Fourth Crusade,The:And the Sack of Constantinople - Hardcover

Phillips, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224069861 ISBN 13: 9780224069861

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

In April 1204, the armies of Western Christendom wrote another bloodstained chapter in the history of holy war. Two years earlier, aflame with religious zeal, the Fourth Crusade set out to free Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But after a dramatic series of events, the crusaders turned their weapons against the Christian city of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire and the greatest metropolis in the known world. The crusaders spared no one in their savagery: they murdered old and young, they raped women and girls - even nuns - in their frenzy. They also desecrated churches and plundered treasuries, and much of the city was put to the torch. In celebration of the victory, a prostitute from the crusader army climbed onto the altar of the Hagia Sophia and gyrated to obscene songs; barbarism cloaked in the mantle of religious warfare had swept aside one of the great civilisations of history. Some contemporaries were delighted: God had approved this punishment of the effeminate, treacherous Greeks; others expressed shock and disgust at this perversion of the crusading ideal. History has judged this as the crusade that went wrong and even today the violence and brutality of the western knights provokes deep ill-feeling from many Greek Orthodox towards the Catholic Church. In this remarkable new assessment of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips doesn't just follow the fortunes of the leading players, but explores the conflicting motives that drove the expedition to commit the most infamous massacre of the crusading movement and looks at the experience of crusading from the perspective of a knight.

About this title

Review:

"Enthralling...Nobody can read it without acquiring a better understanding of the Middle Ages and the medieval mind." (Allan Massie Literary Review)

"Persuasively reconstructs the imaginative world of the thirteenth century." (John Adamson Sunday Telegraph)

"By far the best book I have read on the Fourth Crusade...learned, comprehensive...well-written...exciting." (Norman F. Cantor)

"Stunning" (Financial Times)

Book Description:

A major work of history and the first trade book published on the subject of the crusade of 1204, which went so catastrophically wrong.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0224069861
• ISBN 13: 9780224069861
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400