Contributions

The book’s greatest achievement is its recovery of contingency. Knowing that the expedition ended badly makes it tempting to identify every earlier decision as another step toward unavoidable disaster. Smith refuses that approach. Capturing the Chain Tower was an impressive military and engineering accomplishment. Taking Damietta was a major strategic victory. Targeting Egypt made geopolitical sense. Rejecting al-Kāmil’s first offer was risky, but it had defensible strategic reasoning. Even delaying an immediate advance toward Cairo cannot simply be dismissed as cowardice or stupidity when forces were exhausted, politically divided, seasonally unstable, and expecting imperial reinforcement. Recent military scholarship similarly argues that the underlying Egyptian grand strategy was achievable and that the campaign failed because of operational, leadership, manpower, and defensive factors rather than because attacking Egypt was irrational from the outset.  

Equally impressive is Smith’s handling of Cardinal Pelagius. Earlier popular retellings have often turned the papal legate into a convenient explanation for defeat: an arrogant churchman who overruled sensible soldiers and rejected peace. Smith does not acquit him of mistakes, but he shows that the evidence is far less tidy. His account of the threatened Templar stronghold at Castle Pilgrim is particularly important. Pelagius rapidly sought assistance from Cyprus and the Syrian Franks and allowed Templar forces to leave Egypt to reinforce the castle. Smith uses this episode to challenge the image of an inflexible commander, presenting Pelagius instead as capable of strategic adaptation when circumstances demanded it. 

A third strength is the treatment of belief as historical reality rather than irrational decoration. Prophecy, visions, indulgences, relics, barefoot processions, apocalyptic expectations, and interpretations of divine favour mattered because crusaders themselves believed that they mattered. Smith neither mocks those beliefs nor accepts their supernatural claims. He shows instead how they influenced recruitment, morale, political expectations, and strategic decisions. This is one of the areas in which the book most successfully allows a modern reader to inhabit a very different medieval mental world. 

The source work underneath the narrative is formidable. Oliver of Cologne and Jacques de Vitry provide vivid Latin Christian testimony, but Smith repeatedly tests that material against Ibn al-Athīr, al-Maqrīzī and other Islamic or eastern sources. He also uses letters, charters, papal documentation, material evidence, coins, art, and later chronicles. The 304-page volume is supported by extensive endnotes, bibliography, index, sixteen illustrations, and three maps. Yale itself emphasises Smith’s use of both Christian and Muslim sources, and independent reviews have likewise singled out his breadth of source command.  

Finally, Smith is very good on war as lived experience. The reader encounters sea sickness, muddy water, crocodiles, floods, heat, spoiled food, disease, debt, siege machinery, ships, horses, prisoners, plunder, camp politics, and the constant problem of feeding and financing an international army. Such details make military history more than an account of generals moving pieces across a map. The recent Times review similarly highlights the accessible, colourful way the book reconstructs crusading enthusiasm and the harsh realities of the Damietta campaign.

Limitations

The principal reservation concerns the same technique that makes the book so readable. Smith’s cinematic reconstructions occasionally approach the boundary between evidential reconstruction and historical novelisation. He is admirably transparent about his procedure, and the scenes are grounded in evidence, but reconstructed movements, appearances, sounds, emotional states, and physical surroundings can sometimes accumulate until the distinction between what a source actually records and what is plausible scene-setting becomes less immediately visible to a general reader. The method succeeds far more often than it fails, but a slightly lighter touch in a few openings would strengthen the authority of the narrative. 

Relatedly, some modern analogies are more conspicuous than necessary. Comparing an adapted flail with “nunchucks,” Greek fire with napalm, or medieval landing craft with vessels associated with the Normandy landings immediately gives a nonspecialist reader a mental image. Yet repeated use of such comparisons can momentarily pull the reader out of the thirteenth century. This stylistic tension has appeared elsewhere in the book’s reception: The Critic praised Smith’s research and range of Christian and Muslim evidence while arguing that the mixture of scholarly and conversational registers sometimes produces stylistic awkwardness.  

There is also an inevitable asymmetry of perspective. Smith makes a serious effort to incorporate Islamic sources and to portray al-Kāmil as a capable political and military actor rather than a foil for Christian protagonists. Nevertheless, the book’s emotional centre of gravity remains largely inside the crusader camp because Oliver, Jacques and the Latin documentary record provide the densest eyewitness material. Ayyubid strategic thinking is well represented, but Muslim civilians and the internal texture of Egyptian society receive less sustained narrative intimacy than the European participants. This is partly a limitation of the surviving material and partly a consequence of the narrative architecture rather than evidence of an unbalanced interpretation. 

Finally, the chronological breadth has a cost in pace. The preparations, preaching, travel, and Holy Land operations are essential to Smith’s argument that a crusade was a social and organisational phenomenon rather than merely an Egyptian military campaign. Nevertheless, readers coming primarily for Damietta may find the build-up lengthy, while parts of the protracted siege inevitably reproduce something of the stop-start rhythm experienced by the participants themselves. The Times reached a broadly similar judgment, praising the narrative while noting that its momentum can slacken during slower portions of the siege.  

These reservations do not substantially diminish the book. Indeed, they arise chiefly from Smith’s decision to attempt something difficult: writing scholarship serious enough to engage specialists while telling a story fast and vividly enough to reach readers who may know little about the Fifth Crusade. On balance, that experiment succeeds exceptionally well.