God's War

"God's War" is a long but highly readable account of this extensive back-and-forth struggle. It is an impressive achievement, a work that manages to tie together an extraordinary number of threads across nearly half a millennium of European history. Although it can be taken as a response to Pope Benedict XVI's comments at Regensburg, it is more properly read as an extended rejoinder to Steven Runciman's classic three-volume "History of the Crusades," published in the early 1950s, a long and colorful account that is nonetheless studded with judgments that now seem prejudiced and amateurish. Tyerman, by contrast, is never amateurish. His knowledge of the period is encyclopedic, and his judgments are sharp, astute, and fair--which is to say unsparing--to both camps. He neither vilifies Islam nor engages in the easy Euro-bashing that is the obverse of Islamophobia. With so many people succumbing to subjectivism these days, it is bracing to come across a historian who remains resolutely abo "God's War" is the new standard in the field...Adjectives for [it] almost fail. "Comprehensive," "monumental," and "epic" come to mind, and they are appropriate but scarcely adequate. In brief, this is a work by a master historian.--Alfred J. Andrea"CT Review" (07/01/2007) A magisterial work...it is a shoo-in to become this generation's definitive history of the original Crusades, a series of military expeditions that temporarily returned the Holy Land to Christian rule in the Middle Ages. Hefty, encyclopedic and a darn good read, Tyerman's book has the rarest of virtues among myriad treatments of the subject: It doesn't bend history to preconceptions.--Ron Grossman"Chicago Tribune" (10/29/2006) Anyone who likes knights, castles and battles as much as I do will enjoy Christopher Tyerman's masterpiece "God's War", a history of the Crusades written with great breadth, clarity and human sympathy: one of the achievements of the year.--Dominic Sandbrook"Daily Telegraph" (12/09/2006) Challenging traditional conceptions of the Crusades, e.g., the failure to retain Jerusalem, Tyerman believes that it was the weakening of papal power and the rise of secular governments in Europe that finally doomed the crusading impulse. This is a marvelously conceived, written, and supported book.--Robert J. Andrews"Library Journal" (09/15/2006) Christopher Tyerman...has written a tome that...draws on the most recent scholarship and offers fresh insights, demolishing myths galore.--A. G. Noorani"Frontline" (05/04/2007) Christopher Tyerman, who teaches medieval history in Oxford, offers in his new and massive study of the Crusades as a whole a welcome synthesis for the general reader...Full of fascinating detail..."God's War" is a first-rate, scholarly, up-to-date, and highly readable survey of the entire crusading movement...In the gullible age of "The Da Vinci Code", Tyerman offers a sane, informed, and gripping account of one of the most characteristic and most extraordinary manifestations of the Christian Middle Ages.--Eamon Duffy"New York Review of Books" (10/19/2006) Christopher Tyerman's "God's War: A New History of the Crusades" is a doorstop of a book, a mammoth effort to retell, based on modern scholarship, the story of how Western Christendom made war to wrest the Holy Lands from Muslim hands. As we all know, this isn't considered ancient history in the Middle East.--Fritz Lanham "Houston Chronicle " Christopher Tyerman's "God's War" is comprehensive, fascinating, and timely. It deflates comparisons of current U.S. strategies with the Crusades. True, the participation of religious in battle (like Odo on the Bayeux Tapestry) is noteworthy, but so is Tyerman's questioning of the cliche 'Age of Faith.' Indeed, while these books make the Middle Ages seem real, they also make it seem diff

Christopher Tyerman is a Fellow in History at Hertfod College, Oxford, and a Lecturer in Medieval History at New College, Oxford. He is the author of England and the Crusades.