Download PDF | Norman Housley - Fighting for the Cross_ Crusading to the Holy Land-Yale University Press (2008).
392 Pages
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are countless histories of the crusades to the Holy Land, but hardly any attempts have been made to describe what the practice of crusading meant for the men and women who engaged in it. This is astonishing because crusading generated a very large volume of eyewitness testimony. For generations the accounts that Geoffrey of Villehardouin and John of Joinville wrote about the Fourth and Seventh Crusades have been among the most widely read medieval texts.
They deserve their fame because they're exceptionally vivid and personal memoirs. But Villehardouin and Joinville are just the tip of the iceberg. Narratives, letters, poems, songs, sermons and treatises give us the means to reconstruct to a remarkable degree both the lived experience of crusading and the state of mind of participants. Wherever possible I ve allowed these sources to speak for themselves, using translations when they exist. The crusades have always been well served by translators and in recent years there's been a welcome growth in translations that are both accurate and accessible. The surviving texts are complemented by an unusually large quantity of striking visual evidence, as the illustrations reproduced here should demonstrate. Diacritical marks in oriental place and personal names present a constant issue for historians of crusading and Ive cut the Gordian knot by using none.
The people whose exploits and sufferings are described in this book all took the cross to fight for Jerusalem. Crusading was an extraordinarily diverse phenomenon and thousands took the cross to fight in areas of the medieval world that were far away from the Holy Land, against Muslims, pagans and heretics among others. But for various reasons their experience of crusading was different from that of the crusaders who fought in the East, so I ve made no attempt to bring them into this book. Exceptionally, I have included some of the fighting in Iberia, because it took place when crusaders were travelling to the Holy Land. I ve also been selective in my use of the evidence left by the settlers and military orders based in the East, because their experience and outlook were likely to be different from those of visiting crusaders. I'm grateful to Yale University Press for commissioning this book, to Heather McCallum for much helpful advice on it, and to the Press's readers for their detailed comments. The book is the fruit of three decades of reading, talking, teaching and writing about the crusades, and I can't begin to list the hundreds of colleagues and students who have shaped my thinking about the subject. To all of them I'm grateful.
But I want to single out for special thanks the series of PhD students supervised by Jonathan Riley-Smith whose theses I examined: Cassandra Chideock, Michael Lower, Christoph Maier, William Purkis, Rebecca Rist, Caroline Smith and Susanna Throop. Some of their theses have been published, and I hope that the others will soon join them. Between them these historians have made a fundamental contribution to how we should view the ideas and practices of crusading to the Holy Land. They've certainly taught me more than I can say.
Norman Housley University of Leicester
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