The Crusades

Originally published in French (Les Croisades) in 1965, Russian émigré Oldenbourg has presented both casual history readers and earnest scholars with a sprawling epic that beautifully captures the spirit of the movement that so transformed religion and the Middle Ages. A brisk opening, in which she......more

Crusades were military missions pronounced by the Papacy. The reconciliation of the teachings of the pacific Jesus with the secular interests of Rome was, of course, a stretch, but the sin of it all was entirely mitigated by indulgences proferred participants by the Pope. Zoe Oldenbourg has covered......more

I was so impressed by the clearness, scholarship and insight displayed in the first chapter that I went back immediately and read it again. There are whole subjects, scholars' lifetimes, in some of her clauses. Concentrating on the period of the first three Crusades Oldenbourg manages to bring out,......more

Zoe Oldenbourg's The Crusades provides a highly readable chronicle of Christian efforts to conquer the Holy Land between in the 11th and 12th Centuries. Oldenbourg's work is an old-fashioned narrative history, crisply written yet also packed with detail and clever analysis. Although she wrote in 196......more