Sir Steven Runciman explores the First Crusade and the foundation of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

A major new history of the Crusades with an unprecedented wide scope, told in a tableau of portraits of people on all sides of the wars, from the author of Powers and Thrones. For more than one thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies seized Jerusalem in 1099, they began the most notorious period of conflict between the two religions. Depending on who you ask, the fall of the holy city was either an inspiring legend or the greatest of horrors. In Crusaders, Dan Jones interrogates the many sides of the larger story, charting a deeply human and avowedly pluralist path through the crusading era. Expanding the usual timeframe, Jones looks to the roots of Christian-Muslim relations in the eighth century and tracks the influence of crusading to present day. He widens the geographical focus to far-flung regions home to so-called enemies of the Church, including Spain, North Africa, southern France, and the Baltic states. By telling intimate stories of individual journeys, Jones illuminates these centuries of war not only from the perspective of popes and kings, but from Arab-Sicilian poets, Byzantine princesses, Sunni scholars, Shi'ite viziers, Mamluk slave soldiers, Mongol chieftains, and barefoot friars. Crusading remains a rallying call to this day, but its role in the popular imagination ignores the cooperation and complicated coexistence that were just as much a feature of the period as warfare. The age-old relationships between faith, conquest, wealth, power, and trade meant that crusading was not only about fighting for the glory of God, but also, among other earthly reasons, about gold. In this richly dramatic narrative that gives voice to sources usually pushed to the margins, Dan Jones has written an authoritative survey of the holy wars with global scope and human focus.

Written by a team of leading scholars, this richly illustrated book, with over 200 colour and black and white pictures, presents an authoritative and comprehensive history of the Crusades from the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095 to the legacy of crusading ideas and imagery today.

In the book "The Story of the Crusades," E. M. Wilmot-Buxton retells and describes the most famous events from the crusades. This book revolves around the rise of Islam to the adventures of Bohemond and Richard the Lionheart to the ultimate fall of Constantinople. It is centered around faith, belief, righteousness, and other virtues to embrace.

The two hundred years which cover, roughly speaking, the actual period of the Holy War, are crammed with an interest that never grows dim. Gallant figures, noble knights, generous foes, valiant women, eager children, follow one another through these centuries, and form a pageant the colour and romance of which can never fade, for the circumstances were in themselves unique. The two great religious forces of the world—Christianity and Islam, the Cross and the Crescent—were at grips with one another, and for the first time the stately East, with its suggestion of mystery, was face to face with the brilliant West, wherein the civilisation and organisation of Rome were at last prevailing over the chaos of the Dark Ages...

The Crusades: A History is a comprehensive, single-volume history of the Crusades, from their beginnings in the eleventh century through to their decline and eventual ending at the close of the eighteenth century. As well as providing an account of the major Crusades, the book describes the organization of a Crusade, the experience of crusading and the Crusaders themselves.