A major new history of the Crusades with an unprecedented wide
scope, told in a tableau of portraits of people on all sides of the
wars, from the author of Powers and Thrones. For more than one
thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side,
sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies
seized Jerusalem in 1099, they began the most notorious period of
conflict between the two religions. Depending on who you ask, the
fall of the holy city was either an inspiring legend or the
greatest of horrors. In Crusaders, Dan Jones interrogates the many
sides of the larger story, charting a deeply human and avowedly
pluralist path through the crusading era. Expanding the usual
timeframe, Jones looks to the roots of Christian-Muslim relations
in the eighth century and tracks the influence of crusading to
present day. He widens the geographical focus to far-flung regions
home to so-called enemies of the Church, including Spain, North
Africa, southern France, and the Baltic states. By telling intimate
stories of individual journeys, Jones illuminates these centuries
of war not only from the perspective of popes and kings, but from
Arab-Sicilian poets, Byzantine princesses, Sunni scholars, Shi'ite
viziers, Mamluk slave soldiers, Mongol chieftains, and barefoot
friars. Crusading remains a rallying call to this day, but its role
in the popular imagination ignores the cooperation and complicated
coexistence that were just as much a feature of the period as
warfare. The age-old relationships between faith, conquest, wealth,
power, and trade meant that crusading was not only about fighting
for the glory of God, but also, among other earthly reasons, about
gold. In this richly dramatic narrative that gives voice to sources
usually pushed to the margins, Dan Jones has written an
authoritative survey of the holy wars with global scope and human
focus.
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