What were the 'Crusades'? Were the great Christian expeditions to invade the Holy Land in fact 'Crusades' at all? In this radical and compelling new treatment, Christopher Tyerman questions the very nature of our belief in the Crusades, showing how historians writing more than a century after the First Crusade retrospectively invented the idea of the 'Crusade'. Using these much later sources, all subsequent historians up to the present day have fallen into the same trap of following propaganda from a much later period to explain events that were understood quite differently by...

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...

'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...