The story of how a group of warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust, carved out new Christian-ruled states in the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary of all epics. The crusaders' stunning initial success started a sequence of great Crusades, each with its own story, that fundamentally shaped the Christian and Muslim worlds for two centuries, until the last Crusader castles were finally expunged. The energy and commitment that sent army after army into the eastern Mediterranean also led to the invasion and conversion of Central and Baltic Europe, Spain, Portugal, the destruction of the Cathars in Provence and the settlement of America. Told with great verve and authority, God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating but also horrifying story.

‘We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades…Tyerman tells us how the Church set about preaching the crusades, exploiting the perennial pessimism and guilt of the European nobility of the Middle Ages.  He shows how crusading ideology penetrated the religious sensibility of the period, as well as its secular fiction and poetry…Of all the modern histories of the crusades it is the shrewdest, the most reliable and the most complete.’ – The Spectator

God's War - a piece by The Editor

The Crusades continue to hold an extraordinary fascination for many readers. They form an epic, exciting adventure story – one which fulfils every childhood stereotype of the Middle Ages as a place filled with besieged castles, giant siege-engines and men in picturesque armour. They also form a narrative with an attractive shape – with the hubris of the ferocious Christian offensive of the 12th century giving way to nemesis with the occupation of much of southeast Europe by the Moslems some 300 years later. The Crusades, and our understanding of the Crusades, also of course feed in important ways into current anxieties about relations between Christian and Moslem states – nobody can mention a ‘crusade’ without this having profoundly divisive consequences.

This is therefore a good time for a major new attempt to understand the Crusades and this Christopher Tyerman magnificently achieves in God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Drawing on a vast array of new scholarship, this book is a triumph of story-telling and analysis, telling the whole scarcely credible tale – not just that of the well-known crusades to Palestine and Egypt but also the crusades, which ultimately had far more impact: those which created a Christian-ruled Spain and Portugal (the ‘Reconquest’), which cleared France of heretics (the crusades against the Cathars) and which created a Christian eastern Germany (the campaigns of the Teutonic Knights).

There has not been a book on this scale for fifty years (since Runciman’s bravura three-volume History of the Crusades) and God’s War will be viewed as a landmark work: as well as a gripping and thought-provoking one.