The Gamer's Quarter

[Toto]

i'd like to read more about the crusades, because it's a section of middle eastern history i'm completely in the dark about. any recommendations? i bought a book intended to be an "introduction" to the crusades. also my mum has a book called "the crusades through arab eyes" so i will borrow off that her when she comes back from the states. any help in this regard would be appreciated.

[seryogin]

Well, I hear a book by some dude named Preston, which chronicles the lives of Saladin and Richard the Lionheart is good.

There was also a massive 2000 page history that was published last year.
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[dhex]

which one? har har!

"crusade" is a good name to attach to stabbing the shit out of people cause that's just good marketing.

hokay let's take a look-see.

now since my thing is cathars, i have an awesome book on the albigensian crusades (the yellow cross) but that's probably not what you'd be into in this case. and no doubt there's a lot of shit out there, as "the crusades" in popular usage tend to be either simplistic or overwrought. it's a name given to a few hundred years worth of military campaigns against a number of targets. what people generally mean are the first few against the holy land, not stabbing french dualists or hussites and what have you.

so as for general crusading about town the only books i have, beyond general histories of warfare in europe, are an oxford illustrated book of the crusades (which is really a collection of essays but pretty solid) and a review copy of a newish book called the first crusade which honestly was a little too heavy on the secondary sources. now looking at amazon i really want the six volume history of the crusades series from u. of wisconsin press but i think almost 200 bucks is probably more than i should spend on books i have no place to put.

i have heard good things about the crusade through arab eyes so let us know how it is.
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[Swimmy]

Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds has a long and solid chapter on the crusades, and the whole book is online there. It analyzes it, obviously, as an event of extreme madness, but even if you don't buy that the whole thing was a special kind of mania, it's still got some great stuff in it. Especially read the part about Peter Bartholomew (Barthelemy in the text) and the Holy Lance. It's astounding, and kind of baffling. (Wouldn't the spear that pierced Christ be a cursed rather than a holy item?)

The book was written in 1851, so mind some of the stories may have been disproven by now. And it's not a scholarly work; it's pretty devoid of sources. But I've double-checked a lot of the things throughout the book and they broadly checked out, so I'll stick by the recommendation.

The rest of it is entertaining, too, check out the chapters on the politics of hair, popular admiration of great thieves, and relics.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[kuzdu]

I believe Warriors of God, by James Preston is the one you're talking about. It's good, though it covers a very specific portion of the Crusades.