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To best understand Christopher Tyerman's impressive God's War: A New History of the Crusades (Belknap/Harvard), you must go back more than a half century, to when Sir Steven Runciman produced his three-volume History of the Crusades. A monumental work, it had flaws more visible today than when it was written. One of the misconceptions that Runciman was instrumental in popularizing (and that infuses Terry Jones's awful, 1995 made-for-TV program The Crusades) was the idea that the Crusades were an assault on the sophisticated and superior civilizations of Islam and Byzantium by a barbarian West.

Runciman eloquently summed up his disdain for Western crusaders in the closing lines of his great work: "There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed … and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."

For all of its eccentricities, including such heavy-handed moralizing, Runciman's work is a beautifully written classic that has inspired several generations of historians to engage in Crusade studies. Today, more historians and archaeologists than ever before are working in the field. But they are questioning old orthodoxies and asking new questions as they scour archives, study Crusade art and architecture with new eyes, and dirty their hands uncovering crusader sites.

One of the leaders in this effort is Christopher Tyerman of Oxford University. Since the publication of his England and the Crusades, 1095-1588 (1988), he has helped to redefine the field. In 2004, he published Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades. It is pocket-sized, offering the general reader an overview of more than four centuries of holy war on three continents and a survey of the evolution of the Crusades in popular imagination—all in 233 pages. In that same year he produced an even smaller book, The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction.

But all of this was mere prologue to God's War, which studies in exacting, well-told detail the phenomenon of holy war from its premedieval ideological foundations through the classic era of the Crusades (1095-1291) and down to the last vestiges of crusading in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Tyerman takes pains to point out that the old moralistic reductionism does violence to the complexities of history. He ends his book on a subtle note: "[T]he internal personal decision to follow the cross, to inflict harm on others at great personal risk, at the cost of enormous privations, at the service of a consuming cause, cannot be explained, excused or dismissed either as virtue or sin. Rather, its very contradictions spelt its humanity."

Adjectives for God's War almost fail. "Comprehensive," "monumental," and "epic" come to mind, and they are appropriate but scarcely adequate.

In brief, this is a work by a master historian that will replace Runciman's classic as the standard survey in the field. The spirit of Sir Steven constantly pops up throughout its pages, often as a foil for Christopher Tyerman's assertions and conclusions that run counter to those of his great predecessor.

Among the other misconceptions that Tyerman attacks head on is one that Runciman did not articulate but which has become fashionable today. It says that medieval holy wars between the Cross and the Crescent led directly to such phenomena as Western imperialism and contemporary Islamic anger over a presumed millennium-long assault on it by the Christian West.

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July 2007, Vol. 51, No. 7