It’s not easy to cram four hundred years of military, religious and political endeavour into less than 50,000 words but Christopher Tyerman does stirling work. In particular, he works hard to disabuse the reader of many of the false ideas about the Crusades that have become common currency: that they were a land grab by European nobility, that they should be viewed through contemporary political lenses and that the Crusaders were uniquely barbaric.

The main problem with writing about the Crusades is that Steven Runciman casts a long shadow. His books became the source of almost all popular views of the Crusades and it’s only now that his legacy is slowly being unpicked.

Tyerman acknowledges that he is not the writer that Steven Runciman was, but he sets out to gently correct many of the myths that Runciman promulgated about the Crusades. Unfortunately, Runciman was a writer with an eye for the telling detail and no compunction about employing these details to bolster his own rhetoric. Tyerman is nowhere near his equal as a writer, but he is a much better historian.

So read this book for a more staid, but more truthful, account of the Crusades.