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The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam
Asbridge
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Description for The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam
Paperback. The first new history of the First Crusade since Steve Runciman's classic trilogy on the Crusades written in the 1950's. Num Pages: 448 pages, Illustrations, maps. BIC Classification: 3H; HBJD; HBLC; HRAX. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 233 x 158 x 26. Weight in Grams: 636.
In 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 eternal paradise in Heaven. But when a hardened core finally reached Jerusalem in 1099 they unleahsed an unholy wave of brutality, slaughtering thousands of Muslims--men, women, and children--all in the name of Christianity. The First Crusade marked a watershed in relations between Islam and the West, a conflict that set these two world religions on a course toward deep-seated animosity and enduring enmity. The chilling reverberations of this earth-shattering clash still echo in the world today.
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2005
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Condition
New
Number of Pages
448
Place of Publication
New York, United States
ISBN
9780195189056
SKU
V9780195189056
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-4
About Asbridge
Thomas Asbridge is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London.
Reviews for The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam
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 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
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