Rousing....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 ... Read morereligious 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
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