The Second Crusade: Holy War on the Periphery of Latin Christendom

A seminal article published by Giles Constable in 1953 focused on the genesis and expansion in scope of the Second Crusade with particular attention to what has become known as the Syrian campaign. His central thesis maintained that by the spring of 1147 the Church “viewed and planned” the Second Crusade as a general Christian offensive against and the Muslims of Syria and the Iberian Peninsula and the pagan Wends of the southern Baltic lands. Constable's work remains extremely influential and provides the framework for the recent major works published on this extraordinary twelfth-century phenomenon. This volume aims to readdress scholarly predilections for concentrating on the venture in the Near East and for narrowly focusing on the accepted targets of the crusade. It aims instead to place established, contentious, and new events and concepts associated with the enterprise in a wider ideological, chronological, geopolitical, and geographical context. Jason T. Roche is a Lecturer in Medieval History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests cover the history of the crusades and the Latin East and the topography of medieval Anatolia and the Near East. Janus Møller Jensen is head of department at Nyborg Castle, Museums of Eastern Funen, Denmark. His main research interests cover the history and historiography of the Crusades and Scandinavian medieval history.