The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (OUP, £14.99 in UK)
With the West and Islam again drifting on what, to some people, looks dangerously like a collision course, the Crusades grow more relevant than they did early in the century, when they were merely regarded as a product of the barbaric period of religious warfare. The tide between the Cross and the Crescent flowed to and fro for centuries, and when the first Crusade was launched in 1096, Islam was master of Spain and of the Mediterranean while Europe was just emerging from the Dark Ages. The capture of Jerusalem from the Arabs by the Crusaders was a notable achievement which was disgraced by barbaric massacres, duly revenged by Saladin nearly a century later when he retook the city after destroying a Christian army at Hattin. Crusades were not only fought against Turks and Arabs, of course; in Eastern Europe the Teutonic Knights drove deep into the lands of the pagan Prussians and Slavs, while in Spain a slow Christian recovery produced the Recon quista climaxed by the capture of Granada in 1492. But lack of European unity, accentuated by the split of the Reformation, allowed Islam to re- group under the Ottoman sultans whose power in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean was not seriously challenged until the Habsburg resurgence of the 17th century; while the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a major historical tragedy. In spite of barbarism, clerical and royal intrigues, naked land-grabbing and crass ignorance on the part of the West, the Crusades were a remarkable chapter, or chapters, of history. Personalities such as Richard the Lion Heart, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Frederick Barbarossa have remained folk-heroes in Europe, just as Saladin, Sultan Baybars of Egypt, and the great Ottoman conquerors are in the East. This book, written by various hands, is warmly recommended.