Chronicles of the First Crusade

'O day so ardently desired! O time of times the most memorable! O deed before all other deeds!' 
 
The fall of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 to an exhausted and starving army of Western European soldiers was one of the most extraordinary events of the Middle Ages.It was both the climax of a great wave of visionary Christian fervour and the beginning of what proved to be a futile and abortive attempt to implant a new European kingdom in an overwhelmingly Muslim world.The legacy of these events continues to be argued over more than nine centuries later.This remarkable collection of first-hand accounts brings to life the First Crusade in all its cruelty and strangeness.

Of all the modern histories of the crusades it is the shrewdest, the most reliable and the most complete [Praise for God's War]

Christopher Tyerman is a Fellow and Tutor in History at Hertford College, Oxford and Lecturer in Medieval History at New College Oxford. He has written extensively on the crusades, most recently God's War: A New History of the Crusades (2006) and The Debate on the Crusades (2011).

A New History of the Crusades

God's War

The story of how a group of warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust, carved out new Christian-ruled states in the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary of all epics. The crusaders' stunning initial success started a sequence of great Crusades, each with its own story, that fundamentally shaped the Christian and Muslim worlds for two centuries, until the last Crusader castles were finally expunged. The energy and commitment that sent army after army into the eastern Mediterranean also led to the invasion and conversion of Central and Baltic Europe, Spain, Portugal, the destruction of the Cathars in Provence and the settlement of America. Told with great verve and authority, God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating but also horrifying story. 
 
&lsquo;We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades&hellip;Tyerman tells us how the Church set about preaching the crusades, exploiting the perennial pessimism and guilt of the European nobility of the Middle Ages. He shows how crusading ideology penetrated the religious sensibility of the period, as well as its secular fiction and poetry&hellip;Of all the modern histories of the crusades it is the shrewdest, the most reliable and the most complete.&rsquo; &ndash; The Spectator

14,000 hardcovers sold to date, including 9,000 in the UK Trade

Christopher Tyerman is a Fellow in History at Hertfod College, Oxford, and a Lecturer in Medieval History at New College, Oxford. He is the author of England and the Crusades.

Christopher Tyerman

Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages

'Wonderfully written and characteristically brilliant' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads 
 
'Elegant, readable ... an impressive synthesis ... Not many historians could have done it' - Jonathan Sumption, Spectator 
 
'Tyerman's book is fascinating not just for what it has to tell us about the Crusades, but for the mirror it holds up to today's religious extremism' - Tom Holland, Spectator 
 
Thousands left their homelands in the Middle Ages to fight wars abroad. But how did the Crusades actually happen? From recruitment propaganda to raising money, ships to siege engines, medicine to the power of prayer, this vivid, surprising history shows holy war - and medieval society - in a new light.

Christopher Tyerman

How to Plan a Crusade

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