The Invention of the Crusades

'The Invention of the Crusades is a stimulating and provocative book, with a useful survey of how the Crusades have been regarded from the eleventh century to the present day.' - Alastair Hamilton, The Heythrop Journal 'This is a stimulating and impressive book that anyone involved in the study and writing of history should read.' - K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, English Historical Review

Using these much later sources, all subsequent historians up to the present day have fallen into the same trap of following propaganda from a much later period to explain events that were understood quite differently by contemporaries.What were the 'Crusades'? Were the great Christian expeditions to invade the Holy Land in fact 'Crusades' at all? In this radical and compelling new treatment, Christopher Tyerman questions the very nature of our belief in the Crusades, showing how historians writing more than a century after the First Crusade retrospectively invented the idea of the 'Crusade'. Using these much later sources, all subsequent historians up to the present day have fallen into the same trap of following propaganda from a much later period to explain events that were understood quite differently by contemporaries.