1-The Crusades through Arab Eyes

Book Description
The author has combed the works of contemporary Arab chronicles of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants. He retells their story and offers insights into the historical forces that shape Arab and Islamic consciousness today.

2-The Atlas of the Crusades
Jonathan Riley-Smith (editor), 1990

From Book News, Inc.
Chronicles the 700-year history of Christendom's Holy Wars in text, 20 color photographs, and 150 high quality four-color maps. Includes a chronology, glossary, and detailed index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc.Portland, Or.

3-Chronicles of the Crusades

Two of the most readable accounts of the Crusades

These two accounts are highly readable, and it is wonderful to have them packaged together like this. Geoffreys chronicle of the 4th Crusade (the one that sacked Constantinople) is an awesome perspective on an often-maligned event. Jeans account of the 7th Crusade and the life of St. Louis is even better. With Jean we catch a rare glimpse of a sensitive warrior fully capable of expressing a wide range of moods and emotions. Both chronicles are well worth reading and will provide the historian and the non-historian alike with hours of enjoyment.

4-The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374

Theisland of Cyprus was conquered from its Byzantine ruler by Richard I of England in 1191 during the Third Crusade, and remained under western rule until the Ottoman conquest of 1570-1. From the 1190s until the 1470s the island was a kingdom governed by the members of the Lusignan family. The Lusignans, who hailed from Poitou in western France, imposed a new European landowning class and a Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy upon the indigenous Greek population. Nevertheless, their regime provided long periods of political stability and, until the late fourteenth century, a considerable period of prosperity. In the thirteenth century the island was closely linked to the Latin states in Syria and the Holy Land by political, social and economic ties and, with the fall of the last Christian strongholds to the Muslims in 1291, it became the most easterly outpost of Latin Christendom in the Mediterranean. This new study, which is based on original research, traces the fortunes of Cyprus under its royal dynasty and its role in the Crusades and in the confrontation of Christian and Muslim in the Near East until the 1370s. It is both a major contribution to the history of the Crusades in the Levant and the only scholarly study of medieval Cyprus currently available.

5-TheOxford Illustrated History of the Crusades

In 1095 Pope Urban II granted absolutions to whomever would reclaim the Holy Land for Christendom. With that assurance began two centuries of Crusades, and the story, in contemporary chronicles, artwork, and castellated ruins, is well treated in this interpretation of the movement to take up the cross. The subject has stirred from historiographical dormancy, says Editor Riley-Smith, who ably introduces the definitional questions--What is a Crusade? Who became a Crusader?--and then turns the chapters over to a dozen specialists. They analyze in detail the complex religious, economic, and military aspects, emphasizing the immediate instigation of one Crusade or another--often a Muslim counter-Crusade like Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem in 1187--while reiterating the profound piety and concern for salvation on which the whole process rested. It seems an odd combination of compassion and conquest, aptly expressed in knightly orders such as Hospitallers or the Teutonic Order, so elusive to the modern sensibility. These historians, though, dissolve that psychological barrier, interpreting what impelled the pilgrims, the Muslim reaction, and the political course of holy conflict up through the fall of the last Crusader polity--Malta--in 1798.Gilbert Taylor--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description
In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, the story of the Crusades is told as never before in an engrossing, authoritative, and comprehensive history that ranges from the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095 to the legacy of the crusading ideals and imagery that continues today. Here are the ideas of apologists, propagandists, and poets about the Crusades, as well as the perceptions and motives of the crusaders themselves and the means by which they joined the movement.
The authors describe the elaborate social and civic systems that arose to support the Crusades--taxation, for example, was formalized by the Church and monarchs to raise enormous funds needed to wage war on this scale. And here are vivid descriptions of the battles themselves, frightening, disorienting, and dangerous affairs, with keen and insightful commentary on the reactions of the Muslims to a Christian holy war. Extensively illustrated with hundreds of photographs, paintings, drawings, maps, chronologies, and a guide to further reading, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades even includes coverage of crusades outside the eastern Mediterranean region and post-medieval crusades.
From descriptions of the battles and homefront conditions, to a thorough evaluation of the clash (and coalescence) of cultures, to the legacy of the crusading movement that continues into our conflict-torn twentieth-century, to the enduring artistic and social changes that the Crusades wrought, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades offers an informative, engaging, and unsurpassed panorama of one of the great movements in western history.

Synopsis
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. This book is intended for students of medieval history from undergraduate level upwards; anyone with an interest in the Crusades, military history, or medieval history.

6-The First Crusade

Whether the Crusades are regarded as the most romantic of Christian expeditions, or the last of the barbarian invasions, they remain one of the most exciting and colourful adventure stories in history. An army of mounted warriors, travelling with peasants, merchants and artisans, faced a journey over hostile terrain, meeting with unforeseen antagonism, desert heat, and the constant struggle to feed and water their troops and horses. Remittance from penance, a desire to see the Holy Places, or greed for the power and booty to be captured in the East spurred the crusaders on towards the prize, be it spiritual or temporal, of the Holy City of Jerusalem. Their journey's spectacular culmination was the long siege ofJerusalem, at the end of which the Crusaders, by a brilliant tactical manoeuvre, broke down its defences and poured into the city which erupted in a bloody massacre. Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades is justly acclaimed as the most complete and fascinating account of the historic journey to save the Holy Lands from the infidel.