Throughout the Middle Ages crusading was justified by religious ideology, but the resulting military campaigns were fueled by concrete objectives: land, resources, power, reputation. Crusaders amassed possessions of all sorts, from castles to reliquaries. Campaigns required material funds and equipment, while conquests produced bureaucracies, taxation, economic exploitation, and commercial regulation. Wealth sustained the Crusades while material objects,...

MEDIEVAL HISTORY. In 1095 Pope Urban II granted absolution to anyone who would fight to reclaim the Holy Land. With God at their backs, the first Christian crusaders embarked on an unprecedented religious war. While addressing the contribution of flamboyan characters like Saladin and Richard the Lionheart, Malcolm Billings also look at the experiences of the peasants, knights and fighting monks who took the cross for Christendom and the Holy Warriors...

Overview: 'God wills it!' With that cry of medieval knights a new era in European history began. Across Europe a wave of pious enthusiasm led many thousands to leave their homes, family, and friends to march to a distant land in a great struggle for Christ. Yet the crusades were more than simply a holy war. They represent a synthesis of attitudes and values that were uniquely medieval-so medieval, in fact, that the crusading movement is rarely understood...

Presents the controversial argument that the Crusades were a justified war against Muslim terror and aggression and reviews the history of the seven major crusades from 1095 to 1291.

"How were the crusades, and the crusaders, narrated, described, and romanticised by the various communities that experienced or remembered them? This Companion provides a critical overview of the diverse and multilingual literary output connected with crusading over the last millennium, from the first writings which sought to understand and report on what was happening, to contemporary Medievalism in which crusading is a potent image of holy war and...

"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...

One of the most feared warriors of the Knights Templar, Arn de Gotha, after being exiled for twenty years, returns home to Sweden only to find his beloved homeland torn apart by warring clans and embarks on a new quest--to create a new society and establish lasting peace.

When Garron of Kersey returns home to claim his title as Baron Wareham, he's shocked to find Wareham Castle very nearly destroyed by a man called the Black Demon. According to the last starving servants in the castle, the Black Demon was looking for gold belonging to Garron's brother Arthur. Among his remaining servants is the enigmatic Merry. Together they bring Wareham back to its former splendor. But that is only the beginning. Did Arthur really...