In 1971 Edward Peters published Christian Society and the Crusades, 1198–1229, a modest volume of historical documents in English translation intended to make available to students a number of widely scattered source materials and a brief survey of scholarship to date, dealing with the crusade movements of a particularly important period in both crusade and wider European history. The volume drew heavily on the distinguished and pioneering series Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, originally under the aegis of Dana C. Munro, the founder of crusade history in the United States. In the decades since the original publication, the amount of translated source materials and new scholarship has grown enormously, and perspectives on both the thirteenth-century crusades and the character of Christendom in the period have greatly changed. Two excellent and wide-ranging collections of scholarly articles that represent many aspects of the most recent scholarship are Andrew Jotischky, ed., The Crusades, vols. 3 and 4, Critical Concepts in Historical Studies (London, 2008), and Thomas F. Madden, James L. Naus, and Vincent Ryan, eds., Crusades—Medieval Worlds in Conflict (Farnham UK-Burlington VT, 2010).
In February 1991, James M. Powell, whose own 1986 study The Anatomy of a Crusade was a major part of the new scholarship, asked Peters if he planned to revise Christian Society. Peters decided that he would, since much of the more recent material is also often widely scattered and many important texts remained untranslated, but would Jim collaborate? Powell graciously agreed. In 2001 our friend Jessalynn Bird, a young American scholar of the period, completed her D.Phil. thesis at Oxford on James of Vitry and the School of Peter the Chanter, and it seemed logical to invite Bird, whose work then and since substantially complements that of Powell and others, to collaborate with us on the revision. She has done heroic work—many of the newly translated documents of the thirteenth century have been hers.
It has taken more than a decade to assemble the new version, and in the course of that decade the project became an entirely new book with much of a heavily revised older book inside it. The period has been redated to 1198–1291 (with one important item dating from 1187), from the beginning of the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) to the fall of Acre (1291). The number of texts in translation and the range of topics addressed have greatly increased. It is no longer a revision or even a second edition. We have retained most of the translations in the earlier volume, but have reduced the number of texts on the Fourth Crusade by Munro and, in the case of the chronicle of the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221) of Oliver of Paderborn, originally translated and independently published by Joseph J. Gavigan and the University of Pennsylvania Press, have revised the text and scholarly apparatus.
Because of the scope and length of the book, we have not been able to cite scholarly literature in languages other than English, except in a very few cases. But we have attempted to indicate the locations of printed English translations of both the texts we have included and other related texts from the late twelfth to the end of the late thirteenth centuries.