The Crusades

Rating:
Summary: The Crusades: A Masterful Synthesis
Review: The second edition of Mayer's work on the crusades should be a basic text in any course dealing with the subject. It is lucidly written with a particularly good translation by John Gillingham.

Mayer has succeeded in explaining the crusade phenomeon within in the context of its own period by focusing on the societies which produced the crusaders. Mayer eschews the mono-causal explanations that too frequently pass for informed judgments in text books of medieval history. He turns instead to the numerous contemporary circumstances that led Christian men and women to make the long and difficult journey to the East. In particular, Mayer's effort to explain the problem of remission of sins and indulgences granted to crusaders is a model of clarity attained by few other historians dealing with the problem.

Although Mayer is at his best in dealing with the First Crusade, his treatment of the later crusades is also valuable.This is the only work of its kind that deals with the first century of crusading warfare as a unified whole.