Michael Lower's The Tunis Crusade of 1270 is proof that big things can come in small packages. In this densely packed monograph, Lower focuses on events leading up to the year 1270—unpacking the various forces and factors that led to Saint Louis's famous and fatal final crusade against Tunis. It is a sweeping study that takes the reader from Castile to Central Asia, examining players from the Marinids to the Mongols.

The book consists of a short introduction and seven chapters, which spiral inward contextually from the broad world of the Mediterranean to Tunis and the Crusade. Chapter 1, “Baybars, Louis IX, and the Battle for Syria,” begins in the Nile Delta in 1250 with Saint Louis's first crusading failure, which serves as a platform for exploring the rise of the Mamlukes, the complex relations between the Franks and the Mongols, and ultimately the looming Angevin-Hohenstaufen war in Sicily and southern Italy. Next, in “Al-Mustansir, Charles of Anjou, and the Struggle for the Central Mediterranean,” the reader encounters the Hafsid dynasty of Ifriqiya—fending off various would-be Christian colonial patrons, including Castilians, Aragonese, and Charles of Anjou of Sicily, as it struggled to establish itself and expand. The third chapter, “The Diversion,” takes the action back to the eastern Mediterranean and Baybars's campaign against the remaining Frankish territories in Syria—events that led Louis to decide to mount a crusade against Tunis. “The Crusades Begins,” the brief fourth chapter, details the assembling and provisioning of the crusade in Aigues-Mortes and Cagliari, before the Christian fleet swept south to occupy Carthage, surprising an al-Mustansir distracted by domestic affairs, namely the troublesome Bedouin of his inland regime. After an auspicious debut, however, the crusade quickly stalled, allowing fatigue and disease to take their predictable toll on the aggressors. In the fifth chapter, “The Peace of Tunis,” we see the stalemate become official, with the divided Crusaders claiming victory for extracting a tributary agreement from an equally beset Hafsid caliph. Lower resumes the details of the treaty noting that if the various signatories—al-Mustansir, Charles of Anjou, Philip III, and Thibault of Navarre—were satisfied, their more pious-minded subjects certainly were not. Chapter 6 turns to the question, “Why Tunis?,” seeking to uncover the motives behind this enigmatic episode, which historians have debated without a satisfactory conclusion. Lower here looks at each of the main players in turn, unpacking the various and multiple motives they might have had, be they faith, money or power. Finally, “After the Storm. Rupture and Stability in the Medieval Mediterranean,” serves as epilogue, surveying the economic and political after-effects of the campaign as they rippled out across and beyond the Mediterranean.

This is a precise and fine-grained study of the personalities and principalities that were drawn into this crucial episode of the thirteenth-century. An unabashedly positivistic study based on the careful reading of a wide array of primary sources from both Latin Christendom and dar al-Islam, this book evokes the work of past giants, such as Riley Smith, Setton, and Runciman—the difference being that Lower has moved far beyond the Eurocentric perspective that has so clearly handicapped Crusades studies and adopts a regional perspective that gives Islamic principalities and Arabo-Islamic sources very nearly an even seat at the table. There is much here to admire. Lower works meticulously to tease out an exceedingly complex, fascinating, and multilayered history, featuring a myriad of characters, great and small, each with his own and often-shifting agenda. Indeed, so closely does he follow the action that an event that some might place as central—the death of Saint Louis of dysentery in Tunis in 1270—seems to pass almost without mention. It is a study that focuses closely on politics and, to some degree, economics. There is little cultural, intellectual, or social history, and mentalities do not surface often in what some critics (although not necessarily this reviewer) might qualify as a narrowly mechanistic or materialistic analysis. “Crusading spirit,” millenarianism, and supposed pieties do not figure largely as explanatory elements, to say the least.

The strengths of the book are many, and there is no doubt this will be the definitive treatment of the Tunis Crusade for decades to come. However, one might see this is a study of trees that studiously avoids the forest. In the introduction, Lower points to the ground-breaking work of Peter Jackson on the Mongols as a methodological inspiration; Jackson's mastery of far-ranging sources had been established “long before ‘Mediterranean Studies’ [his scare quotes] had gained currency as a field” (6). This dismissal is both curious and unfortunate. Mediterranean Studies might have provided a framework for analyzing this episode that, otherwise, is noticeably lacking. Indeed, his narrative resonates explicitly with the Mediterranean perspective. The complex of intersecting agendas, which often ran across “civilizational” divides, is a case study of what this reviewer has qualified as the “corporate” or meso-level of identity—one in which declared ideologies took a back seat to the demands of realpolitik (see Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, ca. 1050—1614 [Cambridge University Press, 2014], 525–526). Embracing such a theoretical framework would have allowed the author to flesh out the bare bones of the events, and to rise more clearly above anecdote and relate these events more effectively to larger historical trends . . . both elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and perhaps far beyond the Middle Ages.

As it is, this is an excellent work. It is well-written, witty, erudite, and very readable. That said, it is a book by a historian for historians. Students and lay readers (and even academics) will quickly become lost in the “cast of thousands” who inhabit these two hundred pages of dense narrative. But, this is no fault of author; it is a necessary consequence of the book's rigor and detail. In sum, The Tunis Crusade of 1270 should be required reading for any serious scholar of the medieval Mediterranean, not only for the narrative that it lays out, but as an example of thorough scholarship anchored securely in textual evidence drawn from a wide range of perspectives.