A beautifully illustrated and accessible account of the medieval crusades. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades provides an accessible introduction to the medieval crusades and to the changes and developments that have taken place in their study over the last twenty-five years. Written by fifteen experts in the field, it opens with the nature of western European society in the eleventh century that gave rise to the holy war ethos, where the Church promoted violence against the perceived enemies of the faith not as a distasteful necessity in a fallen world but as a meritorious act which attracted a spiritual reward. The launch of the First Crusade in 1095 and its capture of Jerusalem four year later is described, along with the subsequent expeditions to the Holy Land up to 1271. Later chapters focus on some of the less well-known aspects. These include the reaction in the Islamic world to the crusades; the impact on the Jewish communities of western Europe; the perspective from the Byzantine empire; the crusades launched against Christians, whether Orthodox Byzantines or Hussite and Albigensian heretics; the literature and songs to which the crusades gave rise and the physical monuments that can still be seen today. Crusading continued long after the fall of Acre, the last outpost in the Holy Land, in 1291, becoming increasingly defensive in the face of the expansion of the Ottoman empire, although Christian forays into Africa and the Americas in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were still regarded as crusades. Even in the nineteenth century, crusades were looked back on as a model for contemporary European imperialism.

"The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades brings together an outstanding group of scholars to discuss the very latest ideas about crusades, revealing them, through illustration and text, as complex phenomena which both reflected and affected all aspects of the lives of medieval people, East and West." - John France, author of Medieval France at War

"This impressively wide-ranging and in-depth collection of studies provides an accessible and absorbing introduction to the medieval crusades and many insights into recent developments in scholarship." - Helen J. Nicholson, author of Women and the Crusades