Christopher Tyerman

The invention of the Crusades

Introduction Were there any Crusades in the Twelfth Century? Definition and Diffusion Proteus Unbound: Crusading Historiography Select Secondary Bibliography Select Primary Bibliography Index

The debate on the Crusades

General Editors foreword Preface Introduction 1. Medieval views on the Crusades 2. Reformation, revision, texts and nations 1500-1700 3. Reason, faith and progress: a contested Enlightenment 4. Empathy and materialism: keeping the crusade up to date 5. Scholarship, politics and the Golden Age of research 6. The end of colonial consensus 7. Erdmann and Runciman and the end of tradition 8. Definitions and directions Epilogue Selective guide to further reading Index

Holy War, Roman Popes, And Christian Soldiers: Some Early Modern Views On Medieval Christendom

Some time in 1608, there arrived at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge a distinguished foreign visitor who, through the good offices of the Chancellor of the University, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, and of Merlin Higden, a Fellow of Corpus, had been given permission to examine a manuscript in the college library. The visiting scholar had secured access to the library through a network of contacts that included his friend, a naturalized Frenchman and diplomat working for Cecil, Sir Stephen Lesieur, and a Chiswick clergyman, William Walter. What makes this apparently unremarkable (and hitherto unremarked) incident of more than trivial interest is that the industrious researcher was Jacques Bongars, veteran roving French ambassador in Germany and staunch Calvinist, and that his text was William of Tyre’s Historia Ierosolymitana .

Proteus Unbound: Crusading Historiography

‘Since the creation of the world, what has been more miraculous excepting the mystery of the Cross, than what has happened in modern times in this journey of our Jerusalemites?1 Ever since this extravagant conceit of Robert of Rheims, failed abbot and popular historian of the First Crusade, written some time before 1108, appreciation of the significance, nature, even course of such expeditions and of the importance of the attendant religious, social, political and fiscal mechanisms has depended on interpreters, not witnesses. Most medieval written primary sources were exercises in interpreting reality, not describing it. Even before the transmuting interests of modern historians operate, the record of the past is slanted. Thus perceptions of the First Crusade were created by the historians it inspired as much as by the experiences of those who campaigned. The actions of the latter were set in a precise, explicable context by the former. Not for the last time, the deeds of soldiers were explained to them by non-combatants. The sources, charters as well as chronicles, tend to be self-conscious attempts to explain actions and events according to the intellectual fashions of the time. The First Crusade united observers in astonishment, admiration and awe.

Definition and Diffusion

The expeditions from western Europe to recover Jerusalem between 1188 and 1192 reforged the ideology and practice of crusading, casting the past in a new light and the future in new directions. Failure to achieve their ultimate goal ensured that subsidium Terrae sanctae — assistance for the Holy Land — remained prominent in contemporary religious and political rhetoric. Diverse mechanisms of thought, organization and action coalesced into recognizable patterns of belief, argument, aspiration and strategy sustained by distinctive legal, ritual and liturgical customs. Funding, recruitment and preaching developed in ways that flowed from the exigencies and experiences of the 1190s rather than the 1090s: clerical taxation; vow redemptions; armies paid by central funds; the use of sea transport; central control of regional preaching campaigns. Built on the disparate practices and habits of the previous century, crusading was fashioned to suit changing religious, ecclesiastical and political objectives.

England and the Crusades, 1095-1588.

A potent mix of salvation and adventure, the Crusades were one of the most prominent features of medieval Europe, reflecting and directing religious and secular movements in Western society for half a millennium. Christopher Tyerman offers this book-length study of the role of England in the Crusades which focuses on the courtroom and council chamber rather than the battlefield. Tyerman seeks to demonstrate the impact of the Crusades on the political and economic functions of English society. Drawing on a wide range of archival, chronicle, and literary evidence, the text illustrates royal personalities, foreign policy, political intrigue, taxation and fundraisingm, and the crusading ethos that gripped England for hundreds of years.