`Magisterial ... catches the feverish, visionary spirituality of the age'

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

`A superb book ... majestic ... an entertaining as well as reliable'

`An intelligible yet elegant, readable yet scholarly narrative ... vivid, convincing, concise' Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Times

`A fine piece of fact-packed, closely argued work on that "clash of civilizations", echoes of which continue to roll across the planet'

God's War tells the powerful and horrifying story of the Crusades - an explosive mixture of religious quest and greed for treasure that led enormous Christian armies to invade the Islamic world.

With compelling authority and vivid detail, Christopher Tyerman's definitive account describes the extraordinary journeys over several centuries that gave birth to European nations, transformed the Christian Church, created the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, and ended with Muslim rule over large parts of Europe. As God's War so brilliantly shows, the consequences of those great battles of the Middle Ages still resonate today.

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".

2008-01-15 Why Crusade?

As with everything which happens in real history there is a spiritual basis to those crusades, and a philosophical explanation. History is philosophical, not factual. Because he ignores this, Tyreman is confused about why the various nobles and people left their homes to go on the crusade.

At the heart of Western life at the time of the First Crusade was the Mass, a ritual which is still perfomred today, and is still at the heart of Christian practice. It's purpose was to transport every Christian into God's love, and to the time when God was on earth, in Jerusalem.
The service uses objects to achieve this: bread and wine. Other objects were used outside the churches themlseves, such as relics, bones of saints, the holy lance and the grail. Being able to walk freely in the footsteps of Christ was another way of getting close to God.
This is why the crusaders, largely from France and England, decided to take possession of Jerusalem. Because God had become a man, and had taken onto himself blood, bones, feet, and the other trappings of life on earth, we can share in divine love by visiting and using those things. In the Holy Communion itself this process can only work because a priest blesses the wine and bread. Similarly, the crusade was only a means to enlarge the experience of the mass itself, to improve on that Last Supper, because the Pope had blessed those making the crusade. The moment of having a piece of Christ's body, and watching it miraculously disappear into the mouth, to make the participant thereby one of Christ's true disciples and to share in a mystical presence of power and love is not just a rite amongst others. It is the basis on which the knights, nobles, people, lords, and the rest all lived. If this rite and its link to Christ is taken away, as this book takes it away, then there is no reasonable explanation for the Crusade. Discovering the Holy Sepulchre was the equivalent of ingesting the Host.

It is unbelievable that such a metaphysical and idealistic impulse can have made our ancestors give up their lives and give up their security. However, the Church was at the heart of our culture in those days, and at the heart of Church was a re-enactment of the Last Supper. Becoming one of the members of the band who surrouned Jesus in his earthly life was the over-riding desire which guided all of the conscious choices of men and women at the time of the First Crusade. Personally, I see those people at the origin of European culture as superior to and more honest than ourselves.
I know that Tyreman is aware of the arguments I have made here. I wish that Oxford scholarship was not so dead and ignorant of its own past that it prohibits the outright expression of the inner core of our history: a belief in God, a belief in the value of objects and rites which take us closer to a mystery, a faith which wants to return our lives to the primitive simplicity which Christ enjoyed, based not on power, but on humility and service not to men, but to God.