The Crusades - Zoe Oldenbourg

1st published in 1965, this is a brilliant portrait of the 1st 3 and Greatest - Crusades. This is the story of a Great adventure, told by Zoe Oldenbourg in a style that combines the historian's accuracy with the novelists understanding. The Crusades as she describes them were not a simply religious phenomenon, nor were they motivated by pure aggression. This was an age which gave birth to an emotional climate which led people from all walks of life - rich and poor, saints and sinners - to leave their homes and follow the unattainable idea of a heavenly Jerusalem on Earth. Zoe Oldenbourg evokes the whole structure of feudal society, and reveals the remarkable vitality and ingenuity of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, one of the more sophisticated achievements of the Middle ages. She presents the Great personalities behind the crusades - Bohemond, Tancred,Peter the Hermit, Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin - as human beings, with alltheir fascinating complexity of character. And she also describes the unimportant people, the countless individuals who pinned their hopes and faith on this new adventure in a Foreign land, who suffered and all too often died for something they probably never understood.