The Debate on the Crusades

The Debate on the Crusades
by Christopher Tyerman 
Manchester University Press, 2011.


This recent work by Christopher Tyerman is unassuming in its purpose, that of writing a short crusade historiography that is accessible to both a scholarly and popular audience.  The focus on writers and philosophers from 1099 onward to the present, outlines extensively the changing views towards the crusades from contemporaries of the First Crusade to the modern world in ways that demonstrate multiple shifting attitudes.  This work is a real gem for the crusade historian who seeks an overview of all the important names in the field along with their perspectives, and is thus a must read.  Making several stops from the medieval period into the Reformation and Enlightenment, Tyerman jumps through the final centuries to the present noting each major work that moves forward the debate on how the crusades are defined.

Tyerman's warning as it were throughout the book and neatly summed up in the epilogue, is the danger of attempting to contextualize the crusade past in modern perspective which correlates to current events.  This was true for Voltaire and David Hume as much as it is true today in a post-9/11 society.  Instead of constantly asking what lessons can be learned, we must allow the facts to remain just so; facts of events that occurred in an era somewhat alien from ours some nine hundred years ago.  However, in taking this position Tyerman almost seems to exclude the possibility of using history as an instructional form at all.  His real issue addressed in the work, is the perceived moral applications that heighten tense relations between Christians and Muslims today, if not between Protestants and Catholics, and Representative versus Totalitarian government.

The Debate on the Crusades is a history about history and opens up questions about other fields of historical inquiry, demonstrating that even if Napoleon was right and "history is a myth that men agree upon", that myth is always in danger of changing because of the very human tendency to want it to conform to perceived reality.  As an intellectual history this work challenges the reader to come to grips with his own perceived notions and sometimes strongly held beliefs about the nature of history, this should be a work that is suggested reading in any class on historiography or the study of western civilization. 

-John Lowe (J. Sharp)