The Crusades have inspired a vast amount of writing since the very beginning. Most scholars date their beginnings to November 1095 CE, when Pope Urban II stepped onto a rostrum outside the town of Clermont (in modern France) and said... something... to the assembled crowd. We don't really know what the message was but can pretty safely guess that it asked them to travel to the East in order to "liberate" Jerusalem by force.
From this murky beginning, things only get more confusing.
After the Christians conquered Jerusalem in 1099 CE, massacring many of the inhabitants, the task of understanding why they'd been successful and what it all meant fell to the historians. Histories about the journey to the East spread like wildfire, with a first wave written by (people who seem to have been) participants, then a second wave by monks in Europe.
There was little consensus among contemporaries, save that God’s hand seemed to have been guiding the actions of those who left Europe in 1095–96. Writing within the euphoria of their victory, all of these chroniclers were writing something closer to what we might today call theology than what we might today call history. Their models were biblical ones, intended to position the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 within sacred history, using biblical models – Moses into the promised land and the victories of Joshua in one case, the Maccabees against the Greeks in another.
In other words, they were more interested in the overarching story than simply recording objective fact.
Scholars have struggled for some time with the tension of trying to figure out what happened from sources that sometimes really don't want to tell us. And they have struggled.. a lot. Libraries could be filled with works (just in English!) on the topic.
So, for those interested in learning more, just figuring out where to start can be overwhelming. There's a lot of bad information out there, many based more on modern politics (the myth of a neverending war between Christianity and Islam) than the real past. So, to help you find your way through the forest, here are 5 book suggestions.
- Susanna Throop, The Crusades: An Epitome (late 2018). This book is amazing. It's short but thorough, using the latest scholarship but easy to read. It's the best place to start for a general survey of the Crusades that covers everything from start to finish and does so by reflecting not just what the Crusades "were" but how they've been studied, from narrow views that limit "crusading" to Jerusalem to those who also think about the Baltic, Spain, and even crusades launched internal to Euroope. And it's open access, so it's free. The only problem is that it hasn't been published quite yet. Look for it later this Fall 2018.
- Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014). This is another excellent overview but, importantly, from the perspective of the Islamic world. The various political entities Christian crusaders encountered along the way to Jerusalem reacted in very different ways at different times. It wasn't just dueling holy wars. Cobb has mastered the sources and so the story he tells is a welcome new way to think about the encounter that occurred in the medieval Middle East.
- Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (2011). Although this only focuses on the so-called "First Crusade" begun in 1095, it's written like a thriller. Rubenstein has rethought why the First Crusade happened when it did and makes a convincing case that many Christians acted like they did - marched, starved, killed, etc. - because they though the end of the world was coming soon. So well-written, each character comes alive and you're left with the sense that you really understand why they did what they did. It's the best kind of history writing.
- Katherine Allen Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture (2011). This one is a bit of a cheat. It's not directly about the Crusades (but it's all about the Crusades). Smith is interested in origins - how we got to the point by ca. 1100 CE that Christian religious translated their "spiritual warfare" against sin into support for physical warfare against other humans. It's a complex argument but she's patient with us as readers and leads us through it expertly so that, by the time you're done, you wonder how you could have ever thought differently.
- Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (1998). An oldie but a goodie. This short, compelling read argues that the Crusades didn't exist until authors invented them to try to explain things that had happened in the past. It shows, almost better than any other book out there in English, the impact historians have on how subsequent generations understand the past.
This list is, of course, only a start.
There are plenty of other good books out there to explore and if you do pick one of these up and like it, check their bibliographies at the back of the book. See what they read. Follow the bread crumbs. I promise it won't lead to witches. Witches are a Renaissance thing and the Crusades belong only to the Middle Ages, not the modern world.
