The story of how a group of warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust, carved out new Christian-ruled states in the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary of all epics. The crusaders' stunning initial success started a sequence of great Crusades, each with its own story, that fundamental[...]

'O day so ardently desired! O time of times the most memorable! O deed before all other deeds!' The fall of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 to an exhausted and starving army of Western European soldiers was one of the most extraordinary events of the Middle Ages. It was both the climax of a great wa[...]

The crusades influenced western European society in the middle ages far beyond the military campaigns themselves. Reactions and involvement did not always follow the assumptions of ideology or supporters, medieval or modern. In this wide ranging collection of articles spanning thirty years, Christop[...]