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Historians Rank the “Most Important” Books on the Crusades

 

“As I write these words, it is nearly time to light the lamps; my pen moves slowly over the paper and I feel myself almost too drowsy to write as the words escape me. I have to use foreign names and I am compelled to describe in detail a mass of events which occurred in rapid succession; the result is that the main body of the history and the continuous narrative are bound to become disjointed because of interruptions. Ah well, “’tis no cause for anger” to those at least who read my work with good will. Let us go on.”

Anna Comnena, Alexiad 13.6, trans. by E.R.A. Sewter

Provided here are the responses of 34 medieval historians who were asked to provide a list of the top ten “most important” books on the crusades. Many of them are leading scholars in the field. Hopefully, it will be a useful resource for both students and interested readers. For more information, please see the Crusade Book List Project and to see each historian’s list click on their name below (or you can scroll and browse through them below). Please hit the back button to return to the contributor’s list. Also, check back in the future for additional contributions that will be added over time. This will be an ongoing project.

See also: 15 “Most Important” Books on the Crusades

See also: The Most Influential Crusade Historians

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A Crusader’s Mom

Something a bit different.

Early crusaders were volunteers, who took vows to go on a crusade, rather than members of a professional army. As a result, they had to fund themselves for the duration of a crusade, which could often involve traveling across continents over a period of years and often experiencing extraordinary hardships and danger.

Naturally, this was massively expensive and may reflect why only 1% or 2% of Europe’s more religious knights were willing to commit to the First Crusade, as crusading not only promised a high probability of death or injury but was also massively expensive and could be crippling financially. Charters show that those who participated in the crusades were often concerned about the costs more than anything, as many had to mortgage or sell properties to be able to afford to take part.

While there are many Latin Christian sources confirming this, there is one well known source by the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, who confirms it as well. In his account of the siege of Tyre, he notes:

“A Frankish [crusader] prisoner told me that he was his mother’s only son, and their house was their sole possession, and she had sold it and used the money obtained from it to equip him to go and free Jerusalem.”

Source: Gabrieli’s Arab Historians of the Crusades, 1969.

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Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition: An Interview with Dr. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau

As editors for Hackett Publishing’s Myths of History Series, Alfred J. Andrea and I were quite pleased to have recruited scholar Gretchen Starr-Lebeau to write Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition (2023) for the series. Like all of the historical topics covered in the series, many popular myths about the Spanish Inquisition are emphasized in modern literature, film, and the broader popular culture, and have become so imbued in the public consciousness that the efforts of professors to push back against them can seem almost futile. This is why Al and I, as series editors, emphasized the importance of recruiting major scholars, with impeccable credentials, and experienced teachers, with the ability to communicate well with students and general readers, as authors or editors of books in our series. It is for this reason that Al and I were so pleased to have Gretchen, a respected scholar with considerable experience in the college classroom, agree to tackle the challenging topic of the Spanish Inquisition.

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Martin Luther on Holy War against the Turks

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted from Religion and World Civilizations: How Faith Shaped Societies from Antiquity to the Present, 3 Vols. (edited by Andrew Holt). Copyright © 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic. All rights reserved. Reproduced here with the permission of Bloomsbury Academic (Ordering information provided below).

Christians and Muslims had often engaged in warfare prior to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation resulted in the emergence of a third major division of Christianity, to include Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy. Muslims engaged in jihad against Orthodox Byzantine Christians as early as the seventh century and against Latin Christians in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean in the eighth century. During the late eleventh century, Latin Christians developed a unique type of holy war that would come to be known as a crusade, which would develop institutionally and continue in varying parts or forms into the early modern era. When the earliest leaders of the Protestant Reformation began to emerge during the early sixteenth century, it is perhaps not surprising that they rejected crusading, as it depended on papal authority and offered indulgences to participants, both of which had been rejected by the influential German monk and reformer Martin Luther (d. 1546). In the case of Luther, we can see a development of thought on the issue of Christian participation in warfare necessitated by concerns that emerged as a result of the Ottoman threat to Europe in the early sixteenth century. While Luther’s early commentary on the subject rejected the validity of Christian warfare against the Turks, he would later come to embrace it under limited circumstances that aligned with his evolving Protestant views of Christian morality and ethics.

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The High-Flying Sexy World of Encyclopedia Editing: Some Insights for Potential Encyclopedists

Having recently received hardback copies of a third multivolume encyclopedia that I have either edited or authored, I sometimes get questions about the process. Frankly, there are not a lot of written resources for academics considering taking on such a project for the first time, but you can count on senior scholars to share their wisdom. For example, I was fortunate enough to be able to discuss my various projects with my friend, Alfred J. Andrea, a master encyclopedist, and co-edit my first encyclopedia with my former dissertation advisor, Florin Curta, a leading scholar of the early Middle Ages. In this, I have been fortunate to have such guidance, and so want to share a bit of what I have learned about the process.

It’s important to note that one’s experience editing (or authoring) such a project can vary quite a bit from project to project. It depends on one’s goals from the outset, your level of commitment, the level of support from the publisher, and whether or not there is a global pandemic that shuts down all the universities and makes many of your contributors sick while you are trying to complete the task (yes, it happened). These variables aside, while fully acknowledging that other encyclopedists may disagree with me on some finer points, there are some general considerations that I feel confident sharing here.

In what is surely one of the least exciting possible blog posts with the smallest possible target audience since I began blogging, I reflect on some of those considerations in encyclopedia editing here. Hopefully, they will be of use to those few brave souls considering taking on such a project.

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The Myth of Religion as the Cause of Most Wars

The following essay, by Andrew Holt, is republished from John D. Hosler‘s edited volume, Seven Myths of Military History (Hackett, 2022). It is provided here with both the permission of Professor Hosler and Hackett Publishing. Thoughtful feedback and comments are welcome and can be emailed directly to the author at aholt@fscj.edu.

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Chapter 1. War and the Divine: Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?

Andrew Holt

“It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.”

—Richard Kimball[1]

To uproarious laughter, the late comedian and social critic George Carlin once condemned God as the cause of the “bloodiest and most brutal wars” ever fought, which were “all based on religious hatred.” He stated that millions have died simply because “God told” Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians it would be a “good idea” for them to kill each other. Carlin’s comedy routine, entitled “Kill for God!” has received rave reviews by its viewers for being “brilliant” and “spot on,” with one anonymous fan confirming that religion is “by far the single biggest cause of human deaths.”[2]

To be clear, it is not modern military historians who claim religion is the cause of most wars, but rather many prominent intellectuals, scientists, academics, and politicians, often with far greater influence over popular cultural assumptions than professional historians, who have popularized such claims. In a 2006 interview, the neuroscientist and cultural commentator Sam Harris stated, “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology.”[3] The Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins claimed in 2003 that religion is the “principal label, and the most dangerous one,” by which human divisions occur, contributing to “wars, murders and terrorist attacks.”[4]

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Guest Essay: Santiago Matamoros in the Americas by Alfred J. Andrea

Main Image: Santiago Mataespañois, (Santiago, Killer of Spaniards) Museo das Peregrinacións e de Santiago. Photo by A. J. Andrea.

See also: Guest Essay: Santiago Matamoros by Alfred J. Andrea

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Santiago Matamoros was every bit as much the patron of the Spaniards’ conquests in the Americas as he had been during the preceding four and a half centuries of Iberian Reconquista.  The fact that numerous cities and towns throughout Latin America were blessed with the names “Santiago,” and “Matamoros,” including 27 Santiagos and 16 Matamoroses in Mexico alone, indicates the warrior saint’s importance to the conquistadors and the colonists who followed them. And those numbers do not include the many locales to which the saint’s name was added as an honorific, such as Mexico City’s Santiago de Tlateloco, which appears below.

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Guest Essay: Santiago Matamoros by Alfred J. Andrea

Main Image (Above): Francisco Camilo, El Apóstol Santiago a caballo o Santiago Matamoros (1649), Prado Museum. Source: https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/el-apostol-santiago-a-caballo-o-santiago-matamoros/cc593ac0-b3bf-428d-90fa-87f9a7d80294 (accessed December 15, 2020.

The following essay is by Alfred J. Andrea, the former president of the World History Association, a mentor, and a noted medieval historian. In it, he provides background on Santiago Matamoros, the subject of the cover image of our forthcoming book Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History.

See also: Guest Essay: Santiago of the Americas by Andrea J. Andrea

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Santiago Matamoros

This seventeenth-century painting, which graces the cover of the paperback version of Andrea and Holt, Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History, deserves a bit of explanation. The title translates as “The Apostle Saint James on Horseback, or Saint James the Moor-slayer.” How, one rightly asks, did an apostle of Jesus, the same Jesus who preached “Blessed are the peacemakers,”[1] get in the business of killing Moors? And what is that strange symbol on the white banner that he carries? Answers to those questions tells us quite a bit about the holy war known as the Spanish Reconquista and Spanish conquests in the Americas.

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Guest Essay: The Story Behind the Making of Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History by Alfred J. Andrea

The following essay is by Alfred J. Andrea, the former president of the World History Association, a mentor, and a noted medieval historian. In it, he provides background on how our forthcoming book Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History, was envisioned and came together.

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Religion is a shield against life’s assaults. But it is also a “terrible swift sword” unsheathed against the perceived enemies of divine righteousness. As a student of religious history, I have long been fascinated with the dual faces of devotion, especially religion’s sanctification of violence, but for many years did not expand my investigation of holy war beyond the boundaries of Christianity and Islam. That changed abruptly in 2003, while offering a seminar on the crusades at the Global History Center in Beijing. Discussion of Portuguese and Spanish crusades in the Indian Ocean and the Americas prompted a student, who was pursuing a PhD in global history, to ask if there are forms of holy war other than crusades and jihads that a world historian should be aware of. I was momentarily stumped, but promised a reply the next day.

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“Adversarial Camaraderie” at the Siege of Acre: Archery and Wrestling Competitions

Professor John D. Hosler’s fascinating book on the siege of Acre during the Third Crusade provides a brief, but interesting, consideration of the interactions that sometimes took place between combatants during the siege. Regardless of the violence of the siege, Hosler notes that “the spaces between the ramparts…were not necessarily a zone of death.” The shared experience that Muslim and Christians troops who took part in the lengthy and bloody siege (lasting from 1189-1191) could sometimes lead to “noticeable expressions of respect, and even an adversarial camaraderie.” Hosler describes two examples found in the sources.

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Guest Essay: The Global Middle Ages, by Alfred J. Andrea

The following essay is by Alfred J. Andrea, the former president of the World History Association and a noted medieval historian. In it, he provides his insights on the development, and challenges, of studying the Global Middle Ages.

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Most historians who specialize in medieval Europe are ambivalent about the term “the Middle Ages.” While proudly calling themselves “medievalists” (from the Latin medium aevum—middle age), they insist that the millennium or more separating late Roman antiquity from the so-called early modern period was not a middle period in any meaningful way. And it certainly was not a valley of darkness between two lofty golden ages.

Even more problematical or worse in the eyes of many medievalists is the term “the Global Middle Ages.” How, they ask, can one apply such a questionable label as Middle Ages, itself the misbegotten product of out-of-date historical thinking, to the rest of the world? What did India’s Gupta Empire (ca. 320-ca. 550) have in common with the roughly contemporaneous Visigothic Kingdom or China’s Tang dynasty (618-907) with the Carolingian dynasty? What possible connection was there between the twelfth-century Toltecs of central Mesoamerica and the Hohenstaufens of central Europe, or between Mali’s Epic of Sundiata and the Nibelungenlied? Although historians who promote study of the Global Middle Ages might claim that finally medieval history has been shorn of its Eurocentrism, conceivably their critics could counter that applying an obviously Eurocentric label to non-Western cultures is another example of Western academic imperialism. Continue reading →