The Crusades: History and Myths Revealed » (Special Value)

Michael Paine is an historian and author who also works as an academic bookseller and musician in the west of England. He is the author of books on ancient Greece and the Crusades, as well as works on Thomas Bernhard and Blaise Pascal.

For almost two hundred years, from 1095, the Crusades raged on and off dramatically ending with the fall of Acre in 1291, leaving us with some of the most striking images of the Middle Ages. This was the period that saw the birth and dominance of the Knights Templar, The Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights and also gave rise to such legendary figures as Saladin and Richard the Lionheart.

It was a period when enormous Christian armies, spurred on by an explosive mixture of religious fervour and a greed for treasure, waged war across much of the Middle East, the eventual result of which was paradoxically to see large tracts of Europe fall under Muslim rule for centuries.

The author investigates the motives that gave rise to the crusades and the truths behind the myths of chivalry and knighthood. He studies the often-complex relationships between the invaders and invaded and in doing so reveals the surprising extent to which many of the European knights were to adopt the ways of their Muslim opponents. The book traces the chronology from the point at which Pope Urban II set in motion the first crusade, through to the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the other crusader states and examines their struggle to survive. It looks at the success and failure of each of the crusades, including the bizarre children’s crusade,examines the truth and the myth behind the orders of military monks and also the sacking of great city of Byzantium in 1204.

The Crusades clearly explains the consequences of those great battles of the Middle Ages; both for those involved and for us today as the aftershocks of those monumental two centuries echo across time and history shaping relationships between Christians and Muslims to this day.