Professor Jonathan Phillips (Royal Holloway) – ‘Saladin, we have returned!’: The Myriad Memories of the Crusades in the Near East during the Modern Era

Jonathan Phillips was educated at the University of Keele (BA, 1987) and Royal Holloway, University of London (Ph.D, 1992). He worked at the Universities of Southampton and York before returning to Royal Holloway in 1994. He became Professor of Crusading History in 2005.

He is the author of numerous books on the crusades, most recently (2014) a second, extended, edition of The Crusades, 1095-1204, published by Routledge (formerly, The Crusades, 1095-1197, Longman 2002).

In 2013, with Martin Hall, he produced Caffaro, Genoa and the Twelfth Century Crusades, Crusade Texts in Translation no. 24 (Ashgate, Farnham, 2013), a translation and commentary on the writings of Caffaro of Genoa. Caffaro was the first layman to produce a narrative of the First Crusade, he was also responsible for the first urban history of the medieval age with his ‘Annals’ of Genoa.  A selection of charters, mainly in the form of commercial privileges, supplements these texts to give a rich insight into Genoese involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean during the twelfth century.

In 2009 Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades was published by Bodley Head to very positive reviews. It was selected as one of the ‘History Books of 2009’ by The Sunday Telegraph and by BBC History Magazine. Professor William Chester Jordan, Chairman, Department of History, Princeton University, wrote: ‘Jonathan Phillips’ Holy Warriors is a superb book, one written with an elegant blend of clarity and zest. Its author demonstrates his mastery of all the relevant scholarship, from the oldest to the most recent, but he may be the most successful in his ability to capture the spirit of the various crusades through word portraits of some of their most memorable human characters. Readers will find it difficult to put this gripping book down’. Holy Warriors has also been translated into Dutch as In naam van God and published by Nieuw Amsterdam in 2009, into French as Une histoire modern des croisades by Flammarion in 2010; into German as Heliger Kreig: Eine neue Geschichte der Kreuzzüge by DVA, 2009 (with a student-price edition by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2012), and into Italian as Sacri Guerrieri by Laterza 2012.

Phillips’ previous monograph The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom, (Yale University Press, 2007), was strongly praised by reviewers in, for example, Times Literary Supplement (Professor R.I.Moore, 25/4/08), plus The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph. It was translated into Polish in 2013. His earlier The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (Jonathan Cape, 2004) was also translated into Greek, Spanish and Japanese and was shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Literary Prize 2005.

His current research interests centre upon: 1. The life and legacy of the Sultan Saladin. 2. On a major history of the Third Crusade. 3. The Memory of the Crusades in western Europe and the Near East from the C18th to the present day.

He is also the General Editor of the forthcoming 2 volume Cambridge History of the Crusades.