Jonathan Phillips

JONATHAN PHILLIPS is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway, University of London. The author of three previous books, he was the main contributor to the History Channel’s 2005 series The Crusades: The Crescent and the Cross. His articles have appeared in BBC History Magazine, History Today, and The Independent.

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.

In 2021 he was elected President of the Society of the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE).

He is the author of numerous books on the crusades, most recently The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (Bodley Head, 2019), described in The Times as ‘Superbly researched… enormously entertaining… one of the outstanding books of the year… Clear, concise and illuminating.’ It was also the winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Award of 2019. Saladin is published in the US by Yale University Press with translations in Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Russian following. 

Phillips has appeared at the Hay-on-Wye, Oxford, Warwick, Chalke Valley, Jaipur and Dubai Literary Festivals. Saladin has also featured in podcasts such as Greg Jenner’s BBC Series ‘You’re Dead to Me’; History Today’s ‘Year in Time’ (1187); BBC History Magazine with Dan Jones; Dan Snow’s History Hit, and the Historical Association.

In conjunction with his work on the medieval period Phillips is interested in examining the memory and legacy of the Crusades (this forms the final chapters of the Saladin book as well) and with Mike Horswell, he has edited and contributed to: Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Crusades Volume 1 (Routledge, 2018).

 In 2014 a second, extended, edition of The Crusades, 1095-1204, was 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’. 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.

 

 

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