Summary
Title: Fighting For Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades
Author: Christopher Tyerman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192803255
Pro:
• Short, well-written, and engaging account of the Crusades
• Doesn’t just focus on history; also explains how the idea of the Crusades has been (mis)used
Con:
• None
Description:
• Analysis of the history of the Crusades
• Explores how the Crusades have been used ideologically throughout history
• Argues that the Crusades were culturally and historically conditioned
Book Review
Much has been written about the Crusades, so it hardly seems necessary to have yet another. Such an assumption would be a mistake, however, because a fresh look can always be valuable, especially on a topic that has been dominated either by dense academic tomes or popular fluff. Christopher Tyerman’s book Fighting For Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades avoids both fates and provides an interesting look at a well-worn subject.
At a little over 200 pages Tyerman’s book is short, but it’s also ambitious because he is proving an overview of not only the Crusades themselves, but also in how they have been used in ideological propaganda (both medieval and modern), as well as the role they continue to play in political thought today. Any one of those would have been enough for a book twice this length, but Tyerman manages to do reasonable justice to each, and that’s what should make it a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in the Crusades, medieval history generally, or the history of relations between Christianity and Islam.
The thesis that runs as a thread throughout Tyerman’s book is that “much of what passes in public as knowledge of the Crusades is either misleading or false.” With that, he argues that the Crusades were not pursued as a means for political or economic conquest. Instead, it was something more interesting, more difficult to understand, and far more alien to our modern eyes: “an act of total self-abnegating faith demanded by God.” The soldiers of the Crusades traveled far from home to die horribly under an alien sun because they sincerely and fiercely believed that it would please their god.
Sincere belief, however, is not quite enough to create a crusade — that requires a great deal of political organization. Tyreman explains how political and religious leaders of the time carefully manipulated people in order to achieve the desired effects:
- “Crusading was not a spontaneous act. An individual rush of conviction or the sudden collective convulsion of a crowd might provoke the initial act of commitment, the adoption of the cross. However, the translation of that obligation into action depended on personal, political, social, financial, and economic preparation and planning and generated widely diffused legal and fiscal institution.”
- “Armies may march on their stomachs, but it is difficult to make them fight and die without a cause, without some internal dynamic that acts beyond reason to send warriors over the top or stand their ground. But all the passion in the universe could not, cannot create war, crusading or not, without the organization and manipulation of recruitment, finance, logistics, military structure — and ideas.”
Fighting For Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades
It’s the manipulation of ideas that Tyreman spends most of his time on because the Crusades continue to be manipulated today by people. In the wake of World War I, for example, France successfully argued for having political control of part of the Middle East on the basis of French knights have served and died there a millennia earlier. Every generation has found something in the Crusades to use — sometimes they have been romanticized, sometimes they have been vilified. Always, though, they were more important for how they could be used than for what they really were.
The same is true among Muslims. Islamic extremists regularly use the concept of the Crusades as a basis from which they can attack the West and Israel, arguing that the Crusades never really ended and that Muslims must today rise up to throw back the invaders just as they once did under Saladin. The Crusades are a powerful symbol that can be readily manipulated by cynical, clever propagandists. Rather than trying to understand the Crusades on their own terms and as unique products of their own time, people (Muslim and Christian) seem to prefer to use them to continue attacking others.
Tyreman’s book may be a good first step in countering that trend.
