This collection of articles is devoted, above all, to crusading to the Holy Land. The first essay in the book is very general and offers a re-thinking of Henri Pirenne's classic Muhammad and Charlemagne. In this Pirenne suggested that Islamic conquests in the Mediterranean dissolved the harmony which existed there in Roman times and even afterwards. Mark Whittow, by studying scholarship on the question which appeared after Pirenne's work, suggests that the latter was right, and that the harmony was not restored by the crusades. On the contrary, this was rather a sort of Latin colonisation than a recreation of the unity. Nothing much new as a conclusion, but a good and useful summary showing the place of crusading in the medieval history of the Mediterranean world.

Two papers deal with the military history of crusading to the Holy Land. The paper by Guy Perry specifies some points on the Tunis crusade of St Louis which were not sufficiently covered in Michael Lower's recent The Tunis Crusade of 1270: a Mediterranean history (Oxford 2018). This article is mainly focused on some amendments to the question widely discussed by Lower: why was it Tunis and not any other part of the Islamic world that was the first point of attack? Peter Edbury's paper is focused on the siege of Tyre during the Muslim advance in 1187.

The contribution of John France is a re-thinking of the role of Urban ii's Clermont speech (1095) in the history of Western attitudes towards the war. According to France, the distinction between the use of violence against Christians and against those of other religions was the main point of Urban's speech, which ‘broke through the doubts surrounding the place of violence in Christian society’. And this has almost nothing to do with theories formulated by Augustine. Before 1095, as described by France, there were doubts on the issue of violence, even when obeying orders: penitentiaries demonstrate that even on the eve of the First Crusade a murder in war required penitence, even though it was much less important than for an ordinary murder. However, it is not specified whether this situation changed after 1095. At the same time the situation was contradictory, because many saints had been militarily active at some point in their lives, and that posed no problem for their sanctity. Furthermore, before 1095 wars between Christians and Muslims were generally described without any special hostility towards Islam. Though the article focuses on an issue which has been widely discussed in the historiography, it will certainly be of interest in attempts to understand the nature of the idea of holy war promulgated by Urban ii.

A very interesting contribution is made by Kevin James Lewis. He provides a curious summary of medieval perceptions of circumcision in the Middle Ages, including Jewish and Muslim circumcision and the circumcision of Christ. He demonstrates that a relevant characteristic of the AntiChrist was that he too was circumcised, which served as an imitation of Christ. At the same time, although Muhammad was sometimes deemed to be the AntiChrist, Lewis does not argue that there was any emphasis on the circumcision in medieval descriptions of him. It seems to me that this issue has very little direct connection with crusading: Lewis gives only one example, which is in Urban ii's Clermont speech, where he relates how the wretched Muslims forcibly circumcise Christians. The main conclusion is rather ambivalent re medieval attitudes to circumcision – a characteristic of the AntiChrist, but also of Christ, and in the latter case therefore worthy of commemoration. This paper should probably be considered with that of Nicholas Vincent, who offers a case study on an unpublished thirteenth-century letter from a manuscript originating from Burton Abbey in England. This, published as an appendix to the article, offers a curious prophecy with reference to Joachim of Fiore. This text is somehow connected to the crusades, directly because it predicts the fall of the Latin empire of Constantinople, and indirectly because of the mention of the coming of the AntiChrist. Vincent suggests that it was just a satire, but taken seriously afterwards and even ‘updated’ to take into account the realities of later periods. It is difficult to say whether this hypothesis is certain, but an extensive transmission of the information from this text is clearly demonstrated.

G. E. M. Lippiatt's article is a very curious piece which sheds light on the question whether the crusades to the Holy Land and that against the Albigensians at the beginning of the thirteenth century actually hindered one another. Lippiatt argues that the two crusades were seen by the papacy and participants as two complementary activities, since there were preachers and crusaders who were subsequently involved in both, and encountered problems but not because of competition with each other. There were some critics because of the potential conflict of two directions, but some supporters too. Unfortunately this paper lacks references to some important statements, but all in all the argument seems to be convincing. A further study on the individual trajectories of crusaders and the phenomenon of a subsequent participation in different crusades would be really very useful.

Three papers in this volume are devoted to the implementation of crusades in their different aspects. The paper by Jessalynn Bird thoroughly examines the involvement of the canonries of Saint-Victor of Paris and Saint-Jean-des-Vignes of Soissons in crusader-related juridical cases. The article by Helen Nicholson examines the management of Templar estates in England and Wales which served to nourish crusading to the Holy Land. Both contributions are made with the use of a rich unpublished material. The paper by Timothy Guard is a summary, using the evidence of published sources, of the different ways of crowdfunding the crusades of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by means of vow redemptions, collection of donations, indulgence fees, punitive fines and wills.

Finally, there is a paper by Edward M. Peters dedicated to the episode in the Divina commedia where Dante meets his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, a participant in the Second Crusade known only from this text. According to Peters, such a figure of family memory was used to demonstrate that in the good old days people from Florence went on crusade.