February 13, 2020 29
current efflorescence of studies of the
Crusades in Britain owes something to
the inspiration of his literary master-
piece, though much credit must also go
to the more sober and accurate work
produced later by such figures as R.C.
Smail, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Ber-
nard Hamilton. A younger generation
of academic historians is still teach-
ing and publishing, including Thomas
Asbridge, Peter Edbury, Susan Edg-
ington, Helen Nicholson, Jonathan
Phillips, Denys Pringle, Steve Tibble,
and Tyerman himself (who is a pro-
fessor at Oxford and has a string of
weighty studies on the Crusades to his
credit). French scholars used to domi-
nate the subject, the Crusades being
regarded as primarily a bit of French
history; when in 1980 the international
Society for the Study of the Crusades
and the Latin East was established,
the French doyen of Crusader studies,
Claude Cahen, was invited, indeed was
begged, to join it, but he refused, as
he regarded the society’s founding as
masking the takeover of Crusade stud-
ies by the British. Perhaps he was right.
All three of the authors of the books
reviewed here are British, though Dan
Jones and Roger Crowley are not aca-
demics but professional writers who
aim for a popular audience. Jones, who
has previously written books on the
Plantagenets, the Wars of the Roses,
and the Templars, is a huge admirer of
Runciman’s “glorious” work, and the
introduction to Crusaders ends with
a quotation from Runciman: “The ro-
mantic story of the Crusades was an
epic written in blood.” Jones’s writing
aims at a you-are-there effect, and this
is best achieved by almost exclusively
quoting primary sources, while mostly
sidestepping the doubts and theories of
academics. Nevertheless, his reading of
specialized studies is comprehensive
and up to date, including, for example,
Jeffrey Lee’s God’s Wolf: The Life of the
Most Notorious of All Crusaders, Rey-
nald de Chatillon (2017) and Jay Ru-
benstein’s Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream:
The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy,
and the End of History (2019). Some
of Jones’s primary sources are little
known, and even enthusiasts for the
subject may never have heard of the
Russian Daniel the Abbot, Saint Neo-
phytos the Recluse, or La Chronique
de Morigny. It is good to be introduced
to Margaret of Beverley’s account of
how, with a cooking pot on her head,
she took part in the doomed defense of
Jerusalem against Saladin in 1187.
The immediacy of Jones’s book is
enhanced by physical and psycho-
logical descriptions of the heroes and
villains of the story. Yaghisiyan, the
Turkish commander of the garrison
at Antioch, had big hairy ears and a
beard that flowed down to his navel. Il-
ghazi, one of the Turkish warlords who
ravaged Syria at the time of the First
Crusade, was “a sadistic dipsomaniac.”
Jones draws on the Byzantine princess
Anna Comnena’s account of her fa-
ther’s reign to describe Bohemond of
Taranto, one of the leaders of the First
Crusade, as “tall, broad-chested and
handsome, with large hands and a solid
stance, captivating light blue eyes and
a fair complexion, his hair cut short
around his ears and his chin shaved
quite smooth.” (Though Anna’s depic-
tion of Bohemond is otherwise relent-
lessly hostile, I wonder if she did not
fancy him as a bit of Frankish rough.)
Jones has a taste for Grand Gui-
gnol. On their way to Jerusalem the
army of the First Crusade succeeded
in taking the small town of Ma’arrat
an-Nu’man, but then found little to eat
within its walls. Jones quotes the Gesta
Francorum: “‘[Our men] ripped up
the bodies of the dead, because they
used to find bezants [gold coins] hid-
den in their entrails.... Others cut the
dead flesh into slices and cooked it to
eat.’” A governor of Gabès in Muslim
Ifri qiyya, who wanted to surrender the
town to Roger of Sicily, was seized and
tortured by those who disagreed with
him; they ended up using his severed
penis to choke him. In 1147 a fleet car-
rying Crusaders from the British Isles
and Flanders en route to Syria stopped
off in Portugal to assist in the siege of
Muslim Lisbon, and “those demor-
alised citizens who came out begging
for mercy and baptism were sent back
to the city with their hands cut off.” The
Count of Flanders “came to the East in
1177 to atone for the sin of having had
the lover of his adulterous wife Eliza-
beth’s beaten to death with a mace and
dumped headfirst in a lavatory.” “An
epic written in blood,” indeed.
Jones is fairly skeptical of Saladin’s
self-presentation as the ruler who was
above all dedicated to a Holy War
against the Crusaders, and points out
that he fought other Muslims as often
as Christians and that when he did
fight he was often defeated. (Tyerman
is similarly skeptical.) It is true that
Saladin maintained a team of salaried
panegyrists who commemorated his
achievements in chronicles, poetry, and
bombastic proclamations, but it is also
the case that he had a wider circle of
admirers, including Ibn Jubayr, who
passed through Saladin’s lands on his
pilgrimage from Spain to Mecca; ‘Abd
al-Latif al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi physician
who visited Egypt; and Ibn al-Athir, a
chronicler based in Zengid Mosul.Roger Crowley’s The Accursed
Towe r: The Fall of Acre and the End
of the Crusades provides a whistle-stop
history of the Crusader states before
hastening on to a detailed account of
the last days of the rump of the Cru-
sader Kingdom and the siege of Acre by
a Mamluk army under the command of
Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil in 1291. Crow-
ley is very good on the topography and
archaeology of medieval Acre and
good also on the military technology
of the time, especially the operation of
trebuchets (a kind of catapult) and the
mining of walls.
There are a few errors in the early
part of the book regarding Islamic his-
tory. When Crowley describes the Mon-
gols in their advance across the Middle
East as having “destroyed the existing
Persian dynasty and pushed its Turkic
tribal rulers, the Khwarazmians, into
Palestine,” it is not clear which Per-
sian dynasty was being destroyed and
when. Neither of the two major dynas-
ties of the time of the Crusades were
in fact Persian: the Khwarazm Shahs
were Turkish, and the Abbasid Caliph
in Baghdad was an Arab. It is also
misleading to describe the thirteenth-
century Mongol ruler Hülegü as “the
khan of Mesopotamia.” Hülegü was
Ilkhan of Iran and consequently he and
Berke, the Mongol khan of the Golden
Horde, had a disputed common fron-
tier in the Caucasus.
Like Jones, Crowley quotes exten-
sively from primary sources. On theChristian side, the best source is the
Templar of Tyre, who if he was not
actually a Templar certainly knew the
Soldiers of Christ and their Grand
Master pretty well and who remained
in Acre almost to the very end. On the
Muslim side, two participants in the
siege, the Arab prince Abu’l-Fida and
the Turkish emir Baybars al-Mansuri,
described the fighting in their chroni-
cles, but Crowley rightly observes that
the Western sources are much better on
the details of the fighting and descrip-
tions of tactics and weapons used. The
Arabic chronicles tended to resort to a
generalized rhetoric that could apply to
any siege.
Crowley’s book has the feel of a
slow-burning tragedy, and most of
its readers will hope that Acre under
the Crusaders will survive the ordeal
of 1291 even though they know it will
not. Comparisons with the sinking of
the Titanic come to mind, since, as it
became obvious that the city was not
going to survive, those who could af-
ford it arranged for ships to take them
away to sa fet y i n C y pr us a nd elsewhere.
The less fortunate fought and died.In 1986 a British historian of the Mid-
dle East, P. M. Holt, published The Age
of the Crusades: The Near East from
the Eleventh Century to 1517. The title
was absurd, since the period in question
saw the breakup of the Seljuk Sultan-
ate, the elimination of the Fatimid Ca-
liphate, the Mongol invasions, the end
of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad,
the collapse of the Mamluk Sultanate
in Egypt and Syria, and the beginnings
of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires.
It was not defined by the beleaguered
presence of Crusader cities and villages
on the coastal strip of Syria and Pales-
tine, or unsuccessful Crusader raids on
the Nile Delta.
Though Tyerman has devoted most
of his academic career to writing about
the Crusades, he does not overestimate
the impact of the Crusades on the Near
East; he instead argues that the Cru-
sades had a stronger effect on Europe
t ha n on t he Mu sl i m la nds. The World of
the Crusades embraces much of Chris-
tendom and not only devotes a lot of
attention to the Crusades and pseudo-
Crusades that took place in Europe—
including the Baltic Crusades against
pagan and Orthodox Balts, Finns, and
Slavs; the Reconquista in Spain and
Portugal; and the Crusades against
the heretical Albigensians (Cathars)
in southern France and the Hohen-
staufen, whose most powerful mem-
ber, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick
II, was deemed the Antichrist by Pope
Gregory IX—but also pays careful at-
tention to all the necessary prepara-
tions in Europe (preaching, financing,
arming, and fleet-building) before Cru-
sader expeditions could set out for
the East.
Jones and Crowley tend to present
the medieval conflict between Chris-
tianity and Islam as fierce. Tyerman,
by contrast, stresses the truces, the ac-
commodations, the trading relations,
and the occasions when the armies
of Crusader lords fought alongside
Muslim princes. Reading Jones and
Crowley one might get the impression
that the Franks of the Crusader prin-
cipalities almost all lived within the
walls of such cities as Jerusalem, Acre,
Tyre, Beirut, Tripoli, and Antioch, and
that is indeed what the chronicles andother literary sources suggest, but the
archaeological evidence tells another
story. Tyerman, who has read Ronnie
Ellenblum’s pioneering study Frankish
Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom
of Jerusalem (1998), knows that Frank-
ish lords and farmers were quite widely
settled in villages throughout the
kingdom, and that those villages were
mostly populated by native Christians.
Tyerman has not striven to produce
a visceral account of the Crusades, and
his descriptions of the appearance and
the psychology of the figures he dis-
cusses are brisk, when they are there
at all, but his book is strong in analysis
and synthesis, where Jones’s and Crow-
ley’s are weak. To take just one exam-
ple, the opening sentences of Jones’s
Crusaders are: “Count Roger of Sicily
lifted his leg and farted. ‘By the truth
of my religion,’ he exclaimed, ‘there is
more use i n that than i n what you say! ’ ”
Jones treats this as evidence for Roger’s
rejection of his advisers’ proposal to
launch an attack on Muslim North Af-
rica. Tyerman has the same story, but
he regards the anecdote as merely “ben
trovato” and points out that it is related
by a Mosuli Arab chronicler writing
over a century later. All too often in-
vented dialogues and vivid incidents
found in “primary sources” do not de-
scribe what actually happened but have
a convenient explanatory function.
Though The World of the Crusades
is copiously and beautifully illustrated,
Tyerman has not been well served by
his picture researcher—or by the writer
of his jacket copy. A picture of a cross-
legged Arab with a mysterious ball in
his hand is captioned “Saladin, a con-
temporary image.” It is no such thing.
It is an illustration from a thirteenth-
century Egyptian manuscript of Ismail
al-Jazari’s Book of Knowledge of In-
genious Mechanical Devices, and the
Arab in question is a robot that every
half hour drops a pellet into the mouth
of the dragon that is also a robotic part
of this ingenious clepsydra. Saladin
never sat for a portrait and, though fig-
ural art was quite common in the me-
dieval Near East, this did not include
actual portraits. (When the Moroccan
traveler Ibn Battuta visited China in
the early fourteenth century, he was
astounded to discover that the Chinese
could produce portraits of him and his
companions in which “the resemblance
was correct in all respects.”) Again in
Tyerman’s book, there is an illustra-
tion that is captioned “Baibars and
his court.” No, it is not. This image of
an enthroned ruler is the frontispiece
to a work of fiction, al-Hariri’s Maqa-
mat (Seances), and it was produced in
Egypt in 1334, quite some time after
the death of Baybars.
As for jacket copy, it describes Tyer-
man’s book as “definitive.” But the
history of Crusade historiography sug-
gests that the fashions and techniques
for writing that history constantly
evolve, from eighteenth-century de-
nunciations, to nineteenth-century
French pride in their proto-colonial
past, to Runciman’s moralized ver-
sion. If The World of the Crusades
really were definitive, then the subject
would be closed and that would be a
sad thing. Happily, Tyerman agrees. In
his concluding chapter he presents an
eloquent account of the subject’s “con-
tested afterlife,” and concludes with
these words: “Much remains; much still
to be examined and disputed. This is as
it should be. It is called history.” Q