Description
Book SynopsisIn The First Crusade, Thomas Asbridge offers a gripping account of a titanic three-year adventure filled with miraculous victories, greedy princes, and barbarity on a vast scale. Beginning with the electrifying speech delivered by Pope Urban II on the last Tuesday of November in the year 1095, readers will follow the more than 100,000 men who took up the call from their mobilization in Europe (where great waves of anti-Semitism resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jews), to their arrival in Constanstinople, an exotic, opulent city--ten times the size of any city in Europe--that bedazzled the Europeans. Featured in vivid detail are the siege of Nicaea and the pivotal battle for Antioch, the single most important military engagement of the entire expedition, where the crusaders, in desparate straits, routed a larger and better equipped Muslim army. Through all this, the crusaders were driven on by intense religious devotion, convinced that their struggle would earn them the reward of e
Trade ReviewRousing....Asbridge knows this territory well. In 1999, he even walked 350 miles of the crusaders' route. * Christian Science Monitor *
Combines fast-paced history writing, evocotive prose and lucid research for a first-rate history of the First Crusade.... Brilliantly re-creates the three-year history of the First Crusade, chronicling its difficulties and victories, not downplaying its brutality but emphasizing its genuinely religious impulse. * Publishers Weekly *
Asbridge, in keeping with his aim to produce a popular history, writes with maximum vividness. Some of this gets a little hokey * there are cliff-hangers galorebut I am grateful that he stooped to entertain us. Mad Hugh and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer were fun to read about. There is also a note of comedy in the competition among the knights, with their nasty little treacheries, and with the lesser soldiers running back and forth between tents to figure out who's on topand therefore whom they should ally themselves withtoday.Joan Acocella, The New Yorker *
Although well researched, the book wears its scholarship lightly and reads like a work of fiction, complete with vivid characters. * The Herald (Glasgow) *
Asbridge achieves vivid characterization and gripping storytelling without sacrifice of scholarship. Interweaving analysis, narrative, evocative description and occasional wry humor, he tells us * as no other book on the subject really doeswho the crusaders were, how they behaved, how they killed and died and, most surprisingly of all, how they survived and triumphed.Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Millennium and Civilizations *
By focusing on two dozen of the most famous of these crusaders, the author keeps the telling manageable and accessible, and includes eyewitness accounts that describe events with compelling realism. * Curriculum Connections *
Balances persuasive analysis with a flair for conveying with dramatic power the crusaders' plight throughout the nine-month siege of Antioch...should revitalize the study of this fascinating period in European history. * The Financial Times *
