Product Description

The story of how a group of warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust, carved out new Christian-ruled states in the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary of all epics. The crusaders' stunning initial success started a sequence of great Crusades, each with its own story, that fundamentally shaped the Christian and Muslim worlds for two centuries, until the last Crusader castles were finally expunged. The energy and commitment that sent army after army into the eastern Mediterranean also led to the invasion and conversion of Central and Baltic Europe, Spain, Portugal, the destruction of the Cathars in Provence and the settlement of America. Told with great verve and authority, God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating but also horrifying story. ‘We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades…Tyerman tells us how the Church set about preaching the crusades, exploiting the perennial pessimism and guilt of the European nobility of the Middle Ages. He shows how crusading ideology penetrated the religious sensibility of the period, as well as its secular fiction and poetry…Of all the modern histories of the crusades it is the shrewdest, the most reliable and the most complete.’ – The Spectator

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39385 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1056 pages

The Times Literary Supplement
`Magisterial ... catches the feverish, visionary spirituality of the age'

New York Review of Books
`God's War is a first-rate, scholarly, up-to-date, and highly readable survey of the entire crusading movement ... sane, informed, and gripping'

Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Reformation
`A superb book ... majestic ... an entertaining as well as reliable'

Customer Reviews

Move over Sir Steven Runciman
Suddenly Runciman's 50 year old grand narrative of the crusades is surpassed. Tyerman does not write quite as sweetly, but he has a strong narrative drive, and an eye for character, and he is alive to the complexity of the cataclysmic encounter between East and West. There are no simplistic goodies and baddies, and the crusaders in particular are shown acting with rapacity and cruelty as well as courage and piety. The results good and bad live with us to this day. Tyerman helps to show up the misinterpetations which feed much discord between the once-Christian West and Islam.

A flawed masterpiece
Read the other reviews and you will see people either find this essential or annoyingly flawed. They are both right. No book has attempted to encompass not only the Eastern Crusades but also the crusading efforts in Northern Europe, Spain and looking at the later crusades too. Never has so much info covering so many cultures been crammed into 1 volume.

But, and it is a big but, there is an old literary saying "if you have a complex tale to tell then tell it simply" and this is where the book falls down. The language is dry and uses words such as fissiparous which means not only do you have to keep a plethora of characters, dates and events in your mind but you have to keep reaching for the dictionary too. It is also curiously unemotional when it comes to key/epic moments of the Crusades. I think Tyreman has confused being unbiased (which is appropriate given the topic)with being bland.

Also while the research is exhaustive and exhausting I do think the balance is a little odd, do we really need an exact itinerary of the preaching of the Second Crusade, Third Crusade and so on on to skim over things like what were the weapons and tactics of East versus West (this is hardly ever mentioned and never in any depth). Don't get me wrong the preaching is vital to the story but what made the crusades the crusades was the fighting and this does not get the same scrutiny as the liturgies going on in the Rhineland.

Saying that even an expert on the Crusades will find something new here, it's a very big mountain to climb (it took me months to get through and nobody can absorb it all after reading it just once) but the views from the top are spectacular.

Stunning research
When Christian fervour met Islamic resistance, the centuries of crusading and warfare that followed were to shape the modern world like nothing before or since, and an indelible mark was left on the consciences of both religions. Told with passion and academic flair, Tyerman's definitive and engrossing chronicle of the Crusades reads like a centuries-old epic of war, arrogance and the clash of cultures. Its place should be assured on the bookshelves of all politicians.