While I carried around this enjoyable book and recommended it to colleagues, I sometimes found myself referring to it as Fighting for Christendom, a very different book in purpose and style by another eminent historian of the crusades, Christopher Tyerman. The subtitles of both books are similarly interchangeable, vague, and forgettable, unhelpful in distinguishing them. We have witnessed a recent surge in studies of the crusades, but surely authors cannot have exhausted all the useful titles. Perhaps the publisher's goal was to appeal to a general audience, but then it is worth saying that neither book serves as an introduction to the crusades. In short, these titles do justice neither to readers nor to the significant and different arguments held between the cloth covers upon which the titles are engraved.

Echoing his mentor, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Housley's stated aim is to reconstruct the “lived experience” and the “state of mind” of participants in the crusades. Nevertheless, within his own distinguished body of work, Housley's Fighting for the Cross complements his Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536 while also attempting to empirically ground the broader claims he makes in Contesting the Crusades. After an obligatory survey chapter, Housley proceeds thematically rather than chronologically. Drawing on a wealth of detail, each chapter addresses a stage of crusading—the call, the oath, the journey, the warfare, etcetera—while simultaneously marking change over time—before and after the fall of Acre, before and after the Mongol invasions, and so on. While the first four such thematic chapters are conventional in subject, the last five are far more daring and rewarding.

Fundamentally, Housley's object of study is the religious devotion of the crusaders: “This book is about religion, and more specifically about why generations of men and women between 1095 and 1291 believed that the surest way of reaching the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’ was by obeying Christ's command in Mark 8:34 to ‘take up your cross and follow me’” (p. 23). He thinks the religious beliefs of crusaders were neither deviant nor innovative but rather rested on the “solid bedrock of Catholic belief in its various doctrinal, sacramental and devotional aspects” (207). Housley openly addresses the prickly problem of evidence, the challenge of relying on sources that overtly emphasize and conform to a particular idea of religious devotion in order to examine religious practice and thereby understand the spiritual life of crusaders. The solution, Housley argues, lies in attending to “rich detail[s] … that bear the hallmarks of social realism” (179). However sympathetic one might be to Housley's much-needed emphasis on religion, his argument is nearly alchemical. Relying only on his fine historical intuition, this approach leads him to dismiss some evidence as merely a literary topos (122) and claim that other evidence is not merely a topos (177). This does not amount to a method, and the selective use of evidence, the exclusion of certain readings, has the effect of narrowing the meaning of religion rather than expanding our understanding of it (which is Housley's aspiration). One path around this conundrum might lie in a deeper commitment to comparative study, a serious application of non-Latin sources (Greek, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, and Armenian).

All the same, there is a great deal to admire about Fighting for the Cross. Housley writes beautifully; he effortlessly commands both primary and secondary literature; and he drizzles the text with evocative details, such as the miniature ballistic device constructed by the Count of Eu for his entertainment, or James of Vitry purchasing and baptizing Muslim children after the fall of Damietta. The chapter entitled “Saracens” is excellent, incorporating important research while also pointing to new areas of study, though it ends on an awkward and baffling note: “It's open to debate whether Christianity and Islam could have enjoyed better relations if it hadn't been for crusading. What's certain is that it did nothing to help” (237). The strongest chapters, “Storming Heaven,” “Brave New World,” and “Remembrance of Things Past,” are original and fine essays that could be individually plucked and handed to students as models of writing and analysis. Fighting for the Cross is a highly enjoyable, stimulating, and informative read for scholars and students of the crusades.