The First Crusade: A New History [Paperback]

Drawing on innovative scholarship, original research, and an intimate knowledge of the Levant, historian Thomas Asbridge sheds new light on the first crusade, from its inception to its bloody ending, and brings to focus the true nature of relations between Christendom and Islam and how it was transformed by the attack on the Holy Land. Readers will follow the crusaders from the early mobilization in Europe to their arrival in the bafflingly exotic and cosmopolitan cities of the East. Included at descriptions of the brutal battles they fought, including an anti-Semitic massacre in Europe, the siege of Nicaea, the pivotal battle for Antioch, and the slaughter of thousands of Muslim civilians in Jerusalem.The First Crusadewill inspire further study of both European and Middle Eastern history, while facilitating a better understanding of the connections between the two.On the last Tuesday of November 1095, Pope Urban II delivered an electrifying speech that launched the First Crusade. His words set Christendom afire. Some 100,000 men, from knights to paupers, took up the call--the largest mobilization of manpower since the fall of the Roman Empire.Now, inThe 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. Readers follow the crusaders from their mobilization in Europe (where great waves of anti-Semitism resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jews), to their arrival in Constantinople, 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 desperate 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 woulÃ?