Is there any good non-biased book on the Crusades?

Cafe Society
1

Is there any good, academic, non-biased book on the Crusades out there?

Too many books I have come across seem to bash either Christians or Muslims. I don’t want any biased bashing.

Thanks!

WRS

2

Some I’ve enjoyed: The Dream and the Tomb; Warriors of God; and The Crusades by, I kid you not, Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, who is a legitimate medieval scholar. I guess any author has some bias, but these books seemed to me pretty even-handed in their presentation of a complex subject.

I’d also recommend Arab Historians of the Crusades, contemporary accounts by Muslim writers who were there; obviously these accounts are themselves biased, but it’s an interesting perspective.

3

Can we really look to someone named Baldwin to provide non-biased accounts of the Crusades? :dubious:

4

Let me second “Warriors of God.” A great book that was recommened to me by a fellow Doper!

I finished the book as a great admirer of Saladin (the Caliph of the Muslim forces).

And though it is academic, it has a great narrative.

5

May I recommend “Dungeon Fire and Sword” By John J Robinson : http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0871316579/qid=1115575030/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/104-9628620-7872718?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Excellent historical narative on the Knights Templar in the crusades. It’s focus is essentially on that military order, but it covers all the crusades extensively and in an accurate, purely historical way.

6

The classic narrative is Steven Runciman’s three-volume history, which is published by Cambridge Universitry Press, though I see the first two at least appear to be out of print at the moment. A shame, but better libraries should have them.

A recent work worth checking out is The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives by Carole Hillenbrand ( 1999, Edinburgh University Press ). It’s not a survey history, exactly, but rather a large ( 600 pg. + ) examination of the Crusades through the eyes of the Muslims of the time. Quite well done.

  • Tamerlane
7

You’ve hit the mark – I took the name because I was reading The Dream and the Tomb when I first signed up for the SDMB. I was impressed by Baldwin IV; it was nice to see him finally portrayed on screen in The Kingdom of Heaven, which I just got back from seeing. (Better script than I expected; some events were compressed together, some people were combined, and there was that romance novel blacksmith-turned-knight nonsense, but overall it gave a remarkably good picture of the different perspectives involved and the moral choices that people made.)

Personally, I’m completely nonreligious, and realize that, then as now, there were both noble heroes and complete assholes among all the faiths involved; and of course people in general, as always, had their good and bad sides.