The First Crusade: The Call from the East - Hardcover

Frankopan, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847921558 ISBN 13: 9781847921550

Verlag: The Bodley Head Ltd, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In 1096, an expedition of extraordinary scale and ambition set off from Western Europe on a mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Three years later, after a journey which saw acute hardship, the most severe dangers and thousands of casualties, the knights of the First Crusade found themselves storming the fortifications and capturing the Holy City from its Muslim overlords. Against all the odds, the expedition had returned Jerusalem to Christian hands.

With its themes of the rise of the papacy, the confrontation between Christianity and Islam, the evolution of the concept of holy war, of knightly piety and religious devotion, the First Crusade is one of the best-known and most written-about events in history.

Yet this fascinating and innovative study, Peter Frankopan shifts the paradigm and asks vital questions that have never been posed before. Why was there an overwhelming desire to liberate Jerusalem in the mid-1090s, given that the city had been taken by the Muslims nearly 500 years earlier? What were the causes of the Crusade in the east which provoked such an overwhelming response in the west? What role was played by the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople in the genesis and execution of the expedition? In short, why was there a First Crusade?

Rather than concentrating on the pope and the knights of western Europe who have dominated the history of the First Crusade for centuries, Frankopan focuses on Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. He brilliantly restores the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos to the heart of the story, with a series of catastrophic events in the mid-1090s serving to paint a compelling and strikingly original picture of the expedition to Jerusalem that will change our understanding of the Crusades as a whole.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Frankopan is currently Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Faculty Fellow in Medieval and Modern Greek at Oxford University. He is Director-designate of the Centre for Byzantine Studies at Oxford. He took a First in History at Jesus College, Cambridge and completed his doctorate at Oxford, where he was Senior Scholar at Corpus Christi College, and Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College. He has lectured at leading universities all over the world, including at Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, NYU, King's College London, the Institute of Historical Research and at Princeton. His work has been widely published in leading academic journals, including English Historical Review, Journal of Medieval History, Crusades, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies and in many edited volumes. His revised translation of The Alexiad by Anna Komnene was published in 2009.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The Bodley Head Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847921558
• ISBN 13: 9781847921550
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar