Professor Jonathan Phillips - Professor of Crusading History

I teach and research on the history of the crusades, one of the most influential and dynamic movements of the medieval age. My courses explore the motives of crusaders – what impelled people to travel thousands of miles to fight the Muslims of the Near East? The impact of the crusades on the Muslim world has crystallised in my research on the Sultan Saladin and has evolved into a final-year course showcasing his struggle with Richard the Lionheart. The Crusader States feature the remarkable Queen Melisende and this has prompted a course on Medieval Queenship. Over recent years I have developed a strong interest in the memory and legacy of the crusades, in both the West and the Near East, represented in an MA unit.

I really enjoy blending my research interests with my teaching and writing. Much of what I publish has either evolved from a course, or becomes a course once it is written. This keeps what I teach and research fresh to me, and (I hope!) my students.

My recent book The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (2019) is a volume that I genuinely loved writing, not least because I was able to explore new and unpublished material from the medieval period, and to push myself beyond my previous comfort zone of the medieval West to take the Near Eastern perspective. Finding new angles on such a familiar figure as Saladin was a daunting prospect but one that totally absorbed me.

As the man who captured Jerusalem from the Crusades, Saladin’s achievements have had a powerful legacy down the centuries. Making the first proper study of this required me to plunge into the history of the C19th and C20th – again, as a medievalist, a little scary but immensely rewarding.

The research on Saladin now feeds into two undergraduate courses that are concerned with the medieval crusades, including a final year ‘Special Subject’ and an MA unit (the only course in the world solely concerned with the memory of the crusades). The book’s highly positive reviews (e.g. One of the Biographies of 2019 for The Times), were a source of delight and relief; if you put so much into a project it had better come out right!

Since the book came out I have given (literally) dozens of talks and interviews on Saladin. Many of these are in Schools and Colleges where trying to blend my new discoveries alongside the needs of a curriculum, as well as (through the material on the modern legacy of Saladin and the Crusades) showing the relevance and the importance of the medieval period, is an exciting and rewarding experience. Academic audiences – in the UK, Europe and North America - provide a different sort of challenge, one that is sometimes intimidating, but a proper test of one’s research work. Public-facing events, such as Literary Festivals (especially abroad) and Historical Association events are always a pleasure and a different form of challenge, not least because the audiences and their life experiences, knowledge and background can be so wide-ranging you never know where the questions might come from. Forthcoming translations of Saladin into Italian, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian are a further exciting prospect.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - J.P.Phillips@rhul.ac.uk