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miscellany of the documentation produced by one of the greatest estates in an
era generally understood to be one of changing management practice, when the
prevailing pattern of farming demesne manors for fixed cash and food rents was
giving way – on improving church estates – to a more determined direct
management which required a much closer supervision but which might be
expected to produce a greater income. These and similar surveys are the best
evidence we have for rural conditions in the twelfth century, and in themselves
represent an essential early phase in the development of the new bureaucratic
techniques and controls essential to the effective management of an extensive
demesne spread out over Somerset and the surrounding counties. Not
surprisingly, the Glastonbury surveys have attracted the attention of agrarian
historians of the period, and most notoriously stood at the centre of a vigorous
exchange of views and interpretations between M.M. Postan and R.V. Lennard
(in the pages of the Economic History Review, between 1953 and 1956, with
subsequent occasional additions by both protagonists and others), whose
disagreements concerning the condition and management of the Glastonbury
estates in the twelfth century was based largely on Hilbert’s survey, with its
comparative material from c.1135 and 1171. Stacy enters into a preliminary
discussion of the evidence, as now presented, although he declines (for the
present?) the challenge of commenting further on the old debate. The effects
and consequences of the policy of farming out demesnes are not necessarily
more clearly seen, despite the reliability of the texts we now have to work with,
although doubtless greater understanding will come; the equally interesting
question of how far the move to direct management was a well-formulated
policy, and how far a pragmatic, piecemeal response to difficult circumstances,
will be further illuminated by these texts. That old obsession with the demesne
and the management of the lord’s assets apart, here we have invaluable
information on the composition of peasant holdings, and the long-term
developments in tenurial practice on this estate that went back to Domesday
Book, and doubtless beyond. This volume adds to the records of Glastonbury
Abbey in print, most notably the two thirteenth-century surveys and the Great
Chartulary, published by the Somerset Records Society, providing an impress-
ive and accessible body of material for the historian. Furthermore, the
publication of these Glastonbury surveys means that only those of Shaftesbury
Abbey and Evesham Abbey, of the known surviving twelfth-century English
estate surveys, remain unpublished. One must hope that when they are
published it will be in editions as good as this one.

University of Tromsø

R I C H A R D H O L T

What were the Crusades?, by Jonathan Riley-Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2002; pp. 114. Pb.n.p.).

In the twenty-five years since its first appearance, Jonathan Riley-Smith’s
attempt to provide what Hans Meyer called ‘an unambiguous, lucid and
generally accepted definition of the term “crusade” ’ has gained wide circulation
and agreement, not least among the author’s own pupils. This welcome third
edition incorporates recent research and reflects Professor Riley-Smith’s own
increased emphasis on the penitential aspects of crusading, now seen ‘as its most

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defining feature’. The familiar structure of 1977 remains, although fuller in
places and with the addition of distinct sections on Penitents, Indulgences and
Martyrs. Despite its deliberately unadorned style, the purpose of the book was
and is polemic, to assert what has been described as a ‘Pluralist’ interpretation
that insists that all campaigns marked by the preaching of crusade, by vows, and
by the granting of privileges ‘were as authentic as those to or in aid of Jerusalem’.
Riley-Smith’s approach, that takes its force from M.Villey’s 1940s perception of
crusading as a concept of canon law, possesses the virtue of clarity, except where
he feels the need to follow the tyranny of his construct by arguing, for example,
that crusade leagues after 1332 were not ‘true crusades’. Whether his thesis is
‘unambiguous’ may be less apparent. Throughout, the argument for a general
contemporary recognition of the existence of a ‘crusade movement’ embracing
all fronts as ‘equally valid’ (in what sense ‘valid’ is unexplained) slips from
austere legal and curial justification to the highly contentious not to say elusive
source of evidence of popular support. Despite the desire to ‘accept crusaders for
what they were’, the absence of medieval definition is dismissed in the
insouciant aside that ‘crusading became such a familiar element in the medieval
landscape that it did not need to be described in detail’. There are other ways of
taking this, as there are the congruity of language employed in sermons and holy
war apologetics that Riley-Smith regards as confirming his Pluralist stance. This
would be more convincing if the wars of the cross were considered as one form
of Christian holy war as much influenced by not specifically crusading war as
the other way round, notably with the incorporation of Just War theories over
the twelfth century. Examination of recent work on the Decretum once
attributed to Gratian of Bologna might usefully have been considered here.
While pressing for a juridical uniformity, Riley-Smith cannot resist loosening
the stays of his theory if convenient. The exhortation to the crusaders in 1204 to
attack Constantinople in April 1204, seen here as ‘the crusade conforming to the
Christian criteria for war’ was more complicated, an attempt at an ad hoc
justification for an attack by existing crucesignati on fellow Christians. Such
niceties signify because on such legalisms Riley-Smith’s argument depends, that
and a particular vision of the middle ages. At times it appears that the Pluralist
stance rests on an almost Ullmannesque perception of the past as a machine,
with autonomous moving parts (or ‘movements’). Riley-Smith is far too
sensible not to admit complexity and inadequacy both of sources and
experience. The inevitable selectivity of evidence can, however, conceal as well
as clarify. The case for equality of crusade objectives must embrace non-curial
perceptions and clear papal awareness of practical rather than legal or
theological distinctions. There is no discussion of the explicit scale of crusading
priorities expressed in his great bull Quia Maior by the arch-crusader Innocent
III, nor the differences in geographical scope for Holy Land crusade schemes as
opposed to others, nor Innocent IV’s attempt to finesse or disguise his
concurrent anti-Hohenstaufen crusade plans in 1246 during recruitment for an
eastern expedition, nor the absence of papal crusades in Italy from Chaucer’s
Knight’s glamorous crusading itinerary (‘all the main theatres’). It should be
noted that Helmold of Bosau’s famous association of all the fronts of the Second
Crusade formed part of a highly partisan attempt to promote the Baltic wars
and excoriate their morally backsliding leaders. Although Riley-Smith’s rather
abstract discussion of penance and the indulgence is typically lucid and

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thoughtful, the general emphasis on penance and piety seems to rely on a
distinction between the articulation of spiritual and temporal ambitions that
some might regard as shallow, even crude. Arguably, the whole exercise in
categorisation is flawed, trying to force the fluidity of self-referential sources,
stylised behaviour and irrecoverable motive into neat channels. That said, all
students of the crusades must be in Professor Riley-Smith’s debt, for this robust
debating piece no less than for his indefatigably energetic pursuit of the
negotium crucis over four decades: no miles ad terminum he.

Hertford College, Oxford

C

.

J

.

T Y E R M A N

The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, by Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad (tr. D. S.

Richards) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001; pp. 265. £42.50).

Saladin remains the best-known of all the Muslim leaders at the time of the
Crusades, and his reputation in Europe since the middle ages as a magnanimous
and merciful sultan, admired by Dante, Lessing and Scott among others, has
stood firm, despite predictable attempts to ‘demythologise’ the more extreme
eulogies of his personality (even those written by nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Orientalists such as Lane-Poole and Gibb), and to assess his
achievements in a more balanced way. This glowing reputation was largely
based on the writings of two members of Saladin’s immediate entourage, ‘Imad
al-Din al-Isfahani and Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad. Among the Muslim
commanders fighting against the Crusaders, Saladin was the first to be accorded
full-scale biographies. Their authors were for several years his constant
companions and worked and travelled with him on campaign. They have left us
highly laudatory accounts of their master, but they are not purely panegyric.
Indeed, the reader is surprisingly convinced when learning that, on the news of
Saladin’s death, Ibn Shaddad is moved to exclaim: ‘I knew for myself and for
others that, had the purchase of his life been acceptable, we would have paid for
it with our own’. This moving personal tribute resounds down the centuries.
The text of Ibn Shaddad is especially valuable for our knowledge of the Third
Crusade and is all the more precious since its author experienced these events
first hand. This new English translation of his biography of Saladin,
Al-Nawadir al-Sultaniyya wa’l Mahasin al-Yusufiyya, is a welcome addition to
the excellent Crusade Texts in Translation series published by Ashgate. It is by no
means the first time this important Arabic text has been translated; Schultens
made a Latin translation of it in the eighteenth century and a French translation
was provided in the Recueil des historiens des Croisades in the nineteenth century.
An English translation by Conder and Wilson, also part of a series, was
published in 1897 by the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society. Based as it was on the
Arabic text in the Recueil (and one suspects, as Richards points out, the French
translation too) it inevitably suffered from the flaws in that edition and its
accompanying translation. Donald Richards’s translation is based on the most
recent Arabic edition completed by Jamal al-Din al-Shayyal in 1964. Unlike
earlier editions of the text, al-Shayyal’s version draws on a longer text found in a
manuscript in the Aqsa Mosque Library in Jerusalem. Richards also uses
another manuscript of the text from Berlin which was not consulted by
al-Shayyal. There is therefore academic justification for the publication of a new