The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

one might expect the opening decades of the twelfth century to have been marked by a flood of ‘crusading’ activity, as western Europe rushed to embrace this extension of Christian holy war and to defend Outremer. This was not the case. The memory of the First Crusade certainly burned brightly, but the years leading to 1144 witnessed only a sporadic clutch of small-scale crusades. In part this was because many regarded the First Crusade as a singularly astonishing event that was essentially unrepeatable. Drawing upon centuries of hindsight, later historians identified the mass armed pilgrimage stimulated by Pope Urban II’s preaching in 1095 as the first of an ongoing succession of crusades and, thus, as the start of a crusading movement. But this ‘future’ was by no means apparent in the early twelfth century and the idea of crusading had yet to coalesce.