by Christopher Tyerman
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| List Price: | $35.00 |
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Product Description
God's War offers a sweeping new vision of one of history's most astounding events: the Crusades. From 1096 to 1500, European Christians fought to recreate the Middle East, Muslim Spain, and the pagan Baltic in the image of their God. The Crusades are perhaps both the most familiar and most misunderstood phenomena of the medieval world, and here Christopher Tyerman seeks to recreate, from the ground up, the centuries of violence committed as an act of religious devotion. The result is a stunning reinterpretation of the Crusades, revealed as both bloody political acts and a manifestation of a growing Christian communal identity. Tyerman uncovers a system of belief bound by aggression, paranoia, and wishful thinking, and a culture founded on war as an expression of worship, social discipline, and Christian charity. This astonishing historical narrative is imbued with figures that have become legends--Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus. But Tyerman also delves beyond these leaders to examine the thousands and thousands of Christian men--from Knights Templars to mercenaries to peasants--who, in the name of their Savior, abandoned their homes to conquer distant and alien lands, as well as the countless people who defended their soil and eventually turned these invaders back. With bold analysis, Tyerman explicates the contradictory mix of genuine piety, military ferocity, and plain greed that motivated generations of Crusaders. He also offers unique insight into the maturation of a militant Christianity that defined Europe's identity and that has forever influenced the cyclical antagonisms between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Drawing on all of the most recent scholarship, and told with great verve and authority, God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating and horrifying story that continues to haunt our contemporary world. (20060724)
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Informative and Even Handed But A Bit of a Slog, 2008-07-29
This book is very complete, well researched and informative. Tyerman is obviously a first rate scholar with a very good command of the source materials. The book covers not only the well known middle-eastern crusades but also lesser known crusades in central and eastern Europe as well as France and Spain. It is difficult to think of a significant event not covered in depth by the book.
The book further is very evenhanded in its treatment of the subject. Various atrocities committed by each side are presented straightforwardly and put in context with the standards of conduct and warfare at the time. If Tyerman views one side more favorably than the other, it is impossible to tell which one from reading the book.
The only real draw back to the book is that Tyerman is just not a good story teller. He is not a bad writer. The book is clearly written and very readable. But the book is not a good story. Tyerman does not have a great eye for detail. He doesn't do a particularly good job of fleshing out the characters in the book or telling the story in a compelling way.
Overall this is a good book that is incredibly informative and worth having around. But be forewarned, it is not an easy read and is a bit of a slog to get through.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Well written, descriptive, and honest., 2008-07-10
This book comes none too late to combat the prevalence of the postmodernist myth of the Crusades having been a conflict between intolerant Christianity and cosmopolitan Islam. Tyerman's introduction illuminates a central flaw in the modern West's view of its past:
"A familiar but baneful response to history is to configure the past as comfortingly different from the present day. Previous societies are caricatured as less sophisticated, more primitive, cruder, alien. Such attitudes reveal nothing so much as a collective desire to reassure the modern observer by demeaning the experience of the past."
With God's War, Tyerman brings to modern discourse on this most controversial and formative periods of the European past something that has been missing for centuries: objectivity. As Tyerman himself will readily admit, complete objectivity is impossible, and therefore he begins and ends this work in full recognition of its Eurocentric point of view. But unlike many commentators, Tyerman refuses to fall into the trap of issuing a moral verdict on the actions of his ancestors and their enemies. His mission is simple and pure; he comes to tell us a story of what happened and do so as honestly and directly as he can. He does not read cynicically into the motives of the actors and levies skepticism and criticism only where it is positively backed by the historical record. To these qualities I must also add that it is entertainingly written--a hundred Hollywood film scripts could come from this book. It is a long book, though, and those who are uninterested in details may want to stick to Wikipedia articles. If, however, you really want to learn just what was behind this bizarre alliance of Christianity and militarism, I highly recommend this excellent book.
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 really bad, 2008-04-26
I started this book last week and am only around page 100 but am not sure that I will continue. My problem is that the author is not a very good story teller and frankly last night I found myself rereading a sentence 4 times to understand what it was saying only to realize that it was nonsensical. I'm no brain scientist but I'm fairly adept at reading and I keep coming across such passages that are either so convoluted they confuse or are just poorly written. If I had the energy I would go upstairs to pull such a passage but alas carrying 1,000 pages of dullness does not inspire me.
I'm going to give it another try but I'd like some narrative to engage me.
Ok, I tried. This is simply poorly written. Multiple passages that are not even understandable English on top of the very flat way of stating fact upon fact without any compelling narrative. I rarely give up on a book and this is a topic I find fascinating but this is simply not worth the trouble.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Very satisfied, 2008-03-02
The book is very helpful in the historical studies I have engaged. It arrived in excellent condition and in a timely manner.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The best history on the Crusades as well as Medieval Europe, 2007-12-22
God's War is one of the best, and most in depth, histories I have ever read concerning not just the Crusades but also their influence on Medieval Europe. The Crusades were not only a series of wars but also a decisive point for European society on all levels. God's War explains how the Crusades, pushed by the Papacy but also by secular rulers for their own benefit, contributed not just to Islam's current state but also to the Europe we see today.
It should be noted that the Crusades not only targeted Muslims but also pagans in the Baltic as well as "heretics" in Southern France, Eastern Europe, and even the Holy Roman Empire itself. This fact alone cannot be ignored because too often the Crusades are regulated to a mere conflict between Christians and Muslims as if that were the only issue at stake during the centuries they were fought. While not going into quite as much depth as with the main offensives against the Holy Land, God's War gives a short but strong description of these smaller wars for the cross and their end results.
The most important aspect of this book is the social implication that the Crusades placed upon those who were either involved directly or indirectly. While the Crusades had an important impact on the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and the Baltic, they also had an impact in regions such as France, England, Burgundy, Sicily, the Holy Roman Empire, and other regions that produced many of the Crusaders. The most important area would be in terms of faith itself and how Christianity was seen through both secular and Church rule. Also affected were more domestic issues such as how kings could rule their lands and how the common men and women found their own world being changed through a new dynamic of faith crossed with the sword.
I am not surprised that some will see this work as either too slow in reading or even biased. In the first area, I would have to agree that the reading it slow during some points and perhaps over detailed. In regards to the second, I believe the only real bias is held by those who still see the world in draconian religious world views that perhaps are not too different from the mentality that drove the crusades themselves. A sad fact that is especially being played out in both Christian and Muslims worlds even today and indeed perhaps some of those who are currently alive would fit quite well into the world of the original crusades.
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