CRUSADERS

AN EPIC HISTORY OF THE WARS FOR THE HOLY LANDS

‘The Crusaders are resonant and relevant today in a way that they were not before the 9/11 terror attacks,’ James Barr opined in the Times. ‘Writing well about such a big subject

is tricky’, he continued, but Jones ‘embraces the complexity’. ‘This is rollercoaster history; had I not been taking notes I would struggle to recall each twist and turn of the ride. A storyteller rather than an analyst, with a nose for the dramatic, disgusting and bizarre, Jones might not be the right man to get a call from M15. But every page of his extraordinary book provides vivid evidence of the Crusades’ continuing ability to mesmerise, including those with murderous intent.’

‘Jones has a brilliant eye for telling anecdote from the original sources, which bring the extraordinary centuries of Europe’s crusades to fresh and compelling life,’ Christopher Hart enthused in the Sunday Times. ‘We’ve had plenty of books about the period in recent years, but for sheer narrative brio and readability Jones’s sweeping, energetic account is surely the best.’ He ‘homes in on particularly thrilling set-pieces – voyages, battles, sieges – and some of the outsized and unforgettable protagonists who dominated their times, as well as various minor characters’. Characters such as the teenager Sigurd I of Norway, who ‘sailed with 60 ships and 10,000 men ... to serve this new god, Christ, and to get rich or die tryin’.’

Dan Jones himself narrowly escaped a terrorist attack, reminding us the ‘crusader’ war is far from over.

‘Reading about the medieval crusades, one is struck by how irrational and violent our forbears could be,’ Hart concluded, ‘The mistake is to think that much has changed in the intervening centuries.’