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Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land by Norman Housley
Yale University Press, £25

THE date July 19 1099 lives on in infamy. Homicidal crusaders swept into Jerusalem  on that day shedding so much Muslim blood it swilled around their horses’ kneecaps. The date 9/11 lives in infamy, too. Payback time. At least that’s the version of events in the Holy City 900 years ago that both Christians and Muslims have wanted us to believe, advancing death tolls for men, women and children of anything between 30,000 and 70,000.

In Fighting for the Cross, Norman Housley, Professor of History at Leicester University, tells us that the true figure was probably no more than 3,000; a bloody event indeed but, by the standards of the age, no bloodier than other slaughters of the period. It suited Christians to exaggerate at the time because they truly believed their path to paradise lay in killing as many infidels as they could manage and it has subsequently suited some Muslims to exaggerate the deaths to justify today’s terrorist massacres.

So “crusade spin” has a contemporary as well as an historical significance, and Housley sifts the facts from the myths to tell the story of “taking the cross” from the perspectives of the participants.

The crusades began with some open air preaching by Pope Urban II in November 1095 at Clermont in the Auvergne, a sermon which rivalled the more peaceful one on the Mount in its importance to Christian history. He implored pilgrim soldiers to reclaim the Holy Land for God, an escapade which only ended some 200 years later when it was still in Allah’s hands.

Urban’s message, and that of the popes, bishops and priests who came after him, was that an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a guarantee of salvation. Military orders such as the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller, the mercenaries they hired and assorted peasants caught up in the general hysteria, were only too keen to answer the call. “By fighting for the earthly Jerusalem the crusader gained entry to the heavenly one,” explains Housley.

So it was dodging the purges of Purgatory and the longer stretch in Hell which really motivated the crusaders. They had nothing personal against the Turks or Saracens. Enemy bodies were brutalised for plunder, not pleasure; cannibalism was caused by starvation, not hatred; and crusaders happily had consensual sex with Muslim women in all the towns they captured from the First Crusade onwards.

Housley is dry and matter of fact about these things, and a little more about the personalities to flesh out their exploits would have been welcome. I especially wanted to know what the A-list celebrities of the enterprise, the lionhearted Richard I and his opposite number Saladin, a decent pair of slaughtering coves by all accounts, were really like as people.

Nevertheless, this book tells you almost everything you want to know about the crusades. The only decision, then, before embarking on it, is whether this is a subject you really want to know almost everything about.

Nigel Nelson