Customer Reviews

The Crusades

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having read this book from its French translation, I was impressed with its clear prose. I would suggest this book to anyone looking for a in-depth, scholastic-minded work on the first three crusades; I would suggest another work for the lay reader, or someone without a wealth of knowledge on the subject already. The only problem is that while the work deals with the Islamic response to the Frankish invasion of the Holy land, it only takes a small portion of the book. The other trap the book falls in is an age old one for historical works: We are presented with quasi-fleshed out people, and the author aludes to great knolwledge while failing to translate that wealth of knowledge to paper. Still very informative and well worth reading. The author makes great use of period source documents, worth reading for this alone. If you can find a copy get it and treasure it.

Zoe makes the Crusades come alive. She is historically precise, but makes the characters and personalities involved come alive with anecdotes, insights, and analysis. This book is entertaining, engaging, and suitable for readers of all ages. The author is accurate without being dry, making the story of the Crusades interesting, entertaining, sometimes horrifying, and always human. Enjoy!

Upon finishing the first half of this book, I soon found myself in a university library eagerly devouring smaller works on specific periods and figures that Oldenbourg introduced to me. I am a student of European history trying to narrow my interests before I apply to graduate school, and this book may prove very instrumental in guiding me toward the medieval period. It offers everything an inquisitive but largely uninformed reader could ask for-an even pace that piques the interest enough at every turn to inspire further inspection, lean but sufficiently detailed character sketches, a compelling narrative that provides minimal historiographical analysis, but enough to provoke the reader to draw his/her own conclusions... It also provides maps and illustrations, which are always a pleasant respite after mulling through hundreds of pages of prose.

One small complaint-the index and bibliography are light. This might be a non-factor, though, if you just want a thorough, solid account of an inherently interesting period of history to fulfill your personal interest. It's a good size at 700 or so pages, but I haven't come across a better overview of the first three crusades and believe me, I've been looking.

Zoé B. Oldenbourg (1916 - 2002) was both a highly esteemed specialist in mediæval French history and a critically acclaimed and prize winning historical novelist. She is best known for her novels The World Is Not Enough and The Cornerstone. The Crusades (Les Croisades) was first published in 1965.

Concentrating on the period of the first three Crusades Oldenbourg's book is a social, cultural, political and military history of the period, and covers the history of Turkey, Persia, Iran, Iraq, the Bosphorus, the Balkans, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Sicily, Spain and southern Europe. She makes illuminating references to other phenomenon such as colonialism and pogroms, and is exceptional in that she is able to imaginatively suggest the attitudes, beliefs and limitations of the people she is writing about.

The subject is an immense one: the results of the Germanic invasions; the position of the Papacy; the 'Holy War' and its legacy; the economic effects of overpopulation on a poorly developed agriculture; feudalism; the differences between eastern and western Christianity; heresies and national differences in the east; the history of Constantinople; the rise of the Turks; the divisions and unity of Islam; relations between the Turks and the Arabs, Christians and Muslims; cultural effects of East on West and vice versa; literary influences in both directions; the legend of the Crusader; the subsequent history of 'crusades' such as the Albigensian, the Inquisition and the Conquistadores.

Oldenbourg on contemporary medieval attitudes: it was a time before machines were widely used. ''Man was therefore infinitely closer to physical reality than we can be now. Tools and raw materials had a value and immediacy not easy for us to understand. This direct contact with matter whose laws he knew only empirically made man simultaneously more superstitious than we are today and more skillful and enterprising.''

She is illuminating on the distinction between western and eastern religious feeling, in a way which explains much subsequent Catholic history. She says also that 'men thought of themselves first and foremost as religious beings...''

A plethora of suggestive ideas: that popular religion was (and is) largely pagan (and pagan is used in a non pejorative way); that miracles occupied the space in our lives of science; that war and religion were combined in the Latin west in a way they never could be in the Byzantine east.

'This exclusive, even excessive, exaltation of physical valour was something the Byzantines could never understand. The people of Western Europe believed implicitly that a man's worth was, first and foremost, measured by his prowess in battle. To the Greeks, courage was certainly an estimable virtue...' but they did not rate it any higher than many 'civilised' virtues.'

'The fundamental difference lay in the co-existence in the Western mind of two quite separate ideas, the warrior and the Christian. Byzantium never seems to have been affected by any such ambivalence: it was too blatantly paradoxical for the logical Greek mind to accept.''

On the tangle of military and political objectives pursued by both east and west Oldenbourg sheds a clear light.

She suggests a connection between the German tribes who destroyed the western Roman Empire in the 4th century and the Crusaders. The feudal nobility, she says, were of Germanic or Nordic extraction, unlike the Latin peasantry. They preserved their ideals of love of battle and glorious death despite their conversion to Christianity. The union of these two diverse traditions led to the idea of a holy war, and such wars were waged in Syria in the 12th century. The Germanic tribes, many of whom admired Rome as a great civilising power, conquered it. Later, as admirers of Christianity, they attempted to conquer the Holy Land. In 1204 they conquered Constantinople.

The defining 'cause' of the Crusades was the rise of Turkey as a major power. This rise threatened both the Western, Greek and Arab states, although Turkey itself was Islamic. The Arabs, friendly to Christians, had been accepted politically in their position of power in Syria and the Middle East as well as elsewhere for 400 years. Now the Turks were conquering areas towards the Holy Land, and also areas in the Bosphorus - they posed a direct threat to Byzantium. The Crusades were initially launched to protect Byzantium from the Turks. But the Crusaders included Normans, who were more interested in conquering Byzantium than the Holy Land. And the Great Schism had recently separated the Churches of east and west: instead of reuniting them, the Crusades were to widen the gap between them and exploit their differences.

'Alexius saw no reason to fight the Turks simply because they were infidels (he had suffered too much from Christians to share any prejudges of this kind)...''

'the Greeks were trying to use the Latins in order to reconquer their own lost provinces, while the Latins thought the Greeks had a duty to help them in the much more important task of recovering the Holy Places.''

Oldenbourg follows this concept of the holy war through subsequent history. The union of the military culture of the barons and the culture of love and romance of southern France led to the ideal of chivalry. Later this culture in turn was conquered during the crusade against the Albigensians. Relics of these ideas can be seen in the Inquisition - the Church Militant - and in the deeds of the Conquistadores. Most recent was the attempt of Hitler to conquer the Jews.

The more one explores a subject the more there is to explore. Oldenbourg's book suggests this complexity. There are no easy answers, few generalisations. It is both honest and learned, and motivated by a clear and compassionate intelligence. It has had a far greater effect on me than the celebrated study by Stephen Runciman, still a standard work on the subject (strangely, another major study is Gibbon's, 200 years out of date and still an acute analysis despite it). Oldenbourg explores one of the great conflicts between Christianity and Islam so as to show how misleading it is to regard it as a simple conflict between two ideologies and in this way her book can be helpful and relevant to those who wish to see present day conflicts in a broader, less bigoted context.

Zoe Oldenbourg's "The Crusades" was one of the first books I ever read about the subject, and still remains an unsurpassed introduction to the topic in my experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it is still one of my favourites.

Oldenbourg covers the main events of the major Crusades, and informs the reader in great detail of the situation at hand. Oldenbourg gives a very detailed introductory account of the world and lives of the Crusaders. It will certainly give you enough to decide if you want to learn more on this fascinating topic, or just leave it with Oldenbourg's book.

As an initial introduction to the Crusades, "The Crusades" stands as one of the best available, and will keep you engrossed throughout.

I thought reading this book would be a daunting dask, at 593 pages, on a subject that I knew nothing about, and considered dry. Was I wrong! Ms. Oldenbourg makes the crusades and the participants come alive. She imbues the participants with personality, so each individual is memorable, the reading better than any novel. From the blonde, blue eyed cunning soldier Bohemond to the tragic love triangle of Melisende, Fulk and Hugh, this book has it all. Scheming clerics, ambitious men, massacres, acts of superhuman strength, love, hatred. Not boring at all! And the great part is that it is not fiction. Well worth the read!

Zoe has a firm grasp of the history of this time period and presents it in very interesting and easy to read narrative style that keeps one absorbed up to the end. She manages to give a solid overview of the first three crusades, and does such a good job, that it was easy for me to picture and imagine a little of what it must have been like to be a Crusader. The Franks were truly great warriors. I've always considered the Spartans, Samurai, Vikings, and others to be great, but after reading about the Crusaders and what they did with what little they had, I would rank them just as good or better than all the others. The wars, politics, loves, fueds, blunders, and more are all there. I recommend this book.

1. First of all, I 100% agree with one of the reviewers that this is not for the "lay" reader... and I'm certainly a novice when it comes to this topic. Nonetheless, I can read and the overt problem with this book is that it's just a mishmash of factoids here / there, which is not the basic ingredients for a lucid / coherent book. Thus although many may be impressed with all of the minutia of detail, it rather has the opposite effect on me; If I'm going to put in the time to read/ learn about a certain topic, I think it's reasonable to expect that the author the present a coherent / logical narrative rather than million bits of information.
2. For the novice, we might be better off looking to more standard fare when trying to tackle this subject.

Very well written, provides an excellent insight into medieval man, his contributions to society and history. A goo dinsight into what was really behind the Crusades (politics, wealth, etc) vice the normal (old fashioned) intrepetation that the crusades were to primarily to free the holy land from the infidel.

Zoe Oldenbourg's treatment of the Crusades is, I suspect, the most readable and enjoyable extant in English. Several things make this five star history. Most scholars of this period are men. Ms. Oldenbourg writes brilliantly with feminine insights others have missed. She seems to understand the warrior cast better than other historians and she is not totally unsympathetic. What makes her especially notable is that she understands historical context.
Her treatment of the First and Third Crusades is
very strong. I do wish she had extended this book into Innocent III's the Fourth Crusade because I would love to have read her take on the sack of Constantinoble.
Her treatment of Saladin is especially refreshing. Rather than fawning with politically correctness, she views the Sultan with the historian's critical eye. She reminds the reader how close the great Islamic Warrior came to losing it all several times and that what set Saladin apart perhaps more than anything was "luck." Bushels of luck.
This should not be the first book one reads on the Crusades, but it is certainly a must read. For the material covered, it is the "best in its class" in English.

Walter C. Rodgers