How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries.(Book Review)

by Antony Leopold (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000; pp. 231. 45 [pounds sterling]).

The `recovery treatises' produced between 1290 and 1336 offered suggestions as to how the territories and holy sites in Syria and Palestine, which had been captured by the First Crusade and by subsequent military expeditions from Europe, could be retained or recovered from the Muslims. These proposals have received some previous treatment by modern historians. J. F. Verbruggen considered them as evidence for there being `real planning for whole wars' during the late middle ages, and there have been additional short studies by, for example, Alan Forey and Silvia Schein. This book, however, is …