The Crusades

July 14, 1099 - Jerusalem is captured during the First Crusade.  Here are 10 books on the Crusades.

Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse by Jay Rubenstein - At Moson, the river Danube ran red with blood. At Antioch, the Crusaders-- their saddles freshly decorated with sawed-off heads--indiscriminately clogged the streets with the bodies of eastern Christians and Turks. At Ma'arra, they cooked children on spits and ate them. By the time the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, their quest--and their violence-- had become distinctly otherworldly: blood literally ran shin-deep through the streets as the Crusaders overran the sacred city.
Beginning in 1095 and culminating four bloody years later, the First Crusade represented a new kind of warfare: holy, unrestrained, and apocalyptic. In Armies of Heaven, medieval historian Jay Rubenstein tells the story of this cataclysmic event through the eyes of those who witnessed it, emphasizing the fundamental role that apocalyptic thought played in motivating the Crusaders. A thrilling work of military and religious history, Armies of Heaven will revolutionize our understanding of the Crusades.

The Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas Madden - What is the relationship between the medieval crusades and the problems of the modern Middle East? Were the crusades the Christian equivalent of Muslim jihad? In this sweeping yet crisp history, Thomas F. Madden offers a brilliant and compelling narrative of the crusades and their contemporary relevance. Placing all of the major crusades within their social, economic, religious, and intellectual environments, Madden explores the uniquely medieval world that led untold thousands to leave their homes, families, and friends to march in Christ's name to distant lands. From Palestine and Europe's farthest reaches, each crusade is recounted in a clear, concise narrative. The author gives special attention as well to the crusades' effects on the Islamic world and the Christian Byzantine East.

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge - The Crusades is an authoritative,accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Thomas Asbridge--a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)--covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this  big, ambitious, readable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history. From Richard the Lionheart to the mighty Saladin, from the emperors of Byzantium to the Knights Templar, Asbridge's book is a magnificent epic of Holy War between the Christian and Islamic worlds, full of adventure, intrigue, and sweeping grandeur.

The First Crusade: The Call From the East by Peter Frankopan - According to tradition, the First Crusade began at the instigation of Pope Urban II and culminated in July 1099, when thousands of western European knights liberated Jerusalem from the rising menace of Islam. But what if the First Crusade s real catalyst lay far to the east of Rome? In this groundbreaking book, countering nearly a millennium of scholarship, Peter Frankopan reveals the untold history of the First Crusade.
Nearly all historians of the First Crusade focus on the papacy and its willing warriors in the West, along with innumerable popular tales of bravery, tragedy, and resilience. In sharp contrast, Frankopan examines events from the East, in particular from Constantinople, seat of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The result is revelatory. The true instigator of the First Crusade, we see, was the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who in 1095, with his realm under siege from the Turks and on the point of collapse, begged the pope for military support.
Basing his account on long-ignored eastern sources, Frankopan also gives a provocative and highly original explanation of the world-changing events that followed the First Crusade. The Vatican s victory cemented papal power, while Constantinople, the heart of the still-vital Byzantine Empire, never recovered. As a result, both Alexios and Byzantium were consigned to the margins of history. From Frankopan s revolutionary work, we gain a more faithful understanding of the way the taking of Jerusalem set the stage for western Europe s dominance up to the present day and shaped the modern world.

God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark - In God's Battalions, distinguished scholar Rodney Stark puts forth a controversial argument that the Crusades were a justified war waged against Muslim terror and aggression. Stark, the author of The Rise of Christianity, reviews the history of the seven major crusades from 1095-1291 in this fascinating work of religious revisionist history.

God's Wolf: The Life of the Most Notorious of All Crusaders, Reynald de Chatillion by Jeffrey Lee - In a 2010 terrorist plot, Al-Qaeda hid a bomb in a FedEx shipment addressed to a man who had been dead for 800 years. Born in twelfth-century France and bred for violence, Reynald de Chatillon was a young knight who joined the Second Crusade and rose through the ranks to become the preeminent figure in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, chief foe of the Muslim leader Saladin, and one of the most reviled characters in Islamic history. In the West, Reynald has long been considered a minor player in the crusading saga, and is often dismissed as a bloodthirsty maniac who brought disaster on his fellow crusaders. However, by using contemporary documents and original research, Jeffrey Lee overturns this popular perception and questions other prejudices about the crusades that underlie modern misunderstandings of the Middle East. God's Wolf shows how the crusader kingdom was brought down by a treacherous internal faction, rather than by Reynald's belligerence. In fact, despite Reynald's brutality, Lee argues that he was a strong military leader and an effective statesman, whose actions in the Middle East had a far-reaching impact that endures to this day. An epic saga set in the midst of a violent clash of civilizations, God's Wolf is the fascinating story of an exceptional crusader and a provocative reinterpretation of the crusading era.

The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades by Paul M. Cobb - In The Race for Paradise, Paul M. Cobb offers an accurate and accessible representation of the Islamic experience of the Crusades during the Middle Ages. Cobb overturns previous claims and presents new arguments, such as the idea that the Frankish invasions of the Near East were something of a side-show to the broader internal conflict between Sunnis and Shi'ites in the region. The Race for Paradise moves along two fronts as Cobb stresses that, for medieval Muslims, the contemporaneous Latin Christian expansion throughout the Mediterranean was seen as closely linked to events in the Levant. As a consequence of this expanded geographical range, the book takes a broader chronological range to encompass the campaigns of Spanish kings north of the Ebro and the Norman conquest of Sicily (beginning in 1060), well before Pope Urban II's famous call to the First Crusade in 1095. Finally, The Race for Paradise brilliantly combats the trend to portray the history of the Crusades, particularly the Islamic experience, in simplistic or binary terms. Muslims did not solely experience the Crusades as fanatical warriors or as helpless victims, Cobb writes; as with any other human experience of similar magnitude, the Crusades were experienced in a great variety of ways, ranging from heroic martyrdom, to collaboration, to utter indifference.

The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi's Mission of Peace by Paul Moses - For many of us, St. Francis of Assisi is known as a poor monk and a lover of animals. However, these images are sadly incomplete, because they ignore an equally important and more challenging aspect of his life -- his unwavering commitment to seeking peace. In The Saint and the Sultan, Paul Moses recovers Francis' s message of peace through the largely forgotten story of his daring mission to end the crusades.
In 1219, as the Fifth Crusade was being fought, Francis crossed enemy lines to gain an audience with Malik al-Kamil, the Sultan of Egypt. The two talked of war and peace and faith and when Francis returned home, he proposed that his Order of the Friars Minor live peaceably among the followers of Islam-a revolutionary call at a moment when Christendom pinned its hopes for converting Muslims on the battlefield.
The Saint and the Sultan captures the lives of St. Francis and Sultan al-Kamil and illuminates the political intrigue and religious fervor of their time. In the process, it reveals a startlingly timely story of interfaith conflict, war, and the search for peace. More than simply a dramatic adventure, though it does not lack for colorful saints and sinners, loyalty and betrayal, and thrilling Crusade narrative, The Saint and the Sultan brings to life an episode of deep relevance for all who seek to find peace between the West and the Islamic world.

Saladin by Anne-Marie Eddé - Working simultaneously on two levels, Saladin represents the best kind of biography--a portrait of a man who is said to have made an age, and the most complete account we have to date of an age that made the man. Unlike biographies that focus on Saladin's military exploits, especially the recapturing of Jerusalem from European Crusaders in 1187, Edde's narrative draws on an incredible array of contemporary sources to develop the fullest picture possible of a ruler shaped profoundly by the complex Arabian political environment in which he rose to prominence. The result is a unique view of the Crusades from an Arab perspective. Saladin became a legend in his own time, venerated by friend and foe alike as a paragon of justice, chivalry, and generosity. Arab politicians ever since have sought to claim his mantle as a justification for their own exercise of power. But Saladin's world-historical status as the ideal Muslim ruler owes its longevity to a tacit agreement among contemporaries and later chroniclers about the set of virtues Saladin possessed--virtues that can now be tested against a rich tapestry of historical research. This tension between the mythical image of Saladin, layered over centuries and deployed in service of specific moral and political objectives, and the verifiable facts of his life available to a judicious modern historian is what sustains Anne-Marie Edde's erudite biography, published to acclaim in France in 2008 and offered here in smooth, readable English translation.

The Second Crusade 1148: Disaster Outside Damascus by David Nicolle - After the fall of the crusader kingdom of Edessa, the Pope called for a new crusade in 1145. This new campaign by the Christian west against the forces of eastern Islam would culminate in the 1148 siege of Damascus, then the capital city of an Islamic state that had been friendly towards the crusaders. Despite the earlier successes for the crusaders at Antioch and Jerusalem, and the weak fortifications around Damascus, the siege proved a dismal and embarrassing failure for the western armies. The siege was abandoned soon after it had started and the crusaders retreated. This defeat shocked the Christian world and dealt a severe blow to the confidence of the crusading armies, while bolstering the morale of their enemies.
Utilizing numerous illustrations and full-color artwork, medieval warfare expert David Nicolle analyzes the often-debated battles around Damascus, explaining how the domination of the surrounding countryside by the Islamic forces became the decisive factor, and how the besieging crusading forces found themselves under siege. He also looks at the crusade in the larger context of the battle between East and West and explains how the Second Crusade proved a turning point in this ongoing struggle.