Chronicles of the First Crusade - Christopher Tyerman

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Résumé :
The gripping story of the First Crusade, as witnessed firsthand

The fall of Jerusalem in 1099 to an army of exhausted and starving western European soldiers was one of the most extraordinary events in history-with a legacy that remains controversial more than nine centuries later. This remarkable collection contains firsthand accounts from the knights, religious leaders, and peasants who experienced the First Crusade in all its cruelty and strangeness. Edited with an introduction and notes by one of the foremost experts on the Crusades, Chronicles of the First Crusade is a comprehensive look at the climax of Christian fervor and the record of an ultimately futile attempt to implant a European kingdom in an overwhelmingly Muslim world.

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Biographie:
Christopher Tyerman is a Fellow and Tutor in History at Hertford College, Oxford and Lecturer in Medieval History at New College Oxford. He has written extensively on the crusades, most recently God's War: A New History of the Crusades (2006) and The Debate on the Crusades (2011)....

Sommaire:
The story of the First Crusade as witnessed by contemporary writers '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 wave of visionary Christian fervour and the beginning of what proved to be a futile and abortive attempt to implant a new European kingdom of heaven in an overwhelmingly Muslim world. This remarkable collection brings together a wide variety of contemporary accounts of the First Crusade including Pope Urban II's initial call to arms of 1095 as well as the first-hand writings of priests knights a Jewish pilgrim a destitute noblewoman an Iraqi poet and the historian Anna Comnena. Together they provide a vivid and nuanced picture of the First Crusade and the people who were swept up in it. Edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Tyerman...

Of all the modern histories of the crusades it is the shrewdest, the most reliable and the most complete [Praise for God's War] The Spectator