“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

Contributors

David Abulafia– at Cambridge University (added August 8, 2017)

Michel Balard– at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1) (added Sept. 22, 2017)

Jessalynn Bird– at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame (added July 27, 2017)

Andrew D. Buck– at Queen Mary, University of London (added July 30, 2017)

Megan Cassidy-Welch– at Monash University (added August 1, 2017)

Paul E. Chevedden– at The University of Texas at Austin. (added August 19, 2017)

Paul F. Crawford– at California University of Pennsylvania (added July 27, 2017)

Susan Edgington– at Queen Mary, University of London (added 10/29/2017)

Jaroslav Folda– at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (added August 15, 2017)

John France– at Swansea University (added July 30, 2017)

Daniel Franke– at Richard Bland College (added July 27, 2017)

Peter Frankopan– at Oxford University (added July 27, 2017)

Cecilia Gaposchkin– at Dartmouth College (added July 27, 2017)

Bernard Hamilton– at University of Nottingham (added September 26, 2017).

Andrew Holt– at Florida State College at Jacksonville (added July 31, 2017)

John D. Hosler– at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (added July 27, 2017)

Kurt Villads Jensen– at Stockholms Universitet (added July 31, 2017)

William Chester Jordan– at Princeton University (added July 27, 2017)

Andrew Jotischky– at Royal Holloway, University of London (added August 29, 2017)

Benjamin Z. Kedar– at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (added August 21, 2017)

Svetlana Luchitskaya– at Lomonosov Moscow State University (added August 7, 2017)

Laurence Marvin– at Berry College (added July 27, 2017)

Nicholas Morton– at Nottingham Trent University (added August 23, 2017)

Steve Muhlberger– at Nipissing University (added July 27, 2017)

Alan V. Murray– University of Leeds (added October 21, 2017)

Helen J. Nicholson – at Cardiff University (added September 27, 2017)

Edward Peters– at University of Pennsylvania (added July 27, 2017)

Matthew Phillips– at Concordia University, Nebraska (added July 27, 2017)

Jay Rubenstein-at University of Tennessee, Knoxville (added July 27, 2017)

Iris Shagrir– at The Open University of Israel (added August 21, 2017)

David L. Sheffler– at University of North Florida (added July 27, 2017)

Corliss Slack– at Whitworth University (added July 27, 2017)

Susanna A. Throop– at Ursinus College (added August 11, 2017)

Christopher Tyerman– at Oxford University (added August 22, 2017)



The Lists

———————————————————————————-

David Abulafia – Cambridge University

The Ten Most Important Books on the Crusades – David Abulafia I have looked for the books that in my view have had the greatest influence, particularly on scholarship in the English-speaking world, though one nomination is in French (having first been written in Hebrew) and another was originally in German, because both those works have had enormous impact. I have included the northern crusades, but otherwise I have concentrated on the Latin East, including books on the kingdom of Jerusalem; there was no room for studies of the wars in Spain or the Albigensian Crusade, nor of art history (Buchthal, Folda). Most of these books were written several decades ago, taking one back to an era when a small group of scholars, well-known to one another, dominated the study of the crusades and the Latin East; and I did not have space for excellent books by Hans Mayer and Jean Richard, who were also close to Prawer, Smail and Riley-Smith. All these really founded the subject as we know it. Previously, French scholars such as Grousset had dominated the field, and their work was often coloured by a romantic notion that they were writing about la France dans l’Orient. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. Did you ask for the ten best books? Or my ten favourite books? No, the ten most important. And Runciman has been the starting-point for many of those who have become interested in the crusades, through the clarity (at the price of over-simplification) of his books, and the direction of his narrative, which excludes whole areas of crusading and whole periods. Like it or not, this is the book most non-specialists used to read. One point worth making is that he did take Byzantium very much into account. Joshua Prawer, Histoire du Royaume Latin de Jérusalem, 2 vols. Prawer dug much deeper into the social and political structure of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem than Runciman, and this work, along with what is in effect the third volume, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, published in London, integrates the results of pioneering research into a wider picture (his key articles were collected in yet another volume, Crusading Institutions). Many points have now been challenged, often by Riley-Smith and his acolytes (Edbury etc.), but Prawer was the pioneer who asked the difficult questions in the first place and established the distinguished Israeli school of crusade historians (Jacoby, Kedar, Ellenblum, etc.). Carl Erdmann, The Origins of the Idea of Crusading This is the starting-point for any serious consideration of the nature of holy war at the end of the eleventh century, judicious and widely ranging, paying attention to Spain as well as the East. One may or may not agree with Erdmann’s argument, but the book represents German Quellenforschung at its best. R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, Cambridge Among all the monographs that illuminate the Latin east, this, again stands out because it opened up a new vision of the history and nature of the kingdom of Jerusalem at a time when few scholars were showing much interest in the area, and it was composed with great rigour and insight. It is much more, though, than a book for military historians, since Smail had a very good eye for the political and social setting. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, London This may not be his most challenging work, and it was only the first book among a great many, but Riley-Smith did much to transform the study of the Military Orders from potboilers about Templar crimes to an important sub-division of crusader research. Towards the end of his life it was re-issued in a revised edition. I select it rather than some of his books on the crusading movement because he sometimes became carried away with his ideas, and that is less evident here. W.C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, Princeton This offers a stimulating approach to the way that crusading could affect the structure of politics and society within the European kingdoms. It seems to me to be one of the first works to look at the crusading movement from that very interesting oblique angle. Carol Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives Nowadays the idea that one can study the crusades in isolation from the wider context of the Middle East would not be taken very seriously, all the more so as even the Middle Ages are going global. Although an earlier study by Emmanuel Sivan addressed some of the issues, Hillenbrand’s scholarship has taken the study of the crusades from an Islamic perspective to an entirely new level. Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, Oxford This is the largest of the many heavyweight tomes by the leading historian of the later crusades. It adopts a resolutely pluralist viewpoint, which some may think works much better for his period than the early crusades, but as a result it has the widest possible range and remains a vital and encyclopaedic place of reference. Eliyahu Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages One should not ignore the economic dimension to the history of the crusades, and this work brings together the results of many years of research into western European and eastern Mediterranean (Jewish and Muslim) sources, with an emphasis on the end of the Middle Ages. Ashtor was an eccentric fellow and prone to small errors; he could be very dogmatic, but the question is what has been most important or influential, rather than best, which gives extra marks to pioneers. Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, London This entertaining and wide-ranging overview of the northern theatre has no real rival, in my view: Christiansen was master of sufficient languages to be able to cope with the primary and secondary material, and looked carefully at the societies that were under attack as well as the attackers.

————————-

Michel Balard – Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1)

Dear Colleague, I have found time enough to answer to your request. I read with much interest what was the choice of our Colleagues. It’s a pity that most of them do not know the works published in another language than English: French, Italian, German, Spanish historiography on the Crusades are generally not known. My choice is as follows (alphabetical order): – P. ALPHANDERY – A. DUPRONT, “La chrétienté et l’idée de croisade, 2nd ed., Paris 1995: the analysis of the permanence of the crusading idea in the popular mentality is not yet superseded.

– E. CHRISTIANSEN, “The Northern Crusades”,London 2nd ed. 1997: a brilliant overview which uses sources and literature in various languages and is mindful of the impact of theses crusades on Northern societies.

-A. DEMURGER, “Les chevaliers du Christ”, Paris 2002: a complete analysis of the religious-military orders, which takes into account the most modern researches in a very legible edition.

– C. HILLENBRAND, “The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives”, Edinburgh 1999: according to Claude Cahen’s remark, one cannot study the crusades without a knowledge of the interactions between islam and christendom at the time of the crusades. A very valuable book.

– N. HOUSLEY, “The later Crusades”, Oxford 1992: a complete overview of the XIVth and XVth Centuries leagues and crusades, which remains a reference till to-day.

– J. MICHAUD, “Histoire des croisades”, 4 vol., Paris 1862: a basic work for the history of the crusades, considered as a glorious event of the French monarchy, but masterful for the details of the expeditions

– J. PRAWER, “Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem”, 2 vol., Paris 1970-1971: at the origin of the Israeli school of crusade historians, Prawer published this masterpiece after a pioneering research on all the aspects of crusading and their effect on the structures of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.

– J. RICHARD, “Histoire des Croisades”, Paris 1995: the most recent synthesis in French about the expeditions and the structures of the Latin States in Syria-Palestine. The presentation stops with the eighth crusade.

– J. RILEY-SMITH, “The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading”, Philadelphia 1986: a major work of the leader of the Crusade historians in England, which demonstrates the high pious motivations of the crusaders.

– K.M SETTON, “A History of the Crusades”, 6 vol., Madison, Milwaukee and London 1969-1989: a masterly work, due to the cooperation of the most important Crusade historians of the time, which remains an indispensable reference;

– H.E. MAYER, ” Die Urkunden der lateinischen Könige von Jerusalem”: a masterpiece of erudition which constitutes the base of all researches on the Latin kingdom.

With my best wishes. Michel BALARD, emeritus Professor of medieval History, University of Paris 1 – Sorbonne

———————–

Jessalynn Bird – St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame

Top ten crusading volumes in no particular order Penny J. Cole. The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land (1994). The seminal work on crusade preaching, which inspired much of my own research. Cecilia Gaposchkin. Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Cornell, 2017). Updates Amnon Lindner’s classic volume on the liturgy of the crusades and represents new directions in crusade historiography. Elizabeth Lapina and Nicholas Morton. The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources (Brill, 2017). Another example of dealing with a long-neglected topic. How was the Bible used to justify and contextualize crusading? Christopher Tyerman. How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in th eHIgh Middle Ages (2015). Christopher Tyerman has always delighted in puncturing the papal-centric view of crusading and this latest work summarizes many of his main arguments and also opens up new avenues for the investigation of the impact of the organization of the crusade on cultures in western Europe and elsewhere. Jonathan Riley-Smith. The First Crusade and Idea of Crusading and/or What Were the Crusades? Riley-Smith’s work reinvigorated interest in crusading historiography in England and his mentorship inspired multiple generations of heavy-weight scholars in the field. The first book outlined his theories of the true motivations of the first crusaders (replacing older interpretations by Mayer, Runciman and Erdmann). The second outlined the papal-centric theory of crusading. Norman Housley. Contesting the Crusades (2006). An invaluable summary of the various schools of thought on the origin and direction of crusading. Housley is a giant in the field. Although new directions have opened up in crusading historiography, this is still an extremely useful book. Susan Edgington and Sarah Lambert, eds. Gendering the Crusades (2001). This work brought to everyone’s notice the need to examine how the participation of women in crusading and also how notions of masculinity intersected with crusading. I was there when the initial papers were presented and the room was on fire. It has inspired other important works such as Natasha Hodgson’s book on women in crusading narratives. James M. Brundage. Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (1969). A classic work by the godfather of canon law studies in the U.S. Interestingly enough, there has not been much new work done on the actual implementation of canon law in practice, but I am publishing several articles on this. Jaroslav Folda. Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099-1291. This book brought the study of crusader art into serious contention and has sparked a host of other studies on the material and artistic representations of crusading, including newer studies focusing on relics and manuscripts. Megan Cassidy-Welch. Remembering the Crusades and Crusading (Palgrave, 2016). This book provides a window into cutting-edge work on the subject of memory and crusading, which is a bit of a hot topic at present. I deliberately made this list a somewhat idiosyncratic blend of old and new, classic and cutting-edge. I tried to include works which might otherwise be omitted. To these could be added a host of other fine works. It is hard to choose, particularly with the recent shift away from the classic focus on crusades to the Holy Land to crusades in multiple theatres, “later” crusades (Housley, etc), and the impact of the crusades on culture in West and East. This is leaving aside much fine work on the military orders by Helen M. Nicholson and others. Then there are enormously influential stand-alone volumes on particular crusades or particular theatres of crusading (Thomas Madden and Donald Queller for the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips for the Second Crusade, James Powell for the Fifth Crusade, William C.Jordan for Louis IX). There is also the question of sources in translation, such as the fine Ashgate series or the pioneering collections of translations by Edward Peters. Also to be mentioned are enormously influential and useful encyclopedias such as Alan V. Murray’s multi-volume work, the Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades or the forthcoming multi-volume effort headed by Jonathan Phillips and Thomas Madden intended to replace the Kenneth Setton five volume classic set. And the important translations of Arabic sources by Hillenbrand and Gabrielli.

—————

Andrew D. Buck – Queen Mary, University of London

Trying to decide only 10 influential books is difficult, not only because it is hard to balance what you have personally been guided by with those texts which you know have made a real difference to the field. In the end, my list stretches the 10 quite considerably, but hopefully this will be considered acceptable. I’ve gone for a balance of primary and secondary works, and have tried as much as possible to discuss a varied number of research avenues – the crusades and the Latin East is a diverse field, and it is important to show the richness of the research which has been undertaken (and will hopefully continue to be undertaken). Recueil des historiens des croisades – what scholar of the crusades and the Latin East has not turned to these volumes in the pursuit of their research? Not only have these editions and translations (largely) stood the test of time, but they also opened up the Arabic, Greek, and Armenian sources up to scholars and thus promoted the importance of exploring the crusading past from more than one perspective. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading – the study of the crusades as an academic field remains highly influenced by Riley-Smith’s painstaking and excellent work, especially in reminding us of the devotional motivations of crusade participants. Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades – a work which reminds us all of the complexity of the past and how we must always be on alert when assuming order and organisation. Tyerman asked important and worthwhile questions and continues to provoke thought. Jonathan Phillips, Defenders of the Holy Land, Relations between the Latin East and the West, 1119–1187 – charting the political history of the Latin East is no easy task, and in this book Phillips deftly handles the complex narrative while also demonstrating the troubled relationship between the crusading movement and the needs of the Latin East. Hans Eberhard Mayer and Jean Richard, Die Urkunden der lateinischen Könige von Jerusalem – Mayer and Richard are giants in the field, having contributed meticulous and ground-breaking scholarship, and with this 4-volume edition of the charters of the kingdom of Jerusalem they have provided a service to all those who would wish to examine the Latin East in the future. Crusade Texts in Translation – a series rather than a book, I’ll admit, but the impact of these translations on the teaching of the crusades cannot be ignored, for it has allowed scholars to open up different perspectives to students and, hopefully, to inspire new generations of scholars. Nicholas Paul, To Follow in their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages – a really excellent, meticulously researched book, one that explores the key intersection between crusading and family memory. An engaging and thought-provoking book, this will serve to inspire fresh work for quite some time. Natasha Hodgson, Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative – explores the treatment and role of women in the crusades and the Latin East, providing the first in-depth study of this field. This was much-needed when it appeared and will hopefully continue to inspire important work on gender and crusading. Ronnie Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories – a book which at once outlines how the role crusader castles has long intersected with modern nationalist ideologies and political movements, while also exploring the actual nature of the medieval frontier in the Latin East. Deserves to be on the shelf of anyone interested in the crusades, along with his earlier book on Frankish rural settlement. Ralph-Johannes Lilie, Byzanz und die Kreuzfahrerstaaten: Studien zur Politik des Byzantinischen Reiches gegenüber den Staaten der Kreuzfahrer in Syrien und Palästina bis zum Vierten Kreuzzug (1096-1204) – charts the important relationship between the crusades, the Latin East and the Byzantine Empire in thorough detail. Lots has been written since, but this continues to stand the test of time. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives – this remains the point of entry for all those wanting to explore the interaction between the crusades and Islam, providing critical insight and depth of knowledge while also remaining accessible. A work of huge value for scholars and students alike. Best wishes, Andrew

—————

Megan Cassidy-Welch – Monash University

I’ve chosen mostly to concentrate on the books that influenced my thinking along the way, rather than include primary sources and editions. James Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213-1221 My book on the Fifth Crusade is so indebted to Powell’s work that although I never met him, I will thank him most gratefully in the acknowledgments. Powell knew the Fifth Crusade like no other, and he was a model historian – deeply embedded in the primary texts but able to explain, comment and reflect on the wider contexts with wonderful clarity. Susannah Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095-1216 This book asks us to think very carefully and precisely about the terminology around crusade motivation, and to take seriously the sometimes uncomfortable ideologies justifying crusading. I read this book only recently but it is already influencing how I think about approaching a history of violence. It adds a lot to the recent ‘cultural turn’ in crusading histories. Nicholas Paul, To Follow in their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages This was the first book on the specific subject of crusade and memory, and so is the pioneer in the field. Again, the depth of research and the ability to contextualise are stand-outs. But I also love Paul’s integration of modern theories of memory and his understanding of historical differences in memory-making across time. Bird, Jessalynn, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds., Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291 This is my exception to the list in that it’s a collection of sources. But it’s such a useful and careful piece of scholarship overall that it certainly needs to be included. The translations are terrifically helpful for students (and for me), but the best bit of this book, to my mind, is the introductory material at the start of each section and document. Students are fortunate to have the scholarship of three excellent scholars of the crusades informing and framing this book. Beverley Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229: Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard This book traces the ideas and motifs emanating from and preached by the Cistercians before and during the Albigensian crusade. It provides a wonderful background to the crusade itself and also shows just how closely monastic and crusading rhetoric were connected. Jonathan Riley Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading As an undergraduate student, this was the first book on the First Crusade that I read. Its insistence on piety as a key motivation for crusading and the astonishing scholarship that lies behind this beautifully readable book made it one of the most influential crusade histories for me. Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy The separation of ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ approaches to crusades texts is now hopefully not so pronounced as it once was. Heng’s work is a brilliant example of how literature and cultural politics intersect and inform attitudes that have real consequences for real people. It continually reminds me of the importance of cultural and politics in writing a history of the crusades. Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099-1291 As a self-described cultural historian but not an art historian by training, I’ve found all Folda’s work tremendously helpful. I’ve chosen this one as it provides a terrific overall picture of the visual culture of the crusades at the same time as describing the detail. I’m also sneaking in Elisabeth Lapina, April Morris, Susannah Throop and Laura Whatley’s recent edited volume on the Crusades and Visual Culture here, the essays in which show the huge promise of this area for crusade historians. Paul Cobb, The Race for Paradise: an Islamic History of the Crusades Another brilliantly original history that manages to synthesise an incredible amount of research and scholarship and present it in an accessible and stimulating way. This book (together with Carole Hillenbrand’s The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives and Francesco Gabrieli’s Arab Historians of the Crusades) has been really useful for English-speaking students to glimpse the other worlds that shaped the Crusades. William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of Crusade I still refer to this book when I want to understand something of the impact of the crusade idea and experience on an individual. Jordan’s work on the thirteenth century has been enormously influential overall, but this book on Louis IX is my favourite (and for students, too).

—————

Paul E. Chevedden – The University of Texas at Austin

José Goñi Gaztambide, Historia de la bula de la cruzada en España (Vitoria: Editorial del Seminario, 1958). This monumental study of papal bulls of Crusade in Spain is arguable the most important work of Crusade scholarship of the twentieth century. The book clearly bears the flaws of its era by reading into the past a Castilian-centered vision of Spanish history, by playing down the role of non-Iberians in the peninsular Crusades, and by failing to connect Iberian Crusades to the wider Crusade movement, but it compensates for these deficiencies by the sheer wealth of documentation it places before the reader. It is similar to Carl Erdman’s Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (1935) in that it uses historical documents to revitalize and recast a very traditional view of the history of Iberia and the Crusades. The “folly” of each of these works in upholding a very traditional historical approach to the Crusades was treated very differently by historians. Goñi Gaztambide’s “folly” was exposed and critiqued, allowing the study of the Iberian Crusades to move away from its traditional moorings, while Erdmann’s “folly” provoked repeated attempts to make his work more harmonious with the traditional model of the Crusades. Goñi Gaztambide’s rich harvest of documents never inhibited new interpretive frameworks from emerging in which to view the data, while Erdmann’s study impeded new conceptual schemes from developing by which to evaluate the historical sources. Scholars may judge which of the two paths is the more reliable way forward. Alfons Becker, Papst Urban II (1088-1099): Der Papst, die griechische Christenheit und der Kreuzzug, Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica 19.2 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1988). This important study of Pope Urban II, part of a monumental three-volume history of this crusading pope, breaks free of the traditional dualistic view of the Crusades and pioneers a new way forward in Crusade studies, based on a careful analysis of historical documentation. Jonathan Riley-Smith’s criticism of the book as “fundamentally a sophisticated restatement of Erdmann’s position” is a flagrant misrepresentation of the author’s actual views and findings. Robert I. Burns, The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction on a Thirteenth-Century Frontier, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). The revolutionary nature of this study is difficult to appreciate fifty years after its publication, but a half century ago the conquest of al-Andalus by Latin Christian powers was thought of mainly in terms the “Reconquest,” viewed as a largely secular expansion of Iberian states incessantly moving southward over the course of eight centuries, and not in terms of the Crusade movement. Goñi Gaztambide’s Historia de la bula de la cruzada en España did little to change this mindset. Burns’s study began a new direction in Crusade scholarship, as well as providing a comprehensive ecclesiastical, social, economic, and administrative history of the Crusader kingdom of Valencia. Robert I. Burns, Islam under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-century Kingdom of Valencia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). This study of the subject Muslim communities of newly conquered Sharq al-Andalus began the author’s extensive and wide-ranging exploration of the Mudejar predicament, pursued in many books and articles. Like his earlier award-winning study, The Jesuits and the Indian Wars of the Northwest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), this book is a masterful reconstruction of a subjugated society whose own documentation is either non-existent or extremely sparse. Both Islam and Indian Wars are models of ethnohistory, and I recommend that they be read in tandem. Robert I. Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Groundbreaking achivally-based studies await the reader in this volume, which depict the complex character of the pluriethnic society that was the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia. Burns approaches his subject “from novel angels and with varied methodologies.” One of the highlights of the book is an opening chapter that explores the methodological tensions embedded within the discussion of Muslim-Christian conflict and contact. Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). (See comments below) Joseph F.O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). (See comments below) Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). The epic contest between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula finds detailed and masterful elucidation in this trilogy of volumes from one of the most important historians of medieval Iberia. The Iberian Crusades are often seen as a sideshow to the main act of crusading in the eastern Mediterranean. These studies are not a cure for the underlying bias in Crusade studies, but they do help to right the balance. Kenneth M. Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969-89). Before there were so-called “pluralists” promoting a view of the Crusades resting on monist foundations and a spokesperson for this position claiming that “pluriformity . . . has won the day,” there was an American-led international publishing venture on the Crusades that culminated in a multi-volume and multi-authored work that attempted to take in the full sweep of the Crusades. While many of the contributions in the so-called “Wisconsin History” are now dated, others can be read with great profit (e.g., Charles Julian Bishko, “The Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest, 1095-1492”). Peter Frankopan, The First Crusade: The Call from the East (London: Bodley Head, 2012). This is best study of the so-called “First” Crusade to date. The author breaks centuries of tradition by centering his attention on a “crisis in the [Byzantine] Empire,” rather than on Pope Urban II’s appeal at Clermont in 1095. This study dares to present the “First” Crusade as a product of the political realm, not the religious or devotional realm, and brings much-needed understanding to a call “to bring assistance against the heathen for the defense of the holy church, which had now been nearly annihilated in that region (i.e., western Anatolia) by the infidels, who had conquered her as far as the walls of Constantinople.”

—————–

Paul F. Crawford – California University of Pennsylvania

Here’s a rather hastily compiled list, mostly in answer to the internal question, “What do I keep turning to, over and over again?” Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? A brilliantly concise explanation of crusade historiography, as well as a clear and pretty inarguable definition of what a crusade really was, and was about. Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love”– I’m cheating: this is an article, published in History in 1980; it destroys the arguments that crusading was about greed, or wanderlust, or opportunity, or millennialism, or landless younger sons, or racism, or any of the other silly theories floating around. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131– Demonstrates, through careful analysis of charters and other non-narrative sources, that crusading was largely conducted by the heads of great noble families in France, who considered that crusading was part of their lordly responsibilities, and who went—and died—again and again on crusade. Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood– A careful, scholarly exploration of a military order (the Templars) who have been so lied about from the 14th c. on—the “go-to” resource for questions about the Templars. Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades– Beautiful prose from a master storyteller, shoddily researched and conveyed a profoundly flawed view of the crusades that has, sadly, shaped the understandings of tens of millions of people, if not more. Joseph Michaud, History of the Crusades– One of the first great narrative histories of the crusades, conveying a romantic view that has its own flaws, and which may inadvertently have laid the groundwork for misunderstandings of the crusades as imperial or colonial adventures. Kenneth Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades– A masterly late-twentieth century overview of the crusades, much of which is dated, but some of which has not yet been replaced, and all of which is still useful. Sir Steven referred to this endeavor as “the massed typewriters of the United States”…. Queller & Madden, The Fourth Crusades, 2nd ed.– A seminal work which dispels many of the myths which persist about this crusade. Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades– The best popular anthology of Arabic-language crusade sources available in English, still, despite being translated from Arabic into Italian into English, with all the pitfalls that entails. Made Muslim views of the crusades available to a much wider readership, including crusade historians who can’t read Arabic. Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades- Still the go-to book if one is starting to study the crusades in the Baltic and northeastern Europe; well-written and sensitive in its approach to the sources, despite being a semi-popular work.

————–

Susan Edgington – Queen Mary, University of London

Ten important books I am not going to venture to dictate ‘must-reads’ to anyone else, only to identify the books that have been most important to me at different stages of my working life. I also apologise in advance for my broad interpretation of the brief: here you have ten titles but a much greater number of volumes! In the 1960s our resources were restricted in a way that is almost unimaginable today, but here are five books / collections that launched me on my pilgrimage: As an undergraduate, like so many others, I was seduced by Runciman’s three-volume History of the Crusades (1951-54). Fifty years later, I am aware of its flaws, but at the time I was impressed by Runciman’s masterly fusion of narrative with the authority of the primary sources.

During those same years, volumes of the collaborative work then known as The Pennsylvania History of the Crusades (2nd edn Wisconsin) began to appear, and offered a range of different perspectives on the same events,

and an excellent introduction to the historiography by James Brundage, The Crusades: Motives and Achievements was published in 1964.

I cannot fail to include Albert of Aachen’s Historia Ierosolymitana, of course. I was twenty and looking for a PhD research topic when a throwaway remark by Prof. Joan Hussey about the pressing need for an edition and translation of the work set my path not only for the next few years but for the rest of my working life …

which brings me to the Recueil des historiens des croisades, all the volumes, which had to be my starting point for Albert. Of course, I am now conscious of its shortcomings, but is still an amazing resource and more accessible now that it is available online (courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr ). In the ensuing half-century, friends and colleagues have brought out so many good, readable books on the crusades that it would be invidious to select among them. So my up-to-date five are books I refer to frequently.

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1986) for the light it throws on the north French sources and crusaders’ motivations;

Jean Flori, Chroniqueurs et propagandistes : Introduction critique aux sources de la première croisade (2010) for its examination of a more comprehensive range of primary sources;

Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999), because it is the best guide to the Arabic sources, as well as an insight into events from ‘the other side’.

Alan V. Murray, The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic History 1099-1125, is all about the characters I spend most time with.

I also consult almost daily The Crusades: An Encyclopedia, ed. Alan V. Murray (2006).

————-

Jaroslav Folda – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

15 August 2017 Professor Holt, I have interpreted your request for my list of the 10 most important books on the Crusades to mean, 10 works that were of the greatest importance to me in working towards my publications on the Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land 1098-1187, in 1995, and thereafter. These are works that I have on the shelves of my study, whose authors in some cases I have gotten to know over the years. Jaroslav Folda

William of Tyre, Chronicon (Latin) [Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi, Chronicon, ed. R.B.C. Huygens, Turnholt: Typographi Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1986) 2 vols.], History of Outremer (Old French) [Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs, ed. Paulin Paris (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1879) 2 vols.], History of Deeds done beyond the Sea (English translation) [William, Archbishop of Tyre, A History of Deeds done beyond the Sea, eds. Emily Atwater Babcock and A.C. Krey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941; reprint, Octagon Books, 1976), 2. Vols.] William is the great historian of the Crusader States in the 12th century; he seeks to understand how and why things happened. Even if he is not always reliable with his dating, and there are some conspicuous omissions in his text, he is a serious and careful scholarly thinker who was well educated and well-connected in the church and at court. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952-1954). As the first serious history of the Crusades that I read, I have found his story the best written and the most interesting as I read other histories. As I became more acquainted with him as a Byzantinist and his views on the Crusades, however, I have found other historians of the Crusades whose interpretations were more reliable and sometimes more positive, but his presentations have often remained the best stories in the way that he wrote about them. Kenneth Setton, general editor, and Harry W. Hazard, (editor of volumes 3 and 4, and joint editor of volumes 2 and 5), A History of the Crusades, 6 vols. (Madison and London: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1969-1989). I knew Kenneth Setton only very slightly, but I got to know Harry Hazard when I was an undergraduate studying medieval history; he helped me with my senior thesis. He was a brilliant historian with wonderful command of Near Eastern languages, and he introduced me to these impressive volumes on the Crusades while he worked on editing and indexing the various volumes. I have found them to be amazingly encyclopedic with so many authors introducing the reader to so many fields and points of view beyond the basic Eurocentric history of the Crusading expeditions. Jonathan Riley-Smith has written a number of important books I might cite, the problem is which one to choose. I am indebted to Jonathan for his enormous generosity in being willing to read and comment on both of my volumes (1995 and 2005) on the Art of the Crusaders before they were submitted for publication. I cannot choose his most recent book, because it is not published yet. So I choose either What Were the Crusades? 3rd edition (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), or his Atlas of the Crusades (London: Times Books, 1990). These are perhaps small, but important examples of the range and sharpness of his mind, and his clarity and effectiveness of presentation. Even though I only knew Joshua Prawer very slightly, I read his important 2 volume Histoire du Royaume Latin de Jérusalem (Paris, 1969-71) in French (not in Hebrew) with its sense of the immediacy of the holy land he lived in for the history he was writing. But it is the work of one of his students, Meron Benvenisti, The Crusaders in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1970), that I found especially valuable when I lived in Jerusalem in the 1970s. In this book he links Crusader sites and history to the land of Israel, a methodology that Joshua Prawer had pioneered in his history seminar at the Hebrew University and that Benjamin Kedar continues to explore in his many publications. Hugo Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957). This book (along with several articles by Kurt Weitzmann on icon painting) was the starting point for the study of the art of the Crusaders, in the second half of the 20th century. Focusing on manuscript illumination, which he introduced to the Crusader canon, Buchthal’s scholarship was marked by a brilliant combination of penetrating visual analysis, encyclopedic knowledge of Byzantine and Near Eastern art, as well as western European medieval art, and remarkable interpretations integrating the works of art which he recognized as “Crusader” with the historical developments in which they were created. Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, A Corpus, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 – 2009). I first met Denys Pringle when he was at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem during the 1970s, when he started this remarkable study of the Crusader churches in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. His impressive study is exceptional for its detailed analysis and discussions, its exhaustive documentation, its command of the history and original sources, and its drawings and photos. Camille Enlart, Les Monuments des Croisés dans le Royaume de Jérusalem, Architecture religieuse et civile, 2 vols. with 2 atlases (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1925-1928). Enlart was the great proponent of the art of “Outremer” as being as French as any of the Romanesque schools of France, but distinct from them with its own individual character. He greatly expanded the corpus of what was recognized as Crusader work at the time; he introduced a number of very important monuments especially in Syria and Lebanon along with large studies of churches farther south in the Latin Kingdom; and he enlarged the idea of Crusader art to include sculpture and metalwork, as well as monumental painting. Bernard Hamilton, The Churches of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (London: Variorum Publications, 1980). This book was a constant, invaluable and reliable resource for understanding the ecclesiastical organization, ecclesiastical and clerical developments and special problems characteristic of the Latin clergy and their churches in the Crusader States during the 12th and 13th John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099-1185 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1988). I first met John Wilkinson at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. His excellent volume for the Hakluyt Society was an invaluable modern study of the important pilgrims and their accounts with translations, for which we had previously to rely on the antiquated translations of the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society. John Wilkinson’s studies and translations of these texts became available when new editions of some of the original Latin texts were also coming out, e.g., Theodoricus, Libellus de Locis Sanctis, ed. Marie Luise Bulst Thiele (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitäts Verlag, 1977), and Peregrinationis Tres: Saewulf, John of Würzburg, Theodoricus, ed. R.B.C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis CXXXIX (Turnholt: Typographi Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1994).

————–

John France – Swansea University.

M.Barber, The New Knighthood. A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The monastic Military Orders were the most innovative institution in the Latin States. This is a very fine discussion of the origins and history of the Temple which firmly avoids the fantasies which have become attached to them. O. Blake, ‘The Formation of the “Crusade Idea”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970),11‑31. This is the key piece of writing on the idea of the crusade. The basic ideas suggested in this article have been used and extended by many other writers, but this deserves the description of seminal. W. Edbury, John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997). It is impossible to understand the nature of the 13th century Kingdom of Jerusalem without reading this work. R.Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The publication of this book marked a sea-change in the way we look at the Latin States of the East. Ellenblum shows them to be less alien than was so often thought, and more deeply rooted in the local society and economy. C.Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade tr. M.W.Baldwin and W.Goffart of a 1935 German original (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977). Since 1935 the body of evidence we have about the development of Christian thinking on warfare has increased and it has been analyzed more and more thoroughly. But without a reading of this book there can be no understanding of the modern debate about the crusades. B. Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader states: the Secular Church (Aldershot: Variorum, 1980). This remains the fullest study of the Latin Church in the East and as such is essential reading. C.Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1999). An exceptional book which can serve as a collection of sources on the Islamic reaction to the western incursion. J.M.Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade 1213-1221 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1986). This is the very model of how to write an account of a single crusade. The Fifth Crusade was a remarkably long and complex event, but Powell works through the sources in a highly systematic way to provide a clear and well-structured account. J.Riley-Smith, The Crusades. A History (London: Bloomsbury, 3rd edition, 2104). This is very simply the best outline introduction to the crusades because of its structure and exceptionally clear writing. J.Riley-Smith has contributed an enormous store of ideas aboiut crusading to which this short work serves as an introduction. R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare 1097-1193 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956, 2nd edition 1995). Some of the assumptions underlying this book are dated, notably the identification of crusading with colonialism. However, it remains absolutely the foundation-work on the subject and still vitally useful.

—————

Daniel Franke – Richard Bland College

My Top Ten Books on the Crusades Daniel Franke, Richard Bland College of William and Mary John France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (1994). This is probably one of the finest medieval military histories ever written, perhaps the finest, and a tour-de-force in crusades studies. France’s overall scholarship is superb, his research, including physically following the routes of the various armies, is impeccable, and his grasp and presentation of the realities of medieval warfare is unrivaled. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (1997). This is actually my favorite book among all of Riley-Smith’s works, because it’s a deep dive into the sources with the (successful) goal of recovering the lives and thoughts of actual people. We move beyond the often arcane world of “crusade ideology” to the actual people who lived and died at the turn of the twelfth century. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999). The “other side” of the crusades has (finally) received increasingly detailed treatment in the last twenty years, but nothing is likely to replace Hillenbrand’s exhaustive compendium of the Islamic world’s engagement with “the Franj.” The most recent overview of the entire topic is Paul Cobb’s outstanding, eminently readable The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014). Helen Nicholson, ed. Palgrave Advances The Crusades (2005). This is a book to which I keep returning for everything from crusade ideology to Deborah Gerish’s stellar chapter on gender and the crusades, to Margaret Jubb’s chapter on crusader perceptions of their opponents. Ten years later, it is still the perfect one-volume way of situating yourself in the field. Norman Housley, Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land (2008). I’m a huge admirer of Norman Housley’s work (which is I have three books by him on this list!), and Fighting for the Cross is another book I refer to a lot for its content and its footnotes. It covers crusading actually looked and felt like, from the sermon to the return home. Norman Housley, The Later Crusades: from Lyons to Alcazar (1992). Several of Housley’s studies are unique—that is, there are literally no other books to compare them to. This is one of them, and the earliest of three (the other two are later developments from themes in this book, “honorable mentions” in the bottom of this write-up). Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (2006). This is basically the bible for understanding crusade historiography. Christopher Tyerman has since published some studies that serve to update Housley’s book, and some trends of the last decade are missing (such as Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven) but nothing can really replace Housley’s categorization of which scholars believed what about the crusades. Suzanne Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (2008). This is one of those books that has not only been very useful to me in my own research, but continues to be useful as time goes by because of its endless insights into the complex phenomenon crusade literature, in this case late medieval English writings. Lee Manion’s Narrating the Crusades (2014) is a more recent “take” that bridges the medieval and early modern divide, but Yeager’s book, by focusing on Jerusalem, has a particularly enduring relevance. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1991). Another Riley-Smith volume, this one has, of course, the legendary status of being the first major overhaul the ideology of crusading since Goffart’s translation of Erdmann in 1977. Riley-Smith, however, was interested in the phenomenon of religious justification of violence as a sociological phenomenon, which lends this work a particularly enduring relevance, despite the advances of the past 26 years. Joshua Prawer, The Crusaders’ Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (1972). Although this work is seriously outdated now, even by the late Professor Prawer’s other works, as well as by studies by Denys Pringle, Ronnie Ellenblum, and Adrian Boas, among others, it is simply a gem of a book for helping people understand the physical landscape of the Latin Kingdom. The chapter on the geography of crusader Jerusalem alone is worth the price. Choosing only ten books is very hard. Two “alternates” that I’d also like to mention would have skewed the results even more toward Norman Housley—his Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453-1505 (2012) and Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-1536 (2009). These are both expensive and difficult to obtain, but they focus on two issues that I believe are absolutely key to understanding both crusading and the shift from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era: the European response to the Ottoman Turkish invasions, and the cultural transition from “crusade” to “religious war.” Another “alternate,” and a favorite, is Susan Edginton and Sarah Lambert’s Gendering the Crusades (2002), which was the first book of its kind and the inspiration for a lot of great scholarship. And one last book to mention, which I’ve dipped into constantly for teaching purposes, is Riley-Smith’s The Atlas of the Crusades.

—————

Peter Frankopan – Oxford University

Dear Andrew Sorry to keep you waiting. Here are my top 10. Stephen Runciman The Crusades- I read Runciman’s work as an undergraduate at Cambridge and got to know him towards the end of his life. He opened the door to the Byzantine Empire for me, as for many others. I still get this off the shelf from time time to time; his passion is palpable. I love historians who love their subject – even if I don’t agree with them. Jonathan Riley Smith, The First Crusade and Idea of Crusading- The doyen of Crusade historians, Riley-Smith was an astonishing scholar, a brilliant writer and perhaps most important of all, a teacher of an entire generation of outstanding Crusade historians. This is my favourite of his books and represents history writing at its most compelling: detailed, revelatory and revolutionary. Christopher Tyerman God’s War– Monumental. Essential. Glorious. There are many outstanding books on the Crusades as a whole. But for me, this one is the best. It is a stupendous feat of scholarship by a colleague and friend at Oxford who is as generous and modest as is he brilliant. I’m not sure this work will ever be surpassed. Ralph-Johannes Lilie, Byzanz und die Kreuzfahrerstaaten: Studien zur Politik des Byzantinischen Reiches gegenüber den Staaten der Kreuzfahrer in Syrien und Palästina bis zum Vierten Kreuzzug (1096-1204)- A ground-breaking work that looks at relations between the Byzantine Empire and the Crusader states – a topic barely mentioned, let alone covered by legions of Crusade historians despite its obvious importance. Lilie is meticulous and this book is filled with insights from the outset. Paul Cobb, The Race for Paradise– Paul is a polymath and good friend. He has done Crusade scholars an immense service by expanding the field of vision beyond Christian knights, their aims, objectives and struggles, to look from the perspective of the Islamic world. How anyone can write about the Crusades without doing so is beyond me (you can say the same thing about Byzantium by the way); but most historians and scholars don’t. This book can help change that. Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East Rough Tolerance- Armenia, the Caucasus and the ‘missing east’ forms another hugely important part of the story of the Crusades that is neglected. MacEvitt is one of the new generation of scholars asking interesting (and I daresay better) questions about the full impact of the Crusades. In doing so, he is helping move discussions away from the monasteries of France, and closer to the action. Terrific stuff. Malcolm Barber, The Crusader States– Many historians look at the Crusades from the point of view of the expeditions themselves and their achievements (and shortcomings). Barber looks at the Crusader states themselves, at relations with the Muslim world and those with continental Europe. It is a wonderful book, and one that makes you laugh out loud: the author has a great eye for detail and for finding amusing anecdotes in the sources. Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven. The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse-Jay is a brilliant historian and also a friend of mine. I love the work he does on the Latin sources, which seem to melt in his hands. This book is terrific. It looks at how important the fear and expectation of apocalypse was in late 11th century Europe. Like all good books, it all seems so obvious once you’ve read about it. Jonathan Philips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople- Phillips is one of the leading lights amongst modern Crusade historians. His work is always sharp, smart and engaging. The account of the Fourth Crusade and the build up to 1204 is wonderfully written and compelling. Phillips is able to gather loose strands and tie them into a coherent, single narrative. That is not easy, but he does it beautifully. Anna Komnene, The Alexiad– A shout-out to Anna Komnene for three reasons. First, because I am very aware my other books are written by men; second, because her account of the First Crusade (written at the time of the Second) is both immensely important and also chronically misunderstood. And third, because I really owe Anna my academic career: this text formed the basis of my PhD and post-doctoral work. It taught me how to ask the right questions and how to find good answers. Anna was a far better scholar than me and her text is a delight from start to finish. Understanding how to read a complex 12th century medieval Greek narrative history (the first written by a woman in a European language) taught me how to do the same for sources range from Han dynasty China to going through national archives in the 20th century. Best wishes Peter

—————-

Cecilia Gaposchkin – Dartmouth College

“What ten books do you think are the most important books ever written on the crusades?” When Professor Holt asked me this question, my mind went in two different directions. The first, and easiest, was the ten books that have been most important to my thinking and my work, which is mostly centered on Western Europe, and mostly concerned with religion and devotional ideology. The second direction was the books that have truly shaped the field, that have shaped the entire discourse and to which my own work is heir, but of which my reading did not necessarily shape my thinking and my own research directly, since their import had long been absorbed into the larger scholarship. So I have elected to make two different lists: The first is the ten books which seem to me to have shaped the field. The second is the 10 books which have most influenced me. There is, of course, some overlap. But in a sense, my own list begins, chronologically, where my master list end. It should be said that both lists reflect a definition of “crusade” centered on Jerusalem. As any student of the crusades will know, this is itself a highly contested question. Some historians (sometimes termed “traditionalists”) see the crusades as limited to the Jerusalem, or eastern, crusades. Others have a far more expansive view of the Crusades (usually called the “pluralist” school). This (the pluralist school) seems to me to warrant a third list, which is the ten most important books on the pluralistly-defined crusades, which would include the standard treatments of the Albigensian Crusade, the Northern Crusades, the Reconquista (etc…). And finally, if one is going to try to be complete about this, one should add the ten most important books on the Latin East (Politics, Environment, Military, etc.). For now, I leave these last two lists to others… “The ten (actually, eleven) books on Crusade that have most shaped the field.” William of Tyre. A history of deeds done beyond the sea. Emily Atwater Babcock, A. C. Krey, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. (Originally written in the late twelfth century). William of Tyre was a local ecclesiastical potentate (the archbishop of Tyre) who wrote a history of the Crusades and the Latin East while living in Jerusalem at the end of the twelfth century. He was a serious scholar, who did research in the local libraries and archives to write his history. My friend and colleague Christopher MacEvitt (see his book below) once remarked to me that historians are still rehashing the same basic narrative. Indeed, we could just as well assign William of Tyre to our students than any of the slate of recent textbooks. It is a marvelous account of the central events that structure our narrative of the first century of the Crusades. And Christopher is correct: When it comes to telling the story of the first century of crusade history, we have in many ways progressed not that far at all from William of Tyre. I might proffer that it is the single most influential book on the crusades of all time. Joinville, Jean of, and Geoffrey of Villehardouin. Chronicles of the Crusades. Translated by Caroline Smith. London: Penguin, 2008. My other contemporary pick. Joinville was a French nobleman who participated in the crusade of 1248-1254 and wrote his account of it. It is still our best evidence for the experience of actually going on a crusade. Fuller, Thomas. The historie of the holy warre. Cambridge Eng: Printed by Roger Daniel, and are to be sold by John Williams, 1647 (for third edition). The first English-language account of the Crusades (not yet called the crusades); written by a Protestant, and very critical. I have never read anything but snippets of it, but anyone interested should look at the extraordinary frontispiece which bespeaks its interpretation, which can be found on Wiki commons. Michaud, Joseph Francois. Histoire des croisades. Nouv. éd. faite d’après les derniers travaux et les dernières intentions de l’auteur et augm. d’un appendice, par M. Huillard Bréholles ed. Paris: Furne, Jouvet et cie, 1867. The masterful, if egregiously patriotic, three-volume French account of the Crusades, which he saw as a glorious chapter in the glorious history of France. It should not be lost on anyone that this was about the same time that the French were busy conquering Algeria (1830-1847), a venture often discussed in the language of crusading. Michaud was an amazing, if partisan, historian, and is still worth consulting. Erdmann, Carl. The Origin of the Idea of Crusade. Translated by Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Originally published as Erdmann, Carl. Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Geistesgeschicte 6. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1935. Erdmann’s book, more than any other, established the terms of the debate on the twentieth-century study of the crusades. Although he made a series of arguments that most historians no longer accept (including most famously that the First Crusade did not set out with the explicit aim of conquering Jerusalem), Erdmann wrote brilliantly on the constituent religious and political practices and ideology that went into constructing “the idea of crusade.” Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades. 3 vols. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1951-1954. Sir Steven’s three volume narrative of the crusades was definitive for several decades. A Byzantinist by training and affection, he saw the crusaders as a series of unreconstructed thugs, and the crusades – as the very last line of the final book famously proclaimed – a “sin against the holy spirit.” His gorgeous style, entertaining narrative, and obvious mastery of details in service of a larger story, made this influential in both academic and “lay” circles. Alphandéry, Paul, and Alphonse Dupront. La Chrétienté et l’idée de croisade, Bibliothèque de l’évolution de l’humanité 10. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995 (orig. 1954). Published around the same time as Runcimann, Alphandery and Dupront took up the question of the “idea” of crusade again. And unlike Runciman, they took religious ideas seriously, including its eschatological dimensions. This interest in the role that belief in EndTimes played in the crusades has reemerged in some of the best recent writing on the Crusades, including Jay Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven, Guy Lobrichon’s 1099: Jéruslem conquise (1998) , and Philippe Buc’s Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror (2015; see below). Setton, Kenneth M. The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571. 4 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976. Although updated and broadened by the many books of Norman Housley (and others), Setton’s four volume study of the crusades’ institutional history is unmatched. It is, oddly, not nearly as well-known or well used as it deserves. (Important, but not an easy read). Prawer, Joshua. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European colonialism in the Middle Ages. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. This is the most expansive study of the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The political and institutional narratives remain second to none, even if his claim of proto-colonialism has been much debated and mostly rejected. (See most notably, Christopher MacEvitt’s The Crusades and the Christian Worlds of the East: Rough Tolerance (2008), and Malcom Barber’s The Crusader States (2012).) Prawer still provides the essential and most expansive framework for any engagement in the history of the Latin East. Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Riley-Smith, who died just this past year, was without a doubt the most important crusade historian of the second half of the twentieth and the first two decades of the twenty first century. The very title of this book indicates his engagement with Erdmann’s premise from 1935: What exactly was this new thing that warriors and churchmen invented between 1095 and 1099 that we have come to call the crusades? He extended that question to the history, progress, and immediate interpretation of the First crusade. I think it is a totally brilliant book. For me, the current phase of crusade historiography begins with this book. That said, one of his last books, (The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), in which he grapples with the role the crusades played in the long relationship between Christianity and Islam up to the modern period, is perhaps more timely; and an easy read. Hillenbrand, Carole. The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2000. After nine centuries of analysis of the Crusades from the Western perspective, Hillenbrand was the first to offer a sustained academic study of the idea and experience of the crusades from the other side. In so doing, she offered a massive and urgently needed corrective, and in turn founded a new strand of history, the most recent and important example of which is the Paul Cobb’s magnificent The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford 2014). “The ten books on Crusade that have most shaped my thinking” Erdmann, Carl. The Origin of the Idea of Crusade. Translated by Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Originally published as Erdmann, Carl. Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Geistesgeschicte 6. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1935. Also on my “all time top ten list,” Erdmann’s is the earliest book on my personal list. Included in his project was an examination of the religious ideas and symbols that came together to make the crusades possible. This is the central question that interests me, and I have often returned to Erdmann. Most of the books on the rest of this list engage in one way or another aspects of this question. Siberry, Elizabeth. Criticism of Crusading: 1095-1274. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. I debated whether this one should be on the list, but it is the book that made me understand how Europeans reconciled their repeated failures with their absolute conviction that they were doing God’s work. Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. This book returned to Erdmann’s question (what was the “idea” of the crusade?), but, by explicitly examining the religious idea that animated the First Crusade, it took the crusaders seriously, at their word. It must have been one of the earliest books on the crusades that I read during my training, and I suspect it stands as the central pillar to my understanding of the crusades. I still think it is an extraordinary book. Bull, Marcus. Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, c. 970-c. 1130. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Bull was one of Riley Smith’s early students. It was Riley-Smith who decided to take the religious ideas and motivations of the crusaders seriously. Bull explained the religious ideas of the knightly class who took up the cross for the First Crusade, providing one of the missing pieces in our picture of how the First Crusade, and thus the phenomenon as a whole, took shape. (I say it was the “missing piece” because most of our sources for this period are clerical, and thus arguments built on those sources are always subject to the challenge that we’re perceiving just an ecclesiastical, or “ivory tower,” discourse or construct.) Kedar, Benjamin Z. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches towards the Muslims. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. This was the first book I read that explicitly considered the issue of how the crusades helped shape the complex relationship between Christianity and Islam, and also the important role the crusades played in the creation of Christian identity in the West. This question has only become more and more important in the years since 9/11/2001. Housley, Norman. The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From Lyons to Alcazar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Housley has dedicated his career to showing how the crusade venture lasted long beyond 1291, when the Latin East established around the First crusade was annihilated. He has written widely on this. This was the first of his books I read, and it opened up crusading history as a history that needed to be taken up well past the Reformation. Tyerman, Christopher. The Invention of the Crusades. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1998. This is a book that got a lot of attention when it was first published. Tyerman argued that there really wasn’t anything we should call the Crusades until the end of the twelfth century (at the time of the Third Crusade). In the end, the central argument wasn’t really accepted, but the argument and the evidence used was so provocative and interesting that I often find myself in a mental discussion with its premise, and it has been important for my construction of my own narrative. Schein, Sylvia. Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099-1187). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. This book is not so much about the Crusades, as about the idea of the holy city Jerusalem during the first century of the Crusade (from 1099 to 1187). Again, as it deals with the weighted meaning of Jerusalem at the core of the crusade venture, it reveals the importance of studying ideas to make sense of the actions of individuals and societies. Bird, Jessalyn, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds. Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Although this book is ostensibly a “source book,” it is currently the best thing written on the crusades of the thirteenth century. The editorial commentary is guided by a comprehensive and consistent interpretation of crusading in the thirteenth century. It should really be considered and counted as a monograph, and I think one of the most important contributions of recent years. Buc, Philippe. Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. This book isn’t actually about the crusades. It uses the First Crusade as one of many examples to explicate a grammar of Christian thought, which Buc argues is keyed to eschatology (End Times) and in turn governs ideological, political, and religious history and ideas over two thousand years. But Buc’s grammar in turn helps explain the First Crusade and then the later crusades.

——————

Bernard Hamilton – University of Nottingham

Dear Andrew, My apologies for the delay. The ten books which I consider important are the following. I have restricted my choice to works written in my own field of research: that is the eastern Mediterranean in the period c. 1050-1300. I am conscious that many excellent books have been omitted, but that is inevitable in an exercise of this kind. I leave it to your discretion whether my llst meets the criteria you had in mind. If it does, would you please mount it for me on your site. 1. Robert Huygens edition of William of Tyre, Chronicon, CCCM 63, 63A (Turnholt, 1986). This is the definitive edition of the most important source for the history of the Latin East in the twelfth century. Robert Huygens is a philologist, and the Latin of this text is the nearest that can be produced to William’s autograph. I very much admire the purity of Robert’s scholarship. 2 Hans Eberhard Mayer’s Die Urkunden der lateinischen Konige von Jerusalem, 4 vols., MGH (Hanover 2010), is an indispensable work for the study of the Crusader Kingdom, and is the fruit of a lifetime’s study of the sources. It is particularly important for discussing the sources which are only known indirectly through references in other documents. Hans Mayer’s careful discussion of the dating of documents also makes this also an essential text for determining the chronology of the Latin Kingdom. 3 Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 4 vols (Cambridge, 2003-2009), is a master work. I have found it invaluable in my own work, and in all ways I cannot praise it too highly. 4 Jonathan Riley-Smith, although it is difficult o single out one of his many important works, my choice is The First Crusaders 1095-1131 (CUP, 1993), which demonstrated that in tracing family connections among crusaders, no distinction should be made between maternal and paternal kin. This has proved to be a very fruitful approach. 5 Malcolm Barber, The Crusader States (Yale UP, 2012). This is the most comprehensive and reflective modern history of the Crusader States, which is the product of a lifetime’s consideration of the sources and their interpretation. 6 Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: extending the frontiers of Christendom (Yale UP, 2007) is a masterly examination of the way in which the concept of crusading had developed in the Latin world between the First Crusade and the campaigns which make up the Second Crusade. 7 Keagan Brewer, Prester John, the Legend and its Sources (Ashgate, Crusade Texts in Translation, 2015). The belief that there was a powerful Christian ruler in Asia beyond the Islamic lands who would come to the aid of the crusaders in the East against the growing power of Islam was influential in Latin Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Keagan Brwer has translated and commented on the principal sources for this legend, and discussed their political implications. The competition is huge, but in my view this is the best and most comprehensive book ever written on Prester John. 8 Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410 (Parson, 2005). The Mongol Empire dominated central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and much of Asia throughout the thirteenth century, and the Crusader States and the Crusading movement cannot be studied in isolation from it. Peter Jackson’s detailed and learned account is an indispensable work for understanding thirteenth-century crusading history. I conclude my list with an old book which remains important, and a new book which I consider significant. 9. Melchior de Vogue, Les Eglises de la Terre Sainte (Paris, 1860), was the first comprehensive account of the shrine churches of the Holy Land which the Ottoman authorities allowed to be made. It remains an important source for the study of crusader churches, because many of them have been damaged, or, as at Nazareth, improved, since it was published. 10. Andrew D. Buck, The Principality of Antioch and its Frontiers in the Twelfth Century (Boydell Press, 2017). This is the first comprehensive study of the Principality in the years after 1130 since Cl. Cahen”s La Syrie du nord a l’epoque des croisades (Damascus, 1940), and is much needed. In my view this is an excellent book which makes full use of the very fragmentary sources and of the archaeological evidence and advances a radically new explanation about the relations between the prince and the nobility, which I find convincing.

——————

Andrew Holt – Florida State College at Jacksonville

After setting all of this up, some asked that I add my own list, so here it is. The top ten “most important” books on the crusades (in no particular order) Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusaders, 1095–1131. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. This work has been described by Princeton University’s William Chester Jordan as having “laid to rest for all time” the notion that the crusaders profited from the crusades. Indeed, reading this book as an undergraduate dispelled many popular myths for me and did much to inspire my desire to further study the crusades. Frankopan, Peter. The First Crusade: The Call from the East. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012. I think this is one of the most important recent books to come out as it refocuses attention on the essential role the Byzantine Empire played in helping bring about the calling of the First Crusade. Frankopan examines events from the perspective of Alexios in Constantinople who, with much of his empire recently conquered by the Turks, saw western military aid as a necessity. Tyerman, Christopher. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006. At over a thousand pages, and written by perhaps the leading living scholar of the crusades, this work represents the most comprehensive and authoritative single-volume history of the crusading movement ever written. France, John. Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. John France, a leading British scholar of the crusades, here provides perhaps the best available work on the military history of the crusades. The military historians I know think this is perhaps the most important book on the crusades, military history or otherwise, and will fight you over it. Queller, Donald E., and Thomas F. Madden. The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Queller and Madden do a masterful job detailing the odd and unforeseen sequence of events that culminated in the crusaders’ attack on fellow Christians at Zara and (especially) Constantinople. This work also includes a very useful essay by Alfred J. Andrea on the narrative sources for the Fourth Crusade. Andrea, Alfred J. Encyclopedia of the Crusades. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Although now slightly dated, this work is a single-volume encyclopedia of the crusades authored by a leading American historian that includes over 230 entries (all impressively authored by Andrea himself) with useful further reading sections. At the time of its publication it was (and remains) an extraordinarily useful volume to keep handy as it addressed hundreds of topics authoritatively and concisely. Alan V. Murray’s monumental 4 volume encyclopedia is much more substantial and covers a broader range of topics, but it’s also not as convenient so I tend to consult Al’s more often for quick reference. Edgington, Susan B., and Sarah Lambert, eds. Gendering the Crusades. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. As someone who early in my career had an interest in masculinity and crusading as it related to the identities of knights in the era of the First Crusade, I came to see (and still see) the contributions to this volume as a fascinating collective resource brimming with insights. Hillenbrand, Carole. The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2000. Although Paul Cobb has put out a wonderful book on this topic, Carole Hillenbrand’s classic work remains the most substantive and insightful treatment of Muslim perspectives of the crusaders and events taking place within the Islamic world during the crusading era. Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. I think this is one of Riley-Smith’s most important works. Of particular interest are his final two chapters considering how the crusades have been interpreted by modern westerners and Muslims. He powerfully warns against poor understandings of the crusades and how those poor understandings can dangerously heighten distrust of the west in the modern Islamic world. This is no small thing in an age when al-Qaeda and ISIS regularly invoke the medieval crusades in their imagery and rhetoric and as part of a broader effort to justify their deeds. Madden, Thomas ed. The Crusades: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2002. An excellent collection of some of the most influential essays ever published on the crusades. It is handy to have them all in one volume, with thoughtful and illuminating introductions by Madden for each of them. It is also useful for teaching and gives students a sense of the rich debates on crusade history that have taken place in the recent past. It is tough to limit the choices to just ten. There are so many wonderful works on the crusades by historians like Bernard Hamilton, William Chester Jordan, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Benjamin Kedar, Edward Peters, Helen J. Nicholson and many others that I have not mentioned here, which I regret as they also often rank among the “most important.” There are also numerous important articles that would equal some of these books in importance. For this exercise, I limited myself to just secondary sources and chose those that, if I could only have ten books on the crusades, I would want to be sure to have available.

——————-

John D. Hosler – U.S. Command and General Staff College

My list begins with titles useful for the military history of the Crusades, which is the area of my greatest interest. I’ve included a few other “go-to” studies as well. R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1995). Somewhat outdated, the main contentions of Smail’s classic work are nonetheless necessary reading for historians of warfare. His discussion of field operations in the Levant still dominates the conversation about how crusaders waged war in the East. John France, Victory in the East: a Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge, 1994). As odd as it may sound, the bulk of scholarly histories of the Crusades spend little time analyzing actual military operations. France’s book corrected that for the First Crusade. It has had considerable influence on subsequent military histories of the period by showing that military affairs need not be subordinate to religious or political histories of the period. Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, ed. John H. Pryor (Aldershot, 2006). This collection is mandatory reading for the military history of the Crusades. The essays are authored by some of the foremost scholars; collectively, they demonstrate the sheer complexity of moving tens of thousands of soldiers across continents. Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: a New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 2006). This is my go-to for a single volume comprehensive history of the crusading period. It may not be everyone’s choice for a survey, but Tyerman’s book is much more detailed than its peers and discusses military operations in surprising depth. Adrian Boas, Crusader Archaeology: the Material Culture of the Latin East (London, 1999). The archaeological study of the Middle East is essential for anyone interested in crusading warfare. Scholars working at Israeli institutions in particular (such as Boas, who is at the Univ. of Haifa) have been prodigious in revealing new aspects of both western and eastern operations via the study of poliorcetics and conflict archaeology. Paul Cobb, The Race for Paradise: an Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford, 2014). Crusading scholarship is dominated by studies on the western experience that lean overmuch on the Christian sources. Cobb’s book, a narrative of the crusades from the Muslim perspective, better utilizes the Arabic source materials and is such a much-needed corrective. It is also easier to obtain than Carole Hillenbrand’s equally-impressive The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York, 2000). A History of the Crusades, ed. K. Setton 6 vols. (Madison, 1969-1989). A magisterial collection of essays spanning the entire crusading period. Today, its usefulness is uneven because many of the pieces employ outdated approaches and/or predate more recent discoveries and sources of information. But others are remarkable for their durability, and the overall collection remains a great resource for first readings of diverse topics. Even better, the entire set is available free online via the University of Wisconsin libraries: https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/history/histcrusades/ Joshua Prawer, Crusader Institutions (Oxford, 1980). Prawer is one of the great names in crusading history. I’ve picked this from among Prawer’s many learned works because, for me, it’s the best detailed study of how the Crusader States functioned in political and social senses. Trade, agriculture, property rights, economics–this book covers them all in a topical and accessible manner. Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006). This is the ideal starting place for anyone wishing to understand the different schools of thought and methodological approaches to Crusades scholarship. Housley’s work is especially important for the study of the later crusades and the effect of the Crusades on western legal, political, and religious institutions. Carl Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of the Crusades, trans. M.W. Baldwin and W. Goffart (Princeton, 1977). I struggled with my last pick, but in the end I felt obligated to go with Erdmann because no Crusades list should exclude him. As recent debates over the origins of the First Crusade have reignited in the last ten years, scholars still routinely round back to Erdmann as a first course. This is a classic that continues to inform intellectual and even military considerations of not only the Crusades but, importantly, eleventh century warfare in general.

—————

Kurt Villads Jensen – Stockholms Universitet

To choose the ten most important books requires one to work backwards and remember how one’s own interest in crusading studies began and developed. Benjamin Kedar’s Crusade and Mission: European approaches towards the Muslims came in 1984 when I wrote my master thesis and very much inspired my understanding of the sources I was working with. It is an extremely important book as it is the first to challenge the idea, strong since WWII, that medieval mission was an alternative to crusading. Norman Daniel’s Islam and the West: the Making of an Image from 1960 is still a mine of information and inspiration for finding sources. It is outdated and has been replaced by more recent and far more analytical works, especially those of John Tolan, but it was a pioneering work and fundamental for an entire research area considering perceptions of Islam. It is also written in a wonderfully personal style with all Latin quotations translated, except those that concern sex, which are a matter for Latinists only. Christopher Tyerman’s The Invention of the Crusades came in 1998 when I got my first larger research grant to study the crusades (luckily only after I wrote the application). It contributed significantly to the discussion of how to define a crusade which became extremely important in a Scandinavian and Baltic context where crusading studies really began to take off in the very late 1990s. Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading from 1986 is extremely important for, among other things, its discussions of the motives of crusaders. His The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (from 1997) was methodologically perhaps more interesting in showing how a reconstruction of crusader networks could explain the geographical distribution of crusaders. Hans Eberhard Mayer’s Geschichte der Kreuzzüge was first published in 1965 and has continued to come in new and thoroughly revised versions. It is one of the best general introductions to crusading history. For Scandinavian participation in the crusades to the Middle East, Paul Riant’s Expéditions et pèlerinages des Scandinaves en Terre Sainte au temps des Croisades from 1865 is still the most comprehensive, and the fate of the eccentric, learned, and scandinavophile count is, in itself, fascinating. For the Baltic Crusades, Eric Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades from 1980 was absolutely the best modern introduction. Since c 2000, it has been supplemented by a huge research output by scholars around the Baltic who have specialised in various aspects – to mention only a few, all published in 2007: Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades 1147-1254, Janus Møller-Jensen’s Denmark and the Crusades, 1400-1650, and Anti Selartl’s Livland und die Rus’ im 13. Jahrhundert (English translation 2015). Friedrich Benninghoven’s Der Orden der Schwertbrüder: Fratres milicie Christi de Livonia came in 1965 and is not fun to read, but it is the only comprehensive volume on this small, but important military order in the Baltic. Even less inspiring, but equally empirically heavy is the three volume work in Danish about the Hospitallers in Scandinavia by Erik Reitzel-Nielsen, Johanniterordenens historie med særligt henblik på de nordiske lande, 1984-1991. Of the immensely many interesting sources for crusading history, the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia from 1227 is among the most vivid and frighteningly direct in its description of warfare and massacres. The edition by Leonid Arbusow and Albert Bauer of Henrici Chronicon Livoniae, from 1955, can now be supplemented by the splendid collection of articles in Marek Tamm, Linda Kaljundi, and Carsten Selch Jensen, Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier: A Companion to the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, 2011. My personal hero, however, is Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, missionary to the Orient around 1300 and prolific writer about Islam. His treatise against the Quran, Contra legem sarracenorum, was published in 1986 by Jean-Marie Mérigoux, ‘L’ouvrage d’un frere precheur floretin en Orient a la fin du XIIIe siècle. Le “Contra Legem Sarracenorum” de Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’, in the journal Memorie Dominicane, nuova serie 17, from Pistoia. His fascinating travel description from the Middle East came in a new edition in 1997 by René Kappler, Riccold de Monte Croce: Pérégrination en Terre Sainte et au Proche Orient, Texte latin et traduction. Lettres sur la chute de Saint-Jean d’Acre, Traduction. It gives an impression of the combination of religious sincerity, fascination with and fear of the unknown, warfare, and politics that made the crusades.

William Chester Jordan – Princeton University

Ten Books Important to Me for the Study of the Crusades William Chester Jordan, Princeton University Jean de Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis is a text I go to over and over again—so often that parts of it are indelibly inscribed in my memory. Even Jacob Burckhardt, who I sometimes think did not believe that medieval authors had an iota of genuine individualism in their brains or bodies, had to confess that the Life “stands almost alone as the first complete spiritual portrait of a modern European nature” (Civilization of the Renaissance, II, 324 ). Renaissance before the Renaissance—must have upset him to have to write the quoted words! Du Cange’s Glossarium of Medieval Latin: the dissertationes are a veritable treasure trove of information, not only on the crusades but on all aspects of medieval society, but I was fascinated by the erudition on crusade matters in particular. Du Cange made me envious of the antiquaries of our profession. The Hebrew Chronicles have long struck me as underutilized by historians of the Crusades, although that has changed dramatically in recent years, but . . . Even more important to me have been the allusive and elusive and altogether moving Hebrew liturgical poems produced in the twelfth and thirteenth century. It was these, initially in Carmi’s translations in the Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, which inspired me to undertake some study of Hebrew. This next book may seem strange, but I find the essays, though allegedly introductory, in the Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, absolutely stunning. Jonathan Riley-Smith must have exercised tight editorial control to get essays of such high quality from every single contributor. Everybody will mention something of Jonathan’s work. I think his masterpiece is The First Crusaders. It blew me away that one could do so much with the charters. It is a real inspiration to do close reading. Joseph Bédier’s edition and translations into Modern French of the Chansons de croisade have provided grist for a lot of my scholarship over the years, and thanks to a former graduate student in musicology, now Professor Alice Clark of Loyola of New Orleans, I became fascinated with the music, too (edited by Pierre Aubry in the same volume). One needs to know about the other theaters where these wars occurred. For the Baltic, I have found William Urban’s Baltic Crusade essential. For Spain, I love Father Burns’ Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia. I really use Peter Jackson’s collection, The Seventh Crusade. It has become my go to source in introducing undergraduates to the wide variety of texts and therefore of viewpoints in the period. And, of course, it specifically covers the crusade I have spent so much of my career studying. How could I not adore it? Andrew, I think that’s ten.

—————

Andrew Jotischky – Royal Holloway, University of London

My ‘Top 10’ Books on the Crusades I have approached this partly by thinking about the books that have influenced or inspired me, and partly by thinking specifically about the most influential books in my own research area. I have stuck to secondary works, because choosing among primary sources becomes invidious. (In alphabetical order of author) Alphandéry, P. ed. A. Dupront, La chrétienté et l’idée de croisade (1959). The classic work examining the religious framework of crusading; now in many ways superseded but still a very valuable work. Erdmann, Carl. Die Enstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (1935, trans 1977 as The Origins of the Idea of the Crusade). Although few crusade historians would now accept all the premises of Erdmann’s interpretation of how crusade origins sprang from Germanic culture, it remains a towering book that cannot be ignored. Ellenblum, Ronnie. Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1996). A pioneering work that not only introduces vital new methodologies into the study of the kingdom of Jerusalem but also provides trenchant historiographical discussion. Hamilton, Bernard. The Latin Church in the Crusader States (1980). For anyone concerned with the Christian institutions of the Crusader States, this is the standard book. Hillenbrand, Carole. The Crusades. Islamic Perspectives (1999). It’s difficult to imagine what we did before this magisterial book appeared: comprehensive, scholarly and lavishly illustrated. Kedar, Benjamin. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches towards the Muslims (1984). A highly original and brilliant book; turned crusading studies into new paths. Prawer, Joshua. Historire du royaume latin de Jérusalem (1969-70). Based on very profound knowledge of the social, legal and political institutions of the kingdom of Jeruslaem – obviously this ground has been covered by many before and since, but Prawer’s is in my view the seminal study. Pringle, Denys. The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, A Corpus. (1993- 2009). Monumental study based on archaeological research over many years – an invaluable resource. Richard, Jean. Francs et orientaux dans le monde des croisades (2003). It may be considered sleight of hand to include a collection of essays, but this shows the range and depth of scholarship of this great historian of the Crusades and Crusader States. Riley-Smith, J.S. The First Crusaders, 1097-1131 (1997). It would be impossible for me not to include one of Jonathan’s books, given his profound influence on the whole field. I could have chosen others, such as The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading or The Feudal Nobility in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but this is my favourite of his books.

—————

Benjamin Z. Kedar – Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Dear Andrew, Here is my list of “Most Important” books on the crusades: Voltaire, Histoire des croisades (1751) Hans Prutz, Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge (1883) Emmanuel Rey, Les colonies franques en Syrie aux XIIme et XIIIme siècles (1883) Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (1935) Claude Cahen, La Syrie du Nord à l’époque des croisades et la principauté franque d’Antioche (1940) Jean Richard, Le royaume latin de Jérusalem (1953) Paul Alphandéry & Alphonse Dupront, La Chrétienté et l’idée de croisade (1954, 1959) [NB: to be checked against Alphandéry’s MS in Paris, Arch. du Rectorat] R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097-1193 (1956) Joshua Prawer, Histoire du Royaume latin de Jérusalem, trans. G. Nahon, 2nd ed. (1975) [The book appeared originally in Hebrew, in 1963] Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus, 4 vols. (1993-2009) As for the importance of other recent books, I assume that “it is too early to say.” Best wishes, Benjamin

—————-

Svetlana Luchitskaya – Lomonosov Moscow State University

There are so many excellent works on the history of the crusades, some of them have appeared quite recently. It is impossible to list all of them. I think that every historian who is asked to speak about “ten most important books” will proceed form his (her) research experience. So will I. I will mention my favorite books that at different times have been very important for my research and teaching. Needless to say, that this choice is rather subjective, and the books are listed in arbitrary order Steven Runciman History of the Crusades His three volume History of the Crusades is certainly o