This book takes a decidedly different look at the crusades in that the focus is upon the crusaders and not upon the political or religious causes of the crusades. I concentrate on the men and women themselves, some of whom sacrificed family, lands, titles, wealth, and their lives to go forth for what they believed was a holy cause. Admittedly, some sought those very things and that was their motivation. Some were great. Others had greatness thrust upon them. Some were failures.This is not a book about the rise and fall of kingdoms, colonization, societal changes, the Great Schism, but a book of the lives of the people who sacrificed much to gain either eternal or worldly riches, glory, or found dynasties.The purpose of this book is to breathe some life into the people who went on crusade. Their motivations varied, but included a quest for heaven, earthly glory, plunder, or to simply escape overbearing in-laws. Over the course of these pages, I will present biographies of approximately five hundred crusaders that I have identified. Longer biographies will be presented for those who are most famous (or infamous) while others will only have a paragraph or two and are people who have been generally lost in the mists of time over the six to nine centuries since they lived and died. A full biography of the most famous is beyond the scope of this work, but will hopefully motivate further, detailed study.The crusades lasted from the middle of the twelfth century to the sixteenth century. The crusades to the Holy Land are known to almost all people. Many of the places that are in the news in 2010-2020 are the same ones that haunted Europe from 1050 to 1350. However, the crusades were not limited to the Holy Land. The Albigensian Crusade in the area known as Languedoc where southwestern France and northeastern Spain join on the Mediterranean coast saw significant campaigns, not against the Saracens, but against the Cathars who were considered heretics.Even before the First Crusade to the Holy Land was called for Christians in the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula had been fighting against Moslem invaders for over two hundred years. Though not considered a crusade, the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D. stopped the advance of Islam into the heart of France and Europe. However, much of what is modern Spain had been overrun and the small Christian kingdoms there were limited to a narrow strip of land on the northern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The Reconquest or "La Reconquista" of the Iberian Peninsula is known to students of medieval history. However, the Northern Crusades are little known in the English-speaking world. This book will touch on them. During the crusading period, the fight against pagans that were much closer than the Holy Land gained the same papal indulgence, sanctions, and sanctifications as those waging Holy War in Palestine. I have been a student of history my entire life. Even as a little boy my imagination was filled with dreams and images of knights in shining armor. There are many books and sources which cover the campaigns, politics, and the religious fervor on both sides of this conflict. I will touch on these subjects only briefly to give some background to the times in which these men and women crusaders fought.Any errors in this work are entirely my fault and not the fault of the reference books I have consulted.I hope you find these people as interesting and exciting as I do. Source documentation is presented for each person listed.

Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the crusades and present the memory of crusading in the modern period as a productive, exciting, and much needed area of investigation. Crusading was a part of the rich tapestry of family history, with tales of crusading developed as evidence of heroic endeavour to enhance family prestige. Lists of crusaders were published to satisfy this market and heraldry was a visible means of displaying such lineage. Drawing on extensive research and previously untapped sources, this book charts continuing British interest in the crusades, focusing on the nineteenth century. The volume discusses what was available to read on the subject and how this was discussed in numerous journals. Set in the British context of growing local and regional interest in history and archaeology, the study also considers the physical artefacts associated with the crusades. Tales of the Crusaders – Remembering the Crusades in Britain is the ideal resource for students and scholars of the history of memory and crusades history in a British context.

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.

Crusading in the twelfth century was less a series of discrete events than a manifestation of an endemic phenomenon that touched almost every aspect of life at that time. The defense of Christendom and the recovery of the Holy Land were widely-shared objectives. Thousands of men, and not a few women, participated in the crusades, including not only those who took the cross but many others who shared the costs and losses, as well as the triumphs of the crusaders. This volume contains not a narrative account of the crusades in the twelfth century, but a group of studies illustrating many aspects of crusading that are often passed over in narrative histories, including the courses and historiography of the crusades, their background, ideology, and finances, and how they were seen in Europe. Included are revised and updated versions of Giles Constable's classic essays on medieval crusading, along with two major new studies on the cross of the crusaders and the Fourth Crusade, and two excursuses on the terminology of crusading and the numbering of the crusades. They provide an opportunity to meet some individual crusaders, such as Odo Arpinus, whose remarkable career carried him from France to the east and back again, and whose legendary exploits in the Holy Land were recorded in the Old French crusade cycle. Other studies take the reader to the boundaries of Christendom in Spain and Portugal and in eastern Germany, where the campaigns against the Wends formed part of the wider crusading movement. Together they show the range and depth of crusading at that time and its influence on the broader history of the period.

From the bestselling author of The Templars. 'Voyages, battles, sieges and slaughter: Dan Jones's tumultuous and thrilling history of the crusades is one of the best' SUNDAY TIMES. 'A powerful story brilliantly told. Dan Jones writes with pace, wit and insight' HELEN CASTOR. 'A fresh and vibrant account of a conflict that raged across medieval centuries' JONATHAN PHILLIPS. Dan Jones, best-selling chronicler of the Middle Ages, turns his attention to the history of the Crusades – the sequence of religious wars fought between the late eleventh century and late medieval periods, in which armies from European Christian states attempted to wrest the Holy Land from Islamic rule, and which have left an enduring imprint on relations between the Muslim world and the West. From the preaching of the First Crusade by Pope Urban II in 1095 to the loss of the last crusader outpost in the Levant in 1302-03, and from the taking of Jerusalem from the Fatimids in 1099 to the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, Crusaders tells a tale soaked in Islamic, Christian and Jewish blood, peopled by extraordinary characters, and characterised by both low ambition and high principle. Dan Jones is a master of popular narrative history, with the priceless ability to write page-turning narrative history underpinned by authoritative scholarship. Never before has the era of the Crusades been depicted in such bright and striking colours, or their story told with such gusto. PRAISE FOR THE TEMPLARS: 'A fresh, muscular and compelling history of the ultimate military-religious crusading order, combining sensible scholarship with narrative swagger' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE. 'Dan Jones has created a gripping page-turner out of the dramatic history of the Templars' PHILIPPA GREGORY. 'The story of the Templars, the ultimate holy warriors, is an extraordinary saga of fanaticism, bravery, treachery and betrayal, and in Dan Jones they have a worthy chronicler. The Templars is a wonderful book!' BERNARD CORNWELL. 'Told with all Jones's usual verve and panache, this is a dramatic and gripping tale of courage and stupidity, faith and betrayal' MAIL ON SUNDAY. 'This is another triumphant tale from a historian who writes as addictively as any page-turning novelist' OBSERVER. 'The Templars is exhilarating, epic, sword-swinging history' TLS. 'Jones carries the Templars through the crusades with clarity and verve. This is unabashed narrative history, fast-paced and full of incident... Jones tells their story extremely well' SUNDAY TIMES.