Product Description

God's War offers a sweeping new vision of one of history's most astounding events: the Crusades.

From 1096 to 1500, European Christians fought to recreate the Middle East, Muslim Spain, and the pagan Baltic in the image of their God. The Crusades are perhaps both the most familiar and most misunderstood phenomena of the medieval world, and here Christopher Tyerman seeks to recreate, from the ground up, the centuries of violence committed as an act of religious devotion.

The result is a stunning reinterpretation of the Crusades, revealed as both bloody political acts and a manifestation of a growing Christian communal identity. Tyerman uncovers a system of belief bound by aggression, paranoia, and wishful thinking, and a culture founded on war as an expression of worship, social discipline, and Christian charity.

This astonishing historical narrative is imbued with figures that have become legends--Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus. But Tyerman also delves beyond these leaders to examine the thousands and thousands of Christian men--from Knights Templars to mercenaries to peasants--who, in the name of their Savior, abandoned their homes to conquer distant and alien lands, as well as the countless people who defended their soil and eventually turned these invaders back. With bold analysis, Tyerman explicates the contradictory mix of genuine piety, military ferocity, and plain greed that motivated generations of Crusaders. He also offers unique insight into the maturation of a militant Christianity that defined Europe's identity and that has forever influenced the cyclical antagonisms between the Christian and Muslim worlds.

Drawing on all of the most recent scholarship, and told with great verve and authority, God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating and horrifying story that continues to haunt our contemporary world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #195280 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1040 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This is likely to replace Steven Runciman's 50-year-old History of the Crusades as the standard work. Tyerman (England and the Crusades), lecturer in medieval history at Oxford University, demolishes our simplistic misconceptions about that series of ferocious campaigns in the Middle East, Muslim Spain and the pagan Baltic between 1096 and 1500. Abjuring sentimentality and avoiding clichés about a rapacious West and an innocent East, Tyerman focuses on the crusades' very human paradoxes: "the inspirational idealism; utopianism armed with myopia; the elaborate, sincere intolerance; the diversity and complexity of motive and performance." The reader marvels at the crusaders' inextinguishable devotion to Christ even while shuddering at their delight in massacring those who did not share that devotion. In the end, Tyerman says, what killed crusading was neither a lack of soldierly enthusiasm nor its failure to retain control of Jerusalem, but the loss of Church control over civil societies at home and secular authorities who felt that religion was not sufficient cause for war and that diplomacy was a more rational method of deciding international relations. God's War is that very rare thing: a readable and vivid history written with the support of a formidable scholarly background, and it deserves to reach a wide audience. 16 color illus. (Sept.)
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Review
This is likely to replace Steven Runciman's 50-year-old History of the Crusades as the standard work. Tyerman, lecturer in medieval history at Oxford University, demolishes our simplistic misconceptions about that series of ferocious campaigns in the Middle East, Muslim Spain and the pagan Baltic between 1096 and 1500...God's War is that very rare thing: a readable and vivid history written with the support of a formidable scholarly background, and it deserves to reach a wide audience. (Publishers Weekly (starred review 20061017)

Challenging traditional conceptions of the Crusades, e.g., the failure to retain Jerusalem, Tyerman believes that it was the weakening of papal power and the rise of secular governments in Europe that finally doomed the crusading impulse. This is a marvelously conceived, written, and supported book.
--Robert J. Andrews (Library Journal 20061209)

Christopher Tyerman, who teaches medieval history in Oxford, offers in his new and massive study of the Crusades as a whole a welcome synthesis for the general reader...Full of fascinating detail...God's War is a first-rate, scholarly, up-to-date, and highly readable survey of the entire crusading movement...In the gullible age of The Da Vinci Code, Tyerman offers a sane, informed, and gripping account of one of the most characteristic and most extraordinary manifestations of the Christian Middle Ages.
--Eamon Duffy (New York Review of Books 20061017)

Tyerman, an Oxford scholar, combines vigorous argument and nuanced analysis in this deeply learned chronicle of the Crusades...It's the best single-volume treatment of this still-controversial and fraught subject.
--Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwartz (Atlantic Monthly 20061026)

A magisterial work...it is a shoo-in to become this generation's definitive history of the original Crusades, a series of military expeditions that temporarily returned the Holy Land to Christian rule in the Middle Ages. Hefty, encyclopedic and a darn good read, Tyerman's book has the rarest of virtues among myriad treatments of the subject: It doesn't bend history to preconceptions.
--Ron Grossman (Chicago Tribune 20061211)

This strikingly effective book explains the vicious brutality and the serious Christian altruism so intimately intertwined in the crusading experience
--Mark A. Noll (Christian Century 20070301)

Anyone who likes knights, castles and battles as much as I do will enjoy Christopher Tyerman's masterpiece God's War, a history of the Crusades written with great breadth, clarity and human sympathy: one of the achievements of the year.
--Dominic Sandbrook (Daily Telegraph 20070701)

With rekindled controversy about Western invasions of the Middle East, the Crusades of the late Middle Ages take on unanticipated relevance. It is thus a real boon for this strikingly effective book to appear at this time. The key to Tyerman's signal success is his ability to explain both the vicious brutality and the serious Christian altruism that were so intimately intertwined in the crusading experience and that have left such a tangled legacy for Muslim-Christian relations to this day.
--Mark A. Noll (Christian Century 20070504)

Combines vigorous argument and nuanced analysis in this deeply learned chronicle of the Crusades...the best single-volume treatment of this still-controversial and fraught subject.
--Benjamin Schwarz (Atlantic Online )

God's War is a long but highly readable account of this extensive back-and-forth struggle. It is an impressive achievement, a work that manages to tie together an extraordinary number of threads across nearly half a millennium of European history. Although it can be taken as a response to Pope Benedict XVI's comments at Regensburg, it is more properly read as an extended rejoinder to Steven Runciman's classic three-volume History of the Crusades, published in the early 1950s, a long and colorful account that is nonetheless studded with judgments that now seem prejudiced and amateurish. Tyerman, by contrast, is never amateurish. His knowledge of the period is encyclopedic, and his judgments are sharp, astute, and fair--which is to say unsparing--to both camps. He neither vilifies Islam nor engages in the easy Euro-bashing that is the obverse of Islamophobia. With so many people succumbing to subjectivism these days, it is bracing to come across a historian who remains resolutely above the fray, who insists on viewing the conflict as a whole and who always has the broader context in mind.
--Daniel Lazare (The Nation )

Tyerman, an Oxford scholar, combines vigorous argument and nuanced analysis in this deeply learned chronicle of the Crusades...It's the best single-volume treatment of this still-controversial and fraught subject.
--Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwartz (Atlantic Monthly )

Christopher Tyerman's God's War is comprehensive, fascinating, and timely. It deflates comparisons of current U.S. strategies with the Crusades. True, the participation of religious in battle (like Odo on the Bayeux Tapestry) is noteworthy, but so is Tyerman's questioning of the cliché 'Age of Faith.' Indeed, while these books make the Middle Ages seem real, they also make it seem different, and our capacity to entertain the differences is morally crucial.
--Tom D'Evelyn (Providence Journal )

Christopher Tyerman's God's War: A New History of the Crusades is a doorstop of a book, a mammoth effort to retell, based on modern scholarship, the story of how Western Christendom made war to wrest the Holy Lands from Muslim hands. As we all know, this isn't considered ancient history in the Middle East.
--Fritz Lanham (Houston Chronicle )

This thick book compares favorably to Sir Steven Runciman's three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951-54), but where Runciman, writing a half century ago, saw the Crusades as Christianity's moral failure, Tyerman sees a violent era: neither Christians nor Moslems were peaceful, and both faced dangerous enemies...In addition to persuasive revisionist interpretations of individual crusades, Tyerman treats the broader scope of crusading, including Spain, the Balkans, and the Baltic. Most importantly for historians, the author sees nothing in the Crusades than can inform modem politics.
--W. L. Urban (Choice )

This thick book compares favorably to Sir Steven Runciman's three-volume A History of the Crusades, but where Runciman, writing a half century ago, saw the Crusades as Christianity's moral failure, Tyerman sees a violent era: neither Christians nor Moslems were peaceful, and both faced dangerous enemies...In addition to persuasive revisionist interpretations of individual crusades, Tyerman treats the broader scope of crusading, including Spain, the Balkans, and the Baltic. Most importantly for historians, the author sees nothing in the Crusades than can inform modem politics.
--W. L. Urban (Choice )

God's War is the new standard in the field...Adjectives for [it] almost fail. "Comprehensive," "monumental," and "epic" come to mind, and they are appropriate but scarcely adequate. In brief, this is a work by a master historian.
--Alfred J. Andrea (CT Review )

Christopher Tyerman...has written a tome that...draws on the most recent scholarship and offers fresh insights, demolishing myths galore.
--A. G. Noorani (Frontline )

Review
Christopher Tyerman has crafted a superb book whose majestic architecture compares with Runciman's classic study of the Crusades… He is an entertaining as well as reliable guide to the bizarre centuries-long episode in which Western Christianity willfully ignored its Master's principles of love and forgiveness.
--Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Thomas Cranmer: a Life (20060915)

Customer Reviews

Informative and Even Handed But A Bit of a Slog
This book is very complete, well researched and informative. Tyerman is obviously a first rate scholar with a very good command of the source materials. The book covers not only the well known middle-eastern crusades but also lesser known crusades in central and eastern Europe as well as France and Spain. It is difficult to think of a significant event not covered in depth by the book.

The book further is very evenhanded in its treatment of the subject. Various atrocities committed by each side are presented straightforwardly and put in context with the standards of conduct and warfare at the time. If Tyerman views one side more favorably than the other, it is impossible to tell which one from reading the book.

The only real draw back to the book is that Tyerman is just not a good story teller. He is not a bad writer. The book is clearly written and very readable. But the book is not a good story. Tyerman does not have a great eye for detail. He doesn't do a particularly good job of fleshing out the characters in the book or telling the story in a compelling way.

Overall this is a good book that is incredibly informative and worth having around. But be forewarned, it is not an easy read and is a bit of a slog to get through.

Well written, descriptive, and honest.
This book comes none too late to combat the prevalence of the postmodernist myth of the Crusades having been a conflict between intolerant Christianity and cosmopolitan Islam. Tyerman's introduction illuminates a central flaw in the modern West's view of its past:

"A familiar but baneful response to history is to configure the past as comfortingly different from the present day. Previous societies are caricatured as less sophisticated, more primitive, cruder, alien. Such attitudes reveal nothing so much as a collective desire to reassure the modern observer by demeaning the experience of the past."

With God's War, Tyerman brings to modern discourse on this most controversial and formative periods of the European past something that has been missing for centuries: objectivity. As Tyerman himself will readily admit, complete objectivity is impossible, and therefore he begins and ends this work in full recognition of its Eurocentric point of view. But unlike many commentators, Tyerman refuses to fall into the trap of issuing a moral verdict on the actions of his ancestors and their enemies. His mission is simple and pure; he comes to tell us a story of what happened and do so as honestly and directly as he can. He does not read cynicically into the motives of the actors and levies skepticism and criticism only where it is positively backed by the historical record. To these qualities I must also add that it is entertainingly written--a hundred Hollywood film scripts could come from this book. It is a long book, though, and those who are uninterested in details may want to stick to Wikipedia articles. If, however, you really want to learn just what was behind this bizarre alliance of Christianity and militarism, I highly recommend this excellent book.

really bad
I started this book last week and am only around page 100 but am not sure that I will continue. My problem is that the author is not a very good story teller and frankly last night I found myself rereading a sentence 4 times to understand what it was saying only to realize that it was nonsensical. I'm no brain scientist but I'm fairly adept at reading and I keep coming across such passages that are either so convoluted they confuse or are just poorly written. If I had the energy I would go upstairs to pull such a passage but alas carrying 1,000 pages of dullness does not inspire me.

I'm going to give it another try but I'd like some narrative to engage me.

Ok, I tried. This is simply poorly written. Multiple passages that are not even understandable English on top of the very flat way of stating fact upon fact without any compelling narrative. I rarely give up on a book and this is a topic I find fascinating but this is simply not worth the trouble.