The Concise History of the Crusades

by Thomas F. Madden

This title places the crusades within the medieval social, economic, religious and intellectual environments that gave birth to the movement and nurtured it for centuries. Also included is a historiographical overview of the crusades.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Religion, Middle East, Historical, Medieval History

264 pages, Hardcover

Published March 16, 2014

About the author

Thomas F. Madden is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. As an author and historical consultant he appears in such venues as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The History Channel.

Dr. Madden's latest book is The Fall of Republics: A History from Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution. His previous books include Venice: A New History, The Concise History of the Crusades, Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World, Empires of Trust, and Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice. He has also written and lectured extensively on the ancient and medieval Mediterranean as well as the history of Christianity and Islam.

Awards for his scholarship include the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, the Medieval Academy of America's Haskins Medal, and the Medieval Institute's Otto Grundler Prize. He is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Medieval Academy of America.

Reviews

[EggSalad · Rating 4 out of 5]

The books does what it sets out to do -- give a very high level and brief overview of the crusades. It is well written and easy to read. Of course, it has left me interested in learning more, but it was not written to be definitive. I have no background on the crusdaes and the various historical interpretations of them throughout history, but it also seemed relatively unbiased. I'd recommend it.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is exactly what it purports to be. It reduces over 200 years of history into a short readable outline. Most likely there is a full book exploring the content of any given page. It is an achievement of the author to distill this into just over 200 pages.

Most western adults will not know much about this endeavor. They could only guess at the duration, what was accomplished and outside of Richard I, would most likely not be able to name a participant (I tried this, got 100 years, 3 Crusades and Lancelot!). I think it is glossed over in the high school curriculum due to its complexity, its ugliness and the dubious value of its accomplishments. Madden is even handed. His description of the piety and the devotion of some of its participants balances out the narratives that show the imperialistic motives of some of its leaders.

Even the first Crusade, which accomplished its goal and was glorified at the time, had leaders who broke their word to a fellow Christian, the Emperor in Constantinople. Subsequent Crusaders called it quits due to catastrophic losses or spectacular wins with sufficient booty to return home with some wealth. Noble after noble declared himself King and/or Queen of Jerusalem and then fought to attain the status, not only with the Muslims who held the city, but also with each other. All the while, new Crusaders were recruited from among the faithful. Some nobles gave up their lands and possessions, and common soldiers gave up all to take the Crusader vows. Francis of Assisi journeyed to Egypt to convert Sultan al-Kamil to Christianity.

Madden shows how Crusading was a local affair as well. The Reconquest of Spain, begun several centuries before the formal designation of Crusade, is a clear victory for the Catholics. The Albigensian Crusade, which also meets its aims, seems to be a sanctified witch hunt combined with a territorial war. The Children's Crusade sounds like a group of zealots dispersing into reality at the end of their march.

Amid all the destruction and the shattered lives of survivors, there are fascinating personalities. Places such as Constantinople, Damascus and Cyprus have their own unique sagas over these years.

If you have read, as I have, pieces of the Crusade story in biographies and other histories this is a particularly good book for you. It gives you a good background in one cohesive narrative.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

My ignorance of this historical period makes me incapable of judging it as a historical document. It was a nice overview of the political and military events. However, in the initial chapter it stated the limits of viewing the crusades as a primarily military engagement. So, I was disappointed not to learn more about the women, elderly, poor who made up the bulk of the pilgrims as claimed when describing the first crusade. The masacres were horrifying, but dismissed in a single sentence. And, what about the Christians living in the Middle East before the first crusade. This book made it sound as if all Christians were Europeans.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madden is a known right-wing pundit, so when I started reading this book, I was skeptical that his point of view would dominate. It does, but it's executed so well that it's a easy read, full of great information. Definitely a work of popular history more so than a textbook, but it shouldn't be ignored.

[Joseph Raborg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a brief yet detailed history of all the major crusades. More so than anything else I have read, it strives to understand how the Crusaders themselves viewed their struggle to oust Muslim rulers from the Holy Land. The last couple of chapters are incredibly important, since they describe how historians, Westerners, and Muslims viewed the Crusades across the centuries until modern times. A very good book to read.

[Tim Speer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written. This book gives a complete and pretty thorough history of the Crusades, presenting it in a manner that is easy to follow.

[Hugo Gomez · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much information in such a condensed volume. Highly recommended. An eagle eye view of 500 years of Church history as it pertains to heresies, Islam and the most well known Reformers. There is nothing here on Erasmus of Rotterdam or John Colet, the pivotal players in Reformation. Most likely because they were on the fringe and not necessarily ever considered, officially, anti-Catholic. But not to sidetrack that further. A must read for anyone that wants to glean a long period of rich history.

[Morgan Moeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Personally I don’t like any history before the seventeenth century but I found Madden’s book to help give me a general understanding of the crusades. It’s a lot of information for me so it took me forever to finish but was good in achieving its purpose.

[green_night · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book that provides an accurate and concise telling of the crusades without falling prey to common depictions in the media.

[Kathryn]

For class

[Rodney Harvill · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Professor Madden challenges the popular perception of the Crusades by framing them in their proper medieval context and avoids looking at them through the lense of modern values. Over the course of a few centuries, Islamic armies had overrun Christian lands in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Spain and Anatolia. Of the five patriarchates, three (Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch) were in Muslim hands. Only Rome and Constantinople remained in Christian hands, and Constantinople was directly threatened by Muslim armies on the other side of the Bosporus. Furthermore, the Seljuk Turks, in their zeal for Islam, were destroying churches and harassing if not outright murdering pilgrims. It was in this context that the Bishop of Rome, Urban II, called for a Crusade, at the time a novelty in Christendom. Its intent was an act of Christian charity by Latin Christians to save Greek Christians from Muslim conquest.

Given that the crusaders came from various kingdoms that didn't always get along, there were rivalries at play and no clear chain of command. Even with these issues, the Crusaders were able to help the armies of Constantinople retake most of Anatolia and then went on to conquer Jerusalem and establish crusader kingdoms along the coast of what is now Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The secret of their success was division within the Islamic world at that time. Just as Christian kingdoms were noted for their wars with each other, the emirates of the Islamic world were noted for their wars against each other, as well. In like manner, the secret of the downfall of the Crusades was petty division among the crusader kingdoms and military orders such as the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights. Strong Muslim leaders such as Salah al-Din (Saladin) were periodically able to unite Muslim emirates and take advantage of division among the Christians to retake territory. The usual response to such Muslim success was a new crusade.

As noted above, disunity was the bane of both sides, but the Christians, with their long supply lines could least afford it. For example, during the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart had to cancel his plan to retake Jerusalem and return to Europe because Philip II of France was waging war on his French holdings while he was away on crusade. It didn't help that the emperors in Constantinople sometimes saw the Latin crusaders as a greater threat than the Muslim armies, prompting them to cooperate with the Muslims against the crusaders. That the crusaders managed to maintain holdings in the Levant for almost two centuries is remarkable.

The most bizarre of the crusades was the Fourth Crusade. Because of the increasing unreliability of the emperors in Constantinople, it was decided to travel exclusively by sea to the Holy Land, and transport arrangements were made with the Venetians. There was one problem, a big problem. The shipping needs had been overestimated by a factor of three, and the crusaders who showed up couldn't pay the bill. Through a series of deals, they sacked a Christian city that had once been under Venetian control and which the Venetians wanted back. Afterwards, they successfully backed a claimant to the throne in Constantinople. After he occupied the throne, he found himself unable to honor his promised payments to them. In response, they captured and sacked Constantinople, starting a sixty-year period of Latin rule there.

Constantinople had served as a cork to keep the Turks out of Europe, and the crusades likely bought it time. Once the Turks managed to get a foothold in the Balkans and finally were able to capture Constantinople, Christian Europe found itself staring the Muslim threat in the face. Crusades continued to be called, but the Holy Land was no longer their goal. On the contrary, these crusaders now went into battle to keep the Turks away from their own homes, and many died valiantly in the process.

Today, we look back at the crusades through the modern lense of a strong West and a weak Muslim world and fail to see the dire threat facing Europe. European Christians had seen three quarters of Christendom fall to Islam and felt that they were on the precipice of ruin. In this book, Professor Madden did justice to that historical context. Well done, professor.

[Josh McQueen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madden’s “The Concise History of the Crusades,” is a breakdown of each crusade, the transition period between Crusades, and how the concept of a Crusade progress from an arm pilgrimage to the holy land to a more general fight for a religious purpose. Madden main argument is how the modern view of the crusades is somewhat flawed due to how often it’s viewed as solely religious wars through a modern secular lens, when the crusades, especially the earlier ones, were a lot more nuanced. Medieval cultures at the time held religion and chivalry in very high regard. Modern culture is not defined in the same way, since the focus of monoculture is more on allegiance is to country and social issues. Madden emphasizes how this difference can cause modern culture to not fully understand the why behind the motivation of the Crusaders.

[Josh Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a concise and readable history of the Crusades, sweeping many centuries from the First Crusade in 1095 to wars against foes within Europe and failed attempts to push back the Turks in 1529. Madden admits this is a more expansive view than many books on the Crusade. He argues well for it, given later popes used the same rhetoric, but no longer had the same power. He marks the end of the crusading era as coming to a close with Protestantism. Since Europe was no longer united, it could no longer launch massive campaigns, nor did Protestants listen to the calls from the popes. I also found the rise and fall of the military orders fascinating.

Madden rarely speaks to the moral aspects of the Crusades, sticking to flaws from a military or political standpoint. He downplays the slaughter at the end of the First Crusade, saying it was well within the norms of the day. I found this surprising. In his intro and conclusion, the author makes it clear he thinks the Crusades have been misinterpreted according to modern sentiments. He is deeply critical of Walter Scott's novel, The Talisman and movies such as Kingdom of Heaven. These reinterpret events through the lens of 20th century colonialism. He asserts the Crusades barely registered on the Muslim perspective, given they were mostly ineffective, until the 1950s reactions to modern Israel. These "artificial memories of the crusades, constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists" are the cause of modern tensions, according to Madden. He prefers viewing them in their original context as medieval religious acts, though his book clearly acknowledges worldly desires of spoils and fame.

The book makes no theological claims. From a Christian perspective, I must note the Crusades only began 1,000 years after Christ's death, in steadfast contradiction to his teachings. Loving your enemy is not found among any crusader rhetoric. Nor is that Christ's kingdom is not of this earth, or that the weapons the Church fights with are not of flesh and blood. Peter, Paul, and John led no armed revolutions. They sought to win the hearts of the world with the word of Christ, not the sword. As a religious act for Christ, the Crusades were more than deeply mistaken.

[Adam Marischuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very readable short history of the crusades from a respected historian

Unfortunately, The Concise History is just that, concise. At only two hundred and some pages of generally flowing prose, the concise history leaves the reader craving more. This is an excellent summary/overview of all the 'crusades' with chapters on:

1) The Call
2) The First Crusade
3) The Rise of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Second Crusade
4) The Decline of the Latin Kingdom and the Third Crusade
5) The Fourth Crusade
6) Crusading at home (Albigensian)
7) The Fifth Crusage and the Crusade of Frederick II
8) The Crusades of St Louis
9) The Later Crusades (Cyprus and the Turks)
10) The Legacy of the Crusades

Madden does a wonderfully scholarly job of presenting the sometimes heavy and foreign world of the crusades to the modern reader in a readable and mostly chronological order. His use of scholarly sources and primary sources, from the West, the Byzantines and the Muslim world gives a well rounded overview of the crusades and doesn't play politics with the subject. The characters, especially of the crusading kings spring to life as complex individuals, neither the heros of the romantics nor the villains of modern politically correct revisionists. Madden does an equally good job at dispelling the myths of what the crusades were not, they were not wars of conquest, proto-colonialism, wars of plunder etc.

I highly recommend this read.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madden's history of the Crusades was concise, yet provided a bit of a counter-history to the way crusades have often been portrayed in recent Western historical literature. He understands the Crusades, not as early colonialism, but in the context of the time as religious pilgrimages. He does not overly condemn or hold up either Muslims or Byzantines (a la Runciman) as ideals against barbarous Crusaders, noting atrocities and betrayals on all sides (and the overall benefits to Western European development of the crusades). He also notes crusades outside the holy lands in the Iberian Peninsula and northeast Europe, though does not dwell on them for long. He does have a chapter that is mostly on the Albingensians - where he has written an entire book. It was the least satisfying chapter in the book, replete with too much scholarly detail and absent many opinions or conclusions. Very good overview with a nice (for 1999) bibliographic essay at the end.

[FrDrStel Muksuris · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the student of history, this monograph offers an excellent review of the history and motivational factors behind the Crusades, from both the perspectives of Western Europe and the Islamic peoples of the East. Madden makes good critical use of the sources on this topic which have flooded the scholarly world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His conclusion, only three pages long, is stunningly relevant for world politics. A dense but enjoyable read for the history buff, student, and academic.

[Stan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Concise History of the Crusades is an excellent introduction to the subject. It gives enough detail to inform and piques enough curiosity to make readers want to learn more. When you finish this book you'll know that you need to know more about the Crusades, as the history is vast.

Madden approaches the subject of the Crusades with a desire to understand how the crusaders understood what they were attempting to do. This book attempt to roll back revisions to history and let the crusaders voices be heard. Madden achieved that objective in this book. It is well worth reading!

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is exactly what the title says, but don't let the "concise" part fool you. Thomas gives you the feeling of being there during not only the crusades overseas, but the ones happening in Europe as well. Probably the best part is his thoughts on the animosity between Muslims and Europeans, whether or not the crusades played a part in this, and how the crusades should be viewed from a proper historical viewpoint. All this in about 200 pages, that's what I like!

[Patremagne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty readable and informative narrative of the Crusades, and as nice as it was to not have to read a tome, concise isn't something that works with events as sweeping as the Crusades.

Madden's fairly controversial when it comes to injecting his political beliefs into his books, but it wasn't too bad here.

[Luke Shuffield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Madden succeeds at the goal explicit in the title: to be concise. As a survey textbook probably appropriate for an introductory college course, it's fine. I definitely learned a lot of basic facts (names, dates, events), but I was left wanting more of the "human" element that makes great history books.

[Jared White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Madden provides an excellent yet succinct overview on the topic of the crusades. Anyone interested in crusade history should start with this book. Anyone interested in history at all will find this book a wonderful read. Madden does a great job of writing in a way that entertains and informs, this is a must read book!

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great updated overview of all the crusades crafted in a flowing prose that is not overly academic in weight that it stifles the layperson but not so simplistic that you miss important details. It doesn't romanticize any faction or individual but presents them as humans doing as humans do. Flawed individuals with complex motivations.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every Christian should read this so they can get a better understand of the Crusades. It helps to put things in context and not to villianize them too much and still highlight their shortsided motives.

[Jlawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes Madden's conclusions/proclamations seem questionable, but when he's simply relating facts, this seems to be a decent overview of Western Europe's adventures and misadventures in its medieval crusades.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Crusades were Christian wars against Islam in the Holy Land and the Middle East. Conceived by a pope and kings of Europe , they were also designed to provide a release valve for younger sons who would not by law inherit property. Absolution of sins and wealth was promised to participants.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the title states it's a concise history. It is well written, easy to read, and doesn't skew the history in one direction or the other. The author presents both sides (the Islamic and the Christian) in an even-handed manner with strengths, weaknesses, and the massacres reported for each side.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great primer on the crusades. He weaves a tale that keeps you coming back for more. It was concise as the title suggest, yet encompassed enough to leave me feeling confident in my knowledge of the topic. I found it to be a very enjoyable book.

[Garth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had some vague knowledge that there was more than one crusade, but seven major and a number of minor crusades? Wow.
A very dense recounting of the big picture of these campaigns. Not easy reading due to the large sweep of history covered.

[Tomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seemed to be pretty nice introduction to the crusades. Offers nice and concise timeline on events and explains them from contemporary point of view instead of basing its views on post-colonialist ideas. A very nice, short book if you're interested in the subject.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the title suggests, a very conscious history of the crusades. Runciman might be a better fit for a more comprehensive look into the Crusades but Madden does an effective job at giving the causes, ideologies, and outcomes of the Crusades.