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John France
According to his faculty page at the University of Wales-Swansea, Dr. France's research has been funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Lawrence of Arabia Trust, and the University of Wales Swansea. He was a Leverhulme Fellow in 1999-2000. He has carried out research in Italy, France, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon. His survey of Burj Bait Nasif has been acknowledged in D. Pringle, Secular Buildings in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: an archaeological Gazeteer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), no. 72, p. 42.
While Dr. France has dozens of publications on the crusades (see below), his next published work, titled The Crusades and the Expansion of Europe, will be published by Routledge. He is also working on Warfare from the Fall of Rome to the Millennium. As a result of his research covering this period, he has compiled an electronic database of lives of saints prior to the year 1000. He is also an editor of the Journal of Medieval History.
One unique aspect of Dr. France's work is his willingness to avoid the trend among crusades scholars over the last few decades which holds the crusaders were driven largely by sincere religious devotion, rather than simply greed. Against a wave of scholarly opinion led by Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dr. France maintains that greed was, in fact, a major factor that should be considered in understanding the motivations of the crusaders. Dr. Thomas Madden of St. Louis University has summed up Dr. France's position as follows,
John France, while accepting that most crusaders wanted to save their souls, insisted that they also
wanted to get rich...Religion mattered, he argues, but so too did one's social status. A decision to
crusade had to take those factors into account. France finds that there was an enormous amount
of social mobility among the knigthtly warriors of Europe at the end of the eleventh-century. They
were, he contends, ambitious men by and large who saw in the First Crusade not only an opportunity
to win heaven, but also conquests and wealth.Riley-Smith points out that there was very little gain in
return for the expenditures of the crusade, yet France counters that the crusaders were unaware of
that before they departed.(1)
Selected Publications
Monographs/Joint-authored books
Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades (London: UCL Press, 1999).
Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
(with N. Bulst & P. Reynolds), The Five Books of the Histories and the Life of St. William (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Chapters in books
‘The importance of the Bayeux Tapestry for the History of War’, in P.Bouet, B.Levy and F.Neveux (eds), The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2004), 289-300.
‘War and the Cult of Saints in the early Middle Ages’, in N. Housley et. al. (eds.), The Experience of Crusading: Essays in Honour of J. Riley-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
‘Geoffroy de Monmouth et son époque’, in N.Y.Tonnerre (ed.), Chroniqueurs et historiens de la Bretagne Rennes (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001), 43-56.
‘The Fall of Antioch during the First Crusade’, in M.Balard, B.Z.Kedar and J.Riley-Smith (eds.), Dei gesta per Francos. Etudes sur les croisades dédiées à Jean Richard (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 13-20.
‘Le rôle de Jérusalem dans la piété du XI siècle’, in M.Balard & A.Ducellier (eds.), Le Partage du Monde: Échanges et Colonisation dans la Méditerranée médiévale (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998), 151-61.
‘The Anonymous Gesta Francorum and the Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem of Raymond of Aguilers and the Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere of Peter Tudebode; an analysis of the textual relationship between primary sources for the First Crusade’, in J. France and W. Zajac (eds.), The Crusades and their Sources. Essays presented to Bernard Hamilton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 39-70.
‘The use of the Gesta Francorum in the later histories of the First Crusade’, in From Clermont to Jerusalem: Selected Proceedings from the International Medieval Congress 10-13 July 1995 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 29-42.
‘Patronage and the appeal of the First Crusade’, in J. Phillips (ed.), The First Crusade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 5-20.
‘Les origines de la première croisade’, in M. Balard (ed.), Autour de la première croisade (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 45-56.
‘Technology and the Success of the First Crusade’, in Y. Lev (ed.), War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th-15th centuries (Leiden: Brill,1997), 163-76.
‘La stratégie arménienne de la première croisade’ in C. Mutafian (ed.), Les Lusignans; Armenia, Cyprus and the Crusade (Poitiers: Université de Poitiers, 1995), 141-9.
Articles in journals
‘Property, Warfare and the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’, Journal of the Haskins Society 11 (1998), (appeared 2003), 73-85.
‘The Composition and Raising of the Armies of Charlemagne’, Journal of Medieval Military History 1 (2002), 61-82.
‘Christianity, Violence, and the origins of Crusading: á propos of a Recent Study’, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire 80 (2002), 593-598.
‘Recent Writing on Medieval Warfare: From the Fall of Rome to c.1300’, Journal of Military History 65 (2001), 441-73.
‘The Western Mediterranean Powers and the First Crusade’ Journal of Mediterranean Studies 10 (2000), 265-74.
‘Crusading Warfare and its Adaptation to Eastern Conditions in the Twelfth Century’, Mediterranean Historical Review 15 (2000), 49-66.
‘The Battle of Carcano: the event and its importance’, War in History 6 (1999), 245-61.
‘The First Crusade as a Naval Enterprise’, Mariner's Mirror 4 (1997), 389-97.
‘The destruction of Jerusalem and the First Crusade’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996), 1-17.
‘Glaber as a reformer’, Studia Monastica 34 (1992),41?51.
‘The occasion of the coming of the Normans to Southern Italy’, Journal of Medieval History 17 (1991), 185-205.
‘Rodulfus Glaber and French politics in the early eleventh century’, Francia 16/1 (1989), 101?112.
‘Rodulfus Glaber and the Cluniacs’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39 (1988), 30, 105-20.
‘War and Christendom in the thought of Rodulfus Glaber’, Studia Monastica 30 (1988), 105?121.
‘The text of the account of the capture of Jerusalem in the Ripoll manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale (latin) 5132' English Historical Revue, 102 (1988), 640?58.
‘The military history of the Carolingian period’, Revue Belge d'Histoire Militaire, 26/2 (1985), 81?100.
‘The election and title of Godfrey de Bouillon’, Canadian Journal of History 18 (1983), 321?29.
‘Anna Comnena, the Alexiad and the First Crusade’, Reading Medieval Studies 10 (1983), 20?32.
‘La guerre dans la France féodale a la fin du ixe et au xe siècle’, Revue Belge d'histoire militaire 23/3 (1979), 177?198.
‘The First Crusade and Islam’, The Muslim World 57 (1977), 147?57.
‘The Divine Quaternity of Rodulfus Glaber’, Studia Monastica 18 (1975), 283?94.
‘An unknown account of the capture of Jerusalem', English Historical Review 87 (1972), 771?783.
‘The departure of Tatikios from the crusader army’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 44 (1971), 137?48.
‘Le manuscrit 6041A du fonds latin de la Bibliothèque nationale: un nouveau fragment d'un manuscrit de l'Historia Belli Sacri’ , Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des chartes 126 (1968), 413?16
Links to Additional Information
John France- Faculty Page- University of Wales-Swansea
John France Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, and the First Crusade [PDF] Reading Medieval Studies
Crusades Historians- Crusades-Encyclopedia
Crusades Historiography- Crusades-Encyclopedia
1. Thomas Madden Ed. The Crusades: The Essential Readings. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 194.
(c) Andrew Holt- December 2005- Permission is granted for electronic copying and distribution in print for educational and personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.