La Primera Cruzada

In November 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a momentous speech that lit the flame of Christian fervor in the West. The Christians of the East were victims of terrible violence, Jerusalem had been in the hands of the Muslim enemy for centuries and it was imperative to recover it. Thousands of men, from knights to the dispossessed, responded to Urban's call to arms with the largest military mobilization since the fall of the Roman Empire: the First Crusade was born. In this book, Thomas Asbridge, one of the most prominent medieval historians on the international scene, offers us the gripping account of the titanic undertaking that led Western Christians across the known world driven by devotion and ambition. We will accompany the host in Constantinople, an exotic and opulent city that captivated them, in the siege of Nicea, in the harsh summers and winters in the desert and in the decisive battle of Antioch, until reaching the unexpected outcome of the crusade in the City. Santa Drawing on his deep knowledge of primary and Middle Eastern sources and combining the narrative pulse of a novelist with his scholarship as a historian, Asbridge provides us with an adventure filled with miraculous victories, greedy princes, unbridled passions and large-scale barbarity that changed the world. East-West relations forever.