The Crusades: Voltaire’s History

About this book

Voltaire (1694–1778) is known for Candide and for his lifelong fight against fanaticism. Less known is that he was one of the great historians of his age, who wanted to write the history of peoples and of the human mind, not only of kings and battles. His History of the Crusades is short, lively and full of irony: preachers who sweep the crowds along, lords who sell their lands to go to war, a papal legate who leads an army into the flooding Nile, and crusaders who sack Christian Constantinople. And with open admiration he writes of Saladin, who spared Jerusalem and left gifts to the Muslim, Christian and Jewish poor alike — "wishing to make it understood that all men are brothers, and that to help them one must not inquire what they believe, but what they suffer."

Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon, the Templars and the Hospitallers, Saint Bernard and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus, Saint Francis before the sultan, Frederick II who won Jerusalem by treaty, and Saint Louis, captured in Egypt — two centuries in one gripping book.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the 1752 edition (London), in which the History of the Crusades was printed together with Micromégas. A complete, sentence-by-sentence text — not a summary, nothing softened. Voltaire's own section headings are kept; we have divided the book into ten parts with titles of our own.

What is inside

• ten parts: the world before the crusades; the origins of the crusades; the First Crusade; the Kingdom of Jerusalem; the Second Crusade; Saladin and the Third Crusade; the taking of Constantinople, 1204; Damietta and Frederick II; the crusades of Saint Louis; the end and the reckoning
• the complete text with 85 footnotes — names, places and terms explained on the same page, and where Voltaire was wrong, the note calmly says what historians know today
• ten colour illustrations in the manner of 15th-century illuminated crusade chronicles, one opening each part (created with AI tools)
• a Commentary section at the end: each part in plain words and what modern historians say — where Voltaire was far-sighted and where he erred
• foreword: Voltaire as a historian and how to read this book today

Who it is for

Readers of medieval history and of the crusades; admirers of Voltaire and the Enlightenment; anyone curious about Saladin, Richard the Lionheart and the Knights Templar; lovers of old books and history students.

A historical source: Voltaire writes as a man of the eighteenth century, with the views and some of the prejudices of his time. His judgements remain his own; the notes and commentary explain what historians know today. We treat all the religions and peoples in this book with respect.