Christopher Tyerman - The Debate on the Crusades

Issues in Historiography

The Debate on the Crusades

Issues in Historiography

General editor
R. C. RICHARDSON
University of Winchester

Already published

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Marjorie Chibnall

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Issues in Historiography

CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN

Copyright Christopher Tyerman 2011

The right of Christopher Tyerman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 7321 2 paperback

First published 2011

Reprinted 2012

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For

Imogen and William

History without historiography is a contradiction in terms. The study of the past cannot be separated from a linked study of its practitioners and intermediaries. No historian writes in isolation from the work of his or her predecessors nor can the commentator however clinically objective or professional stand aloof from the insistent pressures, priorities and demands of the ever-changing present. In truth there are no self-contained academic ivory towers. Historians writings are an extension of who they are and where they are placed. Though historians address the past as their subject they always do so in ways that are shaped consciously or unconsciously as the case may be by the society, cultural ethos, politics and systems of their own day, and they communicate their findings in ways which are specifically intelligible and relevant to a reading public consisting initially of their own contemporaries. For these reasons the study of history is concerned most fundamentally not with dead facts and sterile, permanent verdicts but with highly charged dialogues, disagreements, controversies and shifting centres of interest among its presenters, with the changing methodologies and discourse of the subject over time, and with audience reception. Issues in Historiography is a series designed to explore such matters by means of case studies of key moments in world history and the interpretations, reinterpretations, debates and disagreements they have engendered.

Tyermans subject the crusades is only the second medieval topic to join the Issues series. Like its predecessor on the Norman Conquest by Marjorie Chibnall it has a long and complex historiography. In Christopher Tyermans densely crowded but clearly argued pages the reader will find a perceptive and challenging survey which brings out the shifting centres of interest among the many writers who have engaged with this subject, the different agendas which underpinned their various offerings, the kind of sources they used and relied on, and the impact of their particular religious, political and cultural contexts. Early chroniclers such as William of Tyre and his changing posthumous reputation come under scrutiny. Reformation perspectives such as John Foxes History of the Turks (1566) are examined and as Tyermans survey progresses through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries writers such as Thomas Fuller, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon are drawn into the discussion. The cultural as well as political significance of Napoleons late eighteenth-century Egyptian and Syrian campaigns is considered as is a nineteenth-century predilection to view crusaders as well-intentioned missionaries. When we reach the twentieth century Lawrence of Arabia receives a passing mention. Sir Steven Runcimans multi-volume history of the crusades, however, is accorded a full, but certainly not reverential, treatment. Modern American contributions to crusade historiography some of them far from illuminating are rehearsed. Claude Cahen, a rare marxist, and the Egyptian Aziz Suryal Atiya find a place here. Tyerman casts his net very widely; his subject dictates that he should.

Present-day relations between the West and Islam help to make Tyermans book a highly relevant text for students and their teachers. The authors account of the historiography of the crusades emphatically rejects easy modern parallels. Nonetheless by virtue of its subject matter this volume does more than unpack the many layers of a particular topic which has continued to exert its fascination on generations of commentators over the centuries. Revealingly this study opens a window on to a broader landscape of deep-rooted, uneasy and often brutal international relations.

R. C. Richardson
July 2010

The history of history is increasingly fashionable. All history is revisionist, a response to what others have written. Thus, at its simplest, reading other historians will help any writer of history clarify their own views of the past. Writing history is not a neutral revelation but a malleable, personal, contingent, cultural activity. History examines the past by translating it into the present. The role of the translator the historian is thus instrumental, never a passive recorder or neutral interrogator but always a controlling producer. Study of the work of historians historiography becomes part of the way any historical subject is apprehended. Consequently, this book acts as a necessary pendant to my previous work on the crusades themselves. It is a negotiable analysis of predecessors and contemporaries.

This is not an entirely abstract exercise. Attitudes to the past are often conditioned by early perceptions, even, perhaps especially, if these are subsequently revised or rejected. My acquaintance with crusading began with images of heroic but misguided knights in the marvellously vivid, tendentious, but far from unintelligent, illustrated Ladybird History series of the 1950s and 1960s. Such pictures stay etched on the retina of memory. Intellectual engagement was later stimulated at school by exposure to the set-piece rhetorical arias of Edward Gibbon, Ernest Barker and Steven Runciman, embodiments of the very English tradition of astonished rational condescension that, although I did not then know it, reached back to Thomas Fuller in the seventeenth century. The bruising literary power of their historical imaginations failed to disguise that these were no objective summings up. From the very start, it was clear that the crusades were and remained controversial. They and their interpretations continue to be so in circles both academic and not. Why this should and continues to be so is a question that has long engaged me and provides the excuse for this book.