History Unlimited Bookshop: Early Medieval and the Crusades

Books on Early Medieval Europe & The Crusades.

The Norman World

Viking raids led to Viking settlement, most notably in the region of France that was to take its name from the Norse invaders. Normandy provided the base for a vigorous and aggressive expansionism that was to have profound implications for the whole of Europe and the Middle East. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was something of a sideshow in comparison with wider events: medieval history takes on an interesting new dimension if England is viewed as an outlying colony of a Norman-French continental empire. This empire shaped political events for centuries to come.

The Norman Achievement / David C Douglas
The Norman Fate / David C Douglas
From Rollo the Viking’s settlement in Normandy, via the conquest of England, to the Kingdom of Sicily, the Principality of Antioch and Roger the Great’s attack on Byzantium in 1147.

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William the Conqueror / David C Douglas

The life of the bastard Duke of Normandy, his rise to power in a violent age and the impact of the Norman invasion on England. The threshold of the High Middle Ages.

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England & Its Rulers: 1066-1272 / M T Clanchy
Normans, Angevins and Poitevins — from the Norman conquest to the death of Henry III. By the time of Henry II, English possessions extended from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border. Most of these were lost to Philip II of France during the reign of King John ‘Lackland’. Henry II and John both tried to restrict the power of the papacy, thus alienating the Church; and John’s losses in France and his repressive taxation also alienated his barons, who came into direct conflict with the king. Henry III’s financial commitments to the papacy and his foreign favourites led to further revolt by the barons under Simon de Montfort. The most resonating outcome of internecine strife was Magna Carta, originally granted by John in 1215. His immediate repudiation led to the Baron’s War of 1215-1217. The Great Charter in its various versions was primarily designed to affirm the privileges of the Church and the barons, and to define the responsibilities of the monarchy; although in consequence it enshrined some legal tenets that had originated in Anglo-Saxon times. With the decline of feudalism its significance faded, until its rediscovery in the 16th Century by the Parliamentary party and its re-interpretation as a libertarian and democratic document. Since then Magna Carta has been an emotionally charged rallying cry whenever governments have sought to ease temporary difficulties by suspending basic rights and fundamental legal principles. The Lion in Winter (1968) imagines and invective-fuelled meeting between Henry ll, Eleanor of Aquitaine and their sons Richard, John and Geoffrey, available from our Film Store.

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Thomas Becket / Frank Barlow
The murder of Thomas Becket at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral marred forever the reputation of Henry II, otherwise regarded as one of the great monarchs of his time. When Henry succeeded to the throne of England in 1154 he brought with him the overlordship of Anjou and Maine through inheritance from his father, and of Aquitaine through his marriage with Eleanor, divorced wife of Louis VII of France. Intelligent, well-educated and restlessly energetic, he sought to restore the authority of the monarchy, re-established the delivery of justice through touring assizes and laid the foundations of Common Law. He worked with the barons on policy and brought the brightest and best into the service of the crown. His old friend Thomas Becket had been a loyal if flamboyant Chancellor of England. In 1162 Henry nominated Becket for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, a post for which he was unqualified, in the face of opposition from the Church. Henry had expected Becket to support him in bringing clerics accused of secular crimes within the jurisdiction of the criminal courts; and in recognising certain ‘traditional’ customs and prerogatives. Becket, however, elected to maintain the supremacy of the Church. The bitter confrontation between Becket and the king (and many of Becket’s own bishops) was made the more bitter by personal frictions. When Becket elected for self-imposed European exile he became enmeshed in wider political battles, sometime tool, sometime puppet-master, between Henry and Louis, between French king and German emperor, and between pope and anti-pope. After the murder in the cathedral the reported miracles led to Becket’s canonisation, all fuel for a propaganda campaign that exploited superstitious delusion and revitalised the authority of the papacy. Henry, one of the first English kings to resist the encroachments of the church on the temporal power of the emerging nation states, was obliged to undergo an humiliating act of contrition at Becket’s tomb. The film Becket starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole (1964) is available from our Film Store.

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The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284 / David Carpenter
Details the constantly shifting political alignments of Normans, Welsh, Scots and Irish up to the year of Edward the First’s Statute for Wales. This title gives useful insights into the nature of Norman feudalism and the aftermath of the Norman Conquest: where ambitious barons sought to establish their own autonomous regimes away from the centralised power of the monarchy. The resulting conflicts were, in many cases, subsumed into subsequent nationalist myths.

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William of Malmesbury / R M Thomson

The new Norman aristocracy were keen to legitimise themselves by association with the British past. This is an accessible account of the writings and world of William of Malmesbury (c1090 – c1143), one of the Norman scholars who began the mythologizing of English history. His Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (Deeds of the Bishops of England) and Gesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of the English Kings) and a number of other works are amongst the most important and distinguished texts of their time. The Antiquities of Glastonbury is something of a promotional exercise associating the site with the legendary arrival in the British Isles of Joseph of Arimathea, Christianity and the Holy Grail. Much harmless fantasy has followed.

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In the Name of the Cross

The Crusades were a strange mixture of religious fervour, fanaticism, opportunism, politics and colonialism. The kingdoms of Outremer were won and lost as western campaigners and settlers confronted a fervent religious impulse and an alien culture. But confrontation and conflict aside, the Crusader kingdoms were exposed to classical works that had been lost to the west and scientific thought that was far in advance of European knowledge. Please note that there is considerable chronological overlap between the titles listed on this page and on our Rome & Byzantium page.

Crusading and the Crusader States / Andrew Jotischky

The medieval period between 1095 and 1336 saw a series of military expeditions from Western Europe aimed at wresting Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Turks. The early Crusades resulted in the first Western European settlements in the Islamic east and a mingling of cultures that brought about distinctive forms of architecture, art and political and legal systems. Jotischky examines the monumental clash, between two societies and religions, that dominated much of the Middle Ages.

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The Crusades / Zoe Oldenbourg
A very readable history of the first three Crusades and the Kingdom of Jerusalem up to its conquest by Saladin, from a well respected author. A highly recommended introduction to the subject. Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is a spectacular mix of history and fiction, available from our Film Store.

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The Monks of War / Desmond Seward

The creation and history of the religious military orders is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Crusades. The story is of a long and hard fought retreat from the Holy Land and the sieges of their Mediterranean bases of Cyprus, Rhodes and Malta. Desmond Seward covers Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights along with lesser known orders.

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The Assassins / Bernard Lewis

This branch of the Ismaili faction of Shi’ite Islam was (and is) the subject of enduring myth in the west, which saw the Assassins as the equivalent of the crusading military orders. The myth was based on fairly limited contacts between the crusaders and the sectarians who used assassination as a political tool. Their main activities were concentrated well way from the Latin kingdoms and were predominantly involved with the internal politics of the Muslim world. The author explores myth and actuality, and scrutinises the sometimes facile parallels that are drawn between the Ismailis and modern terrorist groups.

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The Templars / Piers Paul Read
The growth of the military order from its formation after the First Crusade to its dissolution under Philip the Fair in 1307.

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The Trial of the Templars / Malcolm Barber
On October 13 1307, members of the Order of the Temple residing in France were arrested on the orders of Philip IV of France in a single co-ordinated operation . Their property was sequestered by the crown and the Knights Templar, who had fought for the Christian faith for almost two hundred years, were accused of heresy, blasphemy, idolatry and institutionalised sodomy. The arrests were followed by torture, confessions, retractions, resistance from Pope Clement V and drawn out trials before the Order was officially suppressed in 1312. Contemporary Christendom was stunned by the series of events that dragged on until 1314, when the Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake for repudiating the accusations against his Order. Malcolm Barber scrutinises background, motivations and the formal proceedings through examination of the documentary sources.

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The Teutonic Knights / William Urban
Formed at the time of the failure of the Third Crusade in the late 12th century, the Teutonic Order established itself in East Prussia with the purpose of taking Crusade to the pagan (and Orthodox) lands to the east. Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevski (1938) translates the 13th Century invasion of Russia into a propaganda vehicle for Stalin on the cusp of World War II. Available from our Film Store.

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Massacre at Montsegur / Zoe Oldenbourg
Not all crusades were directed towards the Holy Land. On more than one occasion temporal authorities conspired with the papacy to further their political and territorial ambitions. The Albigensian Crusade was carried out under the guise of extinction of the Cathar heresy but the end result was to bring the Languedoc firmly under the control of the northern French monarchy.

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Montaillou / Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Constructed from the Inquisition’s register of interrogations of the villagers of the last surviving Cathar stronghold, Montaillou paints a picture of peasant life in the Languedoc between 1294 and 1324.

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