The Banners of Jerusalem

On a November morning in 1095, in a field outside the French town of Clermont, Pope Urban II preached a sermon that set the world on fire. Within a year, tens of thousands - princes and peasants, knights and pilgrims - had sewn crosses to their shoulders and set out to march three thousand miles to Jerusalem. Against every expectation, they took it. What followed was two centuries of war for the Holy Land: kingdoms built and lost, sieges of unimaginable savagery, moments of astonishing chivalry between enemies, and a collision of three civilizations whose echoes have never faded.

Here is the whole sweep of the crusading age: the People's Crusade and the massacres of the Rhineland; the starving miracle at Antioch and the blood-soaked triumph at Jerusalem; the warrior-monks of the Temple and the Hospital; Saladin and the catastrophe at Hattin; Richard the Lionheart's duel for the coast; the crusade that sacked Christian Constantinople; Francis of Assisi preaching in the sultan's tent; the excommunicated emperor who won Jerusalem back with words alone; Saint Louis in chains in Egypt; and the last stand at Acre in 1291, when the dream drowned in smoke and the sea. Beyond the Holy Land it follows the cross to the Baltic, to Spain, and down the long centuries of memory to our own time.

Drawing on chronicles from both sides of the war - Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew - this is the story of the crusades told whole: neither romance nor indictment, but the gripping, terrible, human truth of what happens when men become certain they know what God wills.