The subject of the Crusades is generally taken to cover both the history of the crusades themselves and the history of the states established by crusaders, particularly those on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. This article concentrates on the first of these fields. Surveying the work of recent historians, it is clear that they are divided on three major issues. Were crusades to the East, launched to recover or defend Jerusalem and the Holy Land, the only true crusades or should we take into consideration all manifestations of the movement, including crusades in Spain, along the shores of the Baltic and against heretics and political enemies of the papacy in Europe? Was the crusading movement in steep decline in the thirteenth century? What is the most fruitful approach to crusading ideas and therefore to motivation?
The attitude of an historian to the first of these questions will affect his research, since those who rigidly maintain that the only valid crusading took place in the East are inclined to ignore, or at least undervalue, source material relating to crusading elsewhere. Of the general histories, Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades (3 volumes, Cambridge, 1951-4), still the most readable of the large-scale histories although now rather dated and marked by a bias in favour of the Greeks, and H.E. Mayer's The Crusades (Oxford, 1972), the most competent and up-to-date short history, confine themselves ....
