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58 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book that reads like an action movie, October 26, 2004
This review is from: The First Crusade: A New History (Hardcover)
This is one of the best history books I have read in a long time. It is incredibly well-written and contains a fascinating account about the first crusade. It will keep you riveted until the end.
Asbridge doesn't merely give a blow-by-blow of the action - although action is certainly not lacking. He explores how the crusade got started and the varied motivations of the participants. Characters like Bohemond, Godfrey of Boullion and Peter the Hermit come to life and fascinate.
One of the great strengths of this book is Asbridge's discussion of the history of crusade scholarship - the ideas scholars both modern and medieval had about why the crusade happened and how it played out. I also found that some of the things I learned in college (and I didn't graduate that long ago!) about the crusades have been disproved by further scholarship.
I always have found it ironic that, in a later crusade, western knights pillaged Constantinople when they were supposedly Christians united against a common foe. The roots of breakdown of the relationship between the crusaders and the Byzantine empire are explored, answering my questions.
Asbridge is remarkably balanced and objective when discussing the sensitive area of Christian and Muslim relations. My only complaint is that a couple of times in the beginning of the book that the author includes some snide comments about Christianity.
Kudos to Thomas Asbridge! I hope he decides to write another book about the other, less "successful" crusades.
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75 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taking the Cross, October 23, 2004
This review is from: The First Crusade: A New History (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful book. The author, Thomas Asbridge, has written a taut, clear account of a time in history that, at least for me, has always seemed terribly murky and shrouded in fable.
The main strength of the book is its strong, direct, linear flow. The reader follows the First Crusade from its birth in Clermont and Pope Urban's preaching tour across France; to the Crusade's bloody finale and the Christian army's rampage through Jerusalem. Asbridge is, plain and simply, a good writer, and his vivid language bring the time and place to remarkable light. He has a good writer's eye for drama and the telling detail, and he brings in amazing writings from Crusade participants to flesh out the telling. Characters and events really came to life in my mind's eye while reading, whole landscapes and battles, so that I found myself setting the books aside more than once, simply to let the movie play for a moment. All in all, a great reading experience.
As the book progressed, I really came to visualize the Crusading armies marching from Western Europe across the known world, slowly transforming itself through the crucible of starvation, decease, horrific battles, and hardship. They had begun as an unorganized, splintered assortment of rabble and soldier, princes and false prophets, numbering perhaps 100,000 souls, barely able to mount a cohesive attack. By the time they had reached Lebanon, the army had hardened down to a pack of fast moving, ruthless veterans, sending terror through the Muslim world. Muslim cities, hearing of their barbarity, began begging for peace, throwing riches at them, usually to no avail.
Finally, this efficient juggernaut simply stormed against the heavily fortified Holy City of Jerusalem, taking it quickly and horribly despite overwhelming odds against them, then tore through the city like starved wolves, killing everything (including children and women). The image of the victorious crusaders, coming to fall in tearful prayer at the Holy Sepulchre, their faces and clothes still drenched in blood, is one of the most perfect in the book - at once capturing the strange amalgamation of genuine religious fervor and blood-curdling terror that marked the times. The author also poses many new ideas about the Crusades as well (such as his view of the effect of the religious relic, the Holy Lance, which the author feels had much less importance than is traditionally thought), which make this book good for both history novice and expert alike.
The author does a good job of viewing the times in a fair light. The magnificent achievement of the crusading armies is not understated. After reading what the soldiers and knights of this crusade went through, it is easier to understand why they truly considered many of their victories "miracles" and sure evidence of God's hand. The author does not overlook the grimmer realities of the First Crusade either, which can be summed up in this simple sentence near the end of the book: "In bitter revelation, these eastern Christians soon discovered that they had in fact been better off under Muslim rule than they were in a 'liberated' Jerusalem."
You will be glad you read this book. -Mykal Banta
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49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
400 Years of Missing Roots, September 29, 2007
The problem is with the sub-title: "The Roots of Conflict Between Christianity and Islam." Unfortunately far too many writers, teachers, students and even scholars share this misconception today. The Crusades were not the beginning of a millennia long antagonism between Christianity and Islam. Nor were the Crusades the cause of that hostility. To find the roots of the conflict one must go back another 461 years to the Islamic conquest of Christian Palestine and Syria (beginning in 634 CE). By the time Pope Urban II called upon the nobility of Europe (in 1095 CE) to undertake a Crusade for the liberation of the Holy Land from Muslim domination, Christendom had been continuously on the defensive against Islamic Jihadists for well over four centuries.
All the ancient sites of early Christianity from Antioch to Jerusalem to Alexandria had been conquered. All the Christian peoples of the Levant and North Africa as far west as the Iberian Peninsula had been subjugated and reduced to Dhimmitude - a third class status closely resembling the condition of the Jews in Germany during the 1930s. The Sassanian Persian Empire had likewise been overthrown and the ancient Zoroastrian religion all but eradicated. Later the Indian subcontinent would be conquered and the Hindu peoples subjugated and reduced to Dhimmitude. Buddhism was virtually wiped out in India by its Muslim conquerors. It survives today only in Tibet, China, Japan and Southeast Asia.
The simple fact is that Islam was by no means a peaceful or tolerant religion. On the contrary, as far as non Muslims were concerned, it was a militant, imperialist and tyrannical faith.
The Crusades were the first attempt on the part of Christian Europe since the Battle of Tours in 732 to push back the frontiers of Islamic conquest. The Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire had been at war with Muslim Jihadists in the East almost continuously since 634. Following the disastrous defeat of the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the Emperor Alexius Komnenus appealed to the West for help in turning back the tide of Islamic conquest. This was the proximate cause of the Pope's call for a Crusade - a far cry from the unprovoked act of Christian aggression against a peaceful Dar al Islam imagined by most contemporary Islamists and their western apologists.
The First Crusade was as much a political as a religious war. Coming to the assistance of the beleaguered Byzantine Empire was an act of farsighted and self interested statesmanship. By defeating the Islamic threat in the East the freedom of Western Europe was secured for another four centuries. It was only when the West failed to act - standing indifferently aside while the remnant of the Byzantine Empire was extinguished and its Christian inhabitants reduced to Dhimmitude in 1453 - that the West once again faced the threat of Muslim conquest. The floodgates of Islamic expansion were opened, and by 1529, and again in 1683, the invading Ottoman Turks reached the walls of Vienna - the very door-step of Western Europe.
The religious component of the First Crusade was the liberation of the Christian peoples of the Holy Land and the recovery of the sacred sites of Christianity. All wars need a higher purpose - a mission or cause to inspire the armies and win the support of the people. The liberation of the Holy Land was the mission that inspired the Crusading armies and the peoples of Christian Europe. But they also fought in defense of their co-religionists in the Byzantine Empire, and ultimately in defense of European Civilization itself. The Islamic Jihad was pushed back in Anatolia and the Levant and held in check for three hundred years - until the fall of the last Christian stronghold in the East in 1291. At the same time Sicily was recovered and the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) from its Islamic conquerors was begun. These Crusades enabled Christian Europe to live in safety and security for four hundred years - until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.
All too often the Crusades are trivialized by contemporary Islamists and "politically correct" western writers who wrench them out of their historic context and portray them as an act of unprovoked western aggression against a peaceful Islam. In fact they were a long overdue response to four hundred years of Islamic aggression against the Christian World.
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