The Oxford History of the Crusades

Jonathan Riley-Smith

mar 2002 · OUP Oxford

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Written by a team of leading scholars, this fascinating book presents an authoritative and comprehensive history of the Crusades, from the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095 to the legacy of crusading ideas and imagery today. Reflecting the recent developments in crusade historiography, it covers crusading in many different theatres of war. The concepts of apologists, propagandists, song-writers, and poets, and the perceptions and motives of the crusaders themselves are described, as are the emotional and intellectual reactions of the Muslims to Christian holy war. The institutional developments - legal, financial, and structural - which were necessary to the movement's survival - are analysed. Several chapters are devoted to the western settlements established in the eastern Mediterranean region in the wake of the crusades, to the remarkable art and architecture associated with them, and to the military orders. The subject of the later crusades, including the history of the military orders from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is given the attention it deserves. And the first steps are taken on to a field that is as yet hardly explored - the survival of the ideas and images of crusading into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University and has been a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, since 1994. He has published widely on medieval history and the Crusades and his books include What were the Crusades? (1977), The Crusades: idea and reality (1981), The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1986), and The Atlas of the Crusades (1991). He was President of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East from 1990 to 1995.