Justification,” “Propaganda,” “Recruitment,” “Finance,” and “Logistics.” The thematic arc serves his greater need of providing a general framework for identifying how Western Europeans embraced and participated in a variety of Crusades, ranging from Spain to Prussia and the Holy Land. Offering a comprehensive account of these actions is, of course, a daunting prospect; fortunately, by laying out his thematic organization, Tyerman evades the anticipated fate of being mired in the chronology. How to Plan a Crusade is a well-constructed synthesis of the current slate of primary sources and secondary accounts of the era that is also quite appealing to the desire for well-crafted narrative flow.

A significant theme running throughout the book is the intellectual sophistication of the various Crusading participants. Tyerman supports the idea that these expeditions, while based on principles of faith, were also informed by practical considerations. For example, satisfying religious imperatives may be good and well, but in the end participants took up the cross for more prosaic considerations, including pay, profit, and the prospect of future colonization. And contrary to the balance of the historiographic accounting, Crusades were more successful expressions of the medieval European social will than generally allowed. Only at the end, when it comes to establishing a strategic vision for conquering the Holy Land or fulfilling other supporting objectives, does the Crusading vision unravel. By evaluating the incongruities between religious faith and secular rationality, Tyerman observes the inherent paradox that lay at the core of the enterprise.

By reconceptualizing the place Crusades occupied in the medieval imagination, Tyerman transforms their memory and history into a more fluid example of the Occidentalization of the Mediterranean world. In this context it is the encounter itself, rather than its result, that is revealed as the more significant force. Tyerman acknowledges the Crusades were a violent experience that frequently failed to achieve their stated objectives. When viewed through the cultural lens of its participants and contemporaries, they also are revealed as an idealistic, sophisticated, and even rational expression of faith. Ultimately, Tyerman restores the Crusades to a central place in the medieval imagination. By expressing the rationality at the heart of the concept and showing how Crusades were critical expressions of Western European and Latin Christian expansionist will, Tyerman makes a significant and evocative contribution to the field.