Guy Perry's Reading List

"There are so many books that are simply called ‘the Crusades’, or variants on that theme (and the old classic, in English, is Sir Steven Runciman’s magnum opus ). So there is a vast range of work to choose from if you wanted to find a basic guide to the movement. But God’s War tells you everything that you need to know. It isn’t just enormous and comprehensive. It’s also the product of a lifetime’s rumination on the subject. And I have to confess that I have a particular fondness for it, because the author is my old doctoral supervisor! If I were to pick out what’s particularly good about God’s War , then it’s the fact that Tyerman refuses to accept simple answers to difficult questions. He sums it all up, very neatly, at the end. “ The internal decision to follow the Cross, to inflict harm on others at great personal risk, at the cost of enormous privations, at the service of a consuming cause, cannot be explained, excused or dismissed either as a virtue or a sin .” What he’s saying, in short, is that we need to accept the Crusades, in all their messy complexity, as something that is very real and very human. I think what Tyerman is saying is that we need to be more dispassionate about it. We want to see a clear moral message, but there simply can’t be one for something like this."

"I have to say that this is a rather odd choice. It doesn’t normally appear on reading lists for the Crusades, and I’m being slightly cheeky by putting it in. But what this book does do—and, in my view, much better than any of its rivals—is explain the Latin Western environment from which crusading emerged. It describes how the heartlands of Europe produced a warrior aristocracy: figures who can be described as ‘of slender means but with a big appetite.’ These warriors headed out from the centre to the peripheries to seize new lordships for themselves—and, in fact, this happened regardless of the faith that was held in some of these locations. “These warriors actually made the whole of the Latin world much more homogenous” What’s interesting about all this is that, in the course of the process, these warriors actually made the whole of the Latin world much more homogenous. By the end of the process, Latin Christendom had far more in common than it did at the start: not just in terms of characteristic religious practices, but also in spheres like government, warfare and trade. Bartlett is particularly strong on the subject of naming patterns. Why is that, across the whole of Europe, you find people called things ‘William’, ‘Robert’ and ‘John’? It is because these names became the standard currency of the medieval West, spreading as the region became much more homogenous. In short: this book has shaped my own studies much more than any other work. I’m really interested in social and geographical mobility—both up and down the ladder and across vast distances. I was never able to explain very much of this before I looked at this book, and that’s why I recommend it so highly. You’re certainly putting me on the spot there! One of the principal trends in medieval studies , over the course of the last thirty years, has been to move away from an excessive French focus—from the idea that France was somehow ‘the norm’, and everything else was wrong. But I suppose I still believe in an old ‘Frankish’ core: the territories of the old empire as run by Charlemagne , which included what is now France, the Low Countries, Germany and northern Italy. That’s the Western European bloc, and it was from there, more than anywhere else, that warriors pushed out into regions like Spain, the British Isles, southern Italy and Sicily, the Baltic and the Holy Land. Some of them were. The crucial point to remember is that some form of violence was almost always happening along Latin Christendom’s frontiers. Quite often, these forms of violence could have a highly significant religious and/or ideological tinge. It is these more loaded encounters that could most easily be converted into full-scale holy wars or crusades. But they remain very complex, for all that. For example, the crusades in the Baltic—which, at times, became almost genocidal—were simple opportunities for plunder, and culture wars, religious wars, all at the same time. In other words, it was possible to try to get rich, and promote Germanisation and Christianity , all as a sort of package. Needless to say, though, it wasn’t always comfortable how those various elements held together. You’re exactly right. One of the key critiques that some scholars make of this book is that Bartlett’s starting date is the year 950. A lot of historians would say that the processes that you are describing are simply what Charlemagne was doing, 150 years earlier, so as to build his own empire. The basic message—which the book says explicitly at its close—is that Europe was not just the driver of one of the world’s great processes of conquest, colonisation and cultural change. It was also the product of one. But it is certainly arguable that the latter process began well before 950."

"For an amazingly long time, it was normal to view the Crusades, almost entirely, from a Western perspective. Thankfully, that viewpoint is now completely exploded. In fact, we need to examine the crusades to the Holy Land from both a Greek and an Islamic angle too. If I’d had space, I would have chosen a book on the Byzantine perspective—but if I’ve only got the opportunity to have one, then I’d go for the Muslim angle. “when you get to places like Iraq and Iran, the Crusades were really not that important” There has been quite a rash of books trying to examine what the Crusades looked like to the Islamic world. The reason that I picked Hillenbrand is, quite simply, because it’s a classic. It covers the whole period of the struggle. It shows how the Muslims saw ‘the Franks’, and all the religious and ethnic stereotypes that were being bandied about during this long period of cultural interaction. It assesses what daily life was actually like in the Crusader States —where, on the one hand, you could be enemies on the battlefield, but you could also meet in the souk or in the bathhouse. Hillenbrand also examines how Muslim armies fought, what armour and weapons they used, their fortifications, and so on and so forth. And, of course, she looks at the biggest question of all: what all this meant for how the West viewed the Islamic world, and vice versa. Hillenbrand tries hard not to give simplistic answers. To some extent, the West and the Muslim world are represented as two self-confident cultures—who look at each other, don’t much like what they see, and therefore connect rather less than we might think. But on the other hand, though, an increasingly ‘globalised’ Crusades scholarship is saying that we should view these two spheres as actually rather similar. The warrior aristocracy, on either side, operated under quite closely related assumptions about how one should live, rule and fight, and how religion should affect what you do. But I would also bring out a point that, in my view, Hillenbrand minimises rather too much. This is the simple fact that the Westerners never actually got all that far into the Islamic world. (The Mongols are the ones who actually overrun the Middle East, doing enormous damage in the process.) On the one hand, then, the Crusades seem to be crucial in poisoning relations between the West and Islam. On the other hand, though, you could certainly argue that at the time, at least, the crusaders were little more than an irritant to the Muslim sphere. The Westerners could preoccupy warlords in Syria, and affect rulers in Egypt and what is now Turkey—but when you get to places like Iraq and Iran, the Crusades were really not that important. In a way. The Seljuq Turks had recently conquered most of the Middle East, but their united empire had already begun to break into fragments. One of the most interesting consequences of this is the simple fact that government by an alien minority was really quite normal in eleventh- and twelfth-century Syria. (At this particular juncture, most of the ruling class were Turks, but there were also Kurds, Armenians and so on and so forth—and some of them, at least, were quite suspect in religious terms.) So there is scope to argue that the Franks were not quite as shocking as one might think: that they were simply another foreign ruling class to go alongside the others. This is a particularly significant point because, with the benefit of hindsight, we assume that the Crusader States were always doomed to fail. But when you actually look at the history of the Islamic world, there were very long periods when a Turkish ruling class, for example, stayed in control over vast subject populations. Exactly."

"Yes—Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s The Conquest of Constantinople and Jean of Joinville’s The Life of Saint Louis . The rationale for including this book is that, at some point, you’ve got to hear the original voices. I wouldn’t want to recommend five works on the Crusades without giving you the opportunity to read what a crusader actually wrote. And if there is a medieval chronicle that stands out for being approachable, then it’s Joinville’s. He’s writing in French—for a lay, rather than a clerical audience—and it suddenly becomes real and alive in a way that just doesn’t happen with earlier Latin writers. It is Joinville, for instance, who tells us that when he was leaving his castle to go on crusade, he couldn’t bring himself to look back. One of the children that he was leaving behind was just a few weeks old. You don’t hear that sort of thing in many other sources. Similarly, Joinville gives us asides, anecdotes and funny stories. He reveals, for example, that when the crusaders were encamped together at Sidon, the Count of Eu used to play practical jokes. The Count had a little catapult made and used to fire stones whilst the crusaders were eating, causing comedic havoc on the dinner table. He also got hold of a small bear and sent it into Joinville’s camp, where it killed some of the chickens. All this is heavy medieval humour that has not aged well, but it was clearly very tension-relieving at the time. Joinville is explicitly writing as part of the formal canonisation process for St Louis (Louis IX of France). So there is a clear mission statement: to show that the king was an admirable person. But it’s not a completely positive portrait. In fact, there are moments where Joinville is really quite critical. For instance, when Louis declares his intention to go on his second crusade in 1267, Joinville clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea this time—and, in the end, the future chronicler stays at home. In this way, then, you’re not just getting Joinville’s reminiscences of Louis’s first crusade. You’re also receiving a remarkable insight into France in the mid-thirteenth century, as well as a portrait of an outstanding king. And—in this book as a whole—you also get Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s The Conquest of Constantinople : his account of the Fourth Crusade. Yes. This expedition culminated in the capture and sack of Constantinople, which is really the most shocking event that took place in all the Crusades. That’s especially the case when you bear in mind the fact that the movement had originally started so as to save the Greeks from the Turks. And then, a hundred years or so later, it’s the West that destroys Byzantium, mashing Constantinople into a pulp. Well, there is a lot going on here. On the one hand, there has long been a schism between the Latin West and Greek Orthodox Churches—and this can be exploited to justify what happened in 1204. Even more than that, though, Geoffrey presents the Fourth Crusade as a great chivalric enterprise, driven by honour. And, of course, there is another key point, which is that the ultimate legitimator is success. If you capture a great city like Constantinople, which has never been seized by a non-Greek army before, then it is quite clear—to most medieval thinkers—that God is on your side. Yes—and what is most fascinating is that you can compare his description with that of a contemporary Greek historian. In his O City of Byzantium , Niketas Choniates gives us a quite different view. What everyone can agree on is that the sack was truly horrific. On the one hand, though, we have Geoffrey trying to defend it as the legitimate outcome of a long and complex process, driven ultimately by chivalric ideals like honour. On the other hand, though, we have Niketas, who clearly thinks that this event marks the end of civilisation as we know it."