First Crusade and the Way to Jerusalem

THE FIRST CRUSADE AND THE WAY TO JERUSALEMThey were told to march two thousand miles to reclaim a city most of them had never seen. They went anyway.Nine hundred years ago, a preacher stood before a crowd in a French field and called ordinary men and women to Jerusalem.What followed was one of the most extraordinary—and brutal—military expeditions of the Middle Ages.THE FIRST CRUSADE AND THE WAY TO JERUSALEM tells the story of the three years that transformed a desperate religious pilgrimage into the conquest of Jerusalem.The journey began in disaster. Before the great armies had even left Europe, thousands of poorly armed peasants marched east and were destroyed. The knights who followed faced their own catastrophe: starvation, disease, betrayal, and enemies who repeatedly seemed capable of annihilating them.At Antioch, the crusaders endured a siege so terrible that starving soldiers resorted to eating leather. Then, just as an enormous relief army approached, hope appeared in the form of a mysterious relic. Against seemingly impossible odds, the starving survivors marched out to meet an enemy many times their size.They won.And the road to Jerusalem opened.Along the way, you will meet Bohemond of Taranto, the brilliant and calculating Norman prince who saw opportunity in the chaos; Peter the Hermit, the charismatic preacher who helped unleash a movement he could not control; and Baldwin of Boulogne, a younger son who would rise from relative obscurity to become the ruler of a new kingdom.You will see the Crusade from every side: through the eyes of the European knights and pilgrims who fought and marched, the Byzantine rulers who watched them cross into the East, and the Muslim chroniclers who witnessed the invasion of their lands.This is not a romanticized tale of holy knights.The Crusaders were driven by faith, ambition, greed, fear, political calculation, and the hope of salvation—and often by several of these motives at once. Their victories came at an appalling human cost.The final assault on Jerusalem was one of the bloodiest moments of the entire expedition. Even some of the men who took part in it were shaken by what followed.Yet somehow, against odds that should have destroyed them again and again, the Crusaders reached their destination.They had begun as pilgrims. They ended as conquerors.Written as narrative history rather than a textbook, THE FIRST CRUSADE AND THE WAY TO JERUSALEM brings the people, battles, sieges, betrayals, and religious fervor of the First Crusade vividly to life.Drawing on eyewitness accounts from the chroniclers who accompanied the expedition, alongside Byzantine and Islamic sources that reveal how the invasion looked from the other side, this book reconstructs the road to Jerusalem as the people who lived it experienced it: terrifying, exhilarating, brutal, and utterly unpredictable.Three years. Two thousand miles. One city that changed the medieval world forever.