Download or read book How to Plan a Crusade written by Christopher Tyerman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the wars and conquests initiated by the First Crusade and its successors is itself so compelling that most accounts move quickly from describing the Pope's calls to arms to the battlefield. In this highly original and enjoyable new book, Christopher Tyerman focuses on something obvious but overlooked: the massive, all-encompassing, and hugely costly business of actually preparing a crusade. The efforts of many thousands of men and women, who left their lands and families in Western Europe, and marched off to a highly uncertain future in the Holy Land and elsewhere have never been sufficiently understood. Their actions raise a host of compelling questions about the nature of medieval society.How to Plan a Crusade is remarkably illuminating on the diplomacy, communications, propaganda, use of mass media, medical care, equipment, voyages, money, weapons, wills, ransoms, animals, and the power of prayer during this dynamic era. It brings to life an extraordinary period of history in a new and surprising way.
Download or read book The Caped Crusade written by Glen Weldon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since his debut in Detective Comics #27, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop Art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim ninja of the urban night. Yet, despite these endless transformations, he remains one of our most revered cultural icons. [In this book, Weldon provides a] look at the cultural history of Batman and his fandom"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The First Crusade written by Thomas Asbridge and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A nuanced and sophisticated analysis... Exhilarating' Sunday Telegraph Nine hundred years ago, one of the most controversial episodes in Christian history was initiated. The Pope stated that, in spite of the apparently pacifist message of the New Testament, God actually wanted European knights to wage a fierce and bloody war against Islam and recapture Jerusalem. Thus was the First Crusade born. Focusing on the characters that drove this extraordinary campaign, this fascinating period of history is recreated through awe-inspiring and often barbaric tales of bold adventure while at the same time providing significant insights into early medieval society, morality and mentality. The First Crusade marked a watershed in relations between Islam and the West, a conflict that set these two world religions on a course towards deep-seated animosity and enduring enmity. The chilling reverberations of this earth-shattering clash still echo in the world today. '[Asbridge] balances persuasive analysis with a flair for conveying with dramatic power the crusaders' plight' Financial Times
Download or read book The Children s Crusade written by Ann Packer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Ann Packer, a “tour de force family drama” (Elle) that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades. Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of his future family, Bill buys the property and proposes to Penny Greenway, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life appeals to him. In less than a decade they have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, overwhelmed and undersatisfied, chafing at the conventions confining her. Years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence sets off a struggle over the family’s future. One by one, they tell their stories, which reveal Packer’s “great compassion for her characters, with their ancient injuries, their blundering desires. The way she tangles their perspectives perfectly, painfully captures the tumult of selves within a family” (MORE Magazine). Reviewers have praised Ann Packer’s “brilliant ear for character” (The New York Times Book Review) and her “naturalist’s vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented” (The New Yorker). Her talents are on dazzling display in The Children’s Crusade, “an absorbing novel that celebrates family even as it catalogs its damages” (People, Book of the Week). This is a “superb storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle), Ann Packer’s most deeply affecting book yet, “tragic and utterly engrossing” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
Download or read book Sacred Plunder written by David M. Perry and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sacred Plunder, David Perry argues that plundered relics, and narratives about them, played a central role in shaping the memorial legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the development of Venice’s civic identity in the thirteenth century. After the Fourth Crusade ended in 1204, the disputes over the memory and meaning of the conquest began. Many crusaders faced accusations of impiety, sacrilege, violence, and theft. In their own defense, they produced hagiographical narratives about the movement of relics—a medieval genre called translatio—that restated their own versions of events and shaped the memory of the crusade. The recipients of relics commissioned these unique texts in order to exempt both the objects and the people involved with their theft from broader scrutiny or criticism. Perry further demonstrates how these narratives became a focal point for cultural transformation and an argument for the creation of the new Venetian empire as the city moved from an era of mercantile expansion to one of imperial conquest in the thirteenth century.
Download or read book The First Crusade written by Peter Frankopan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to tradition, the First Crusade began at Pope Urban II’s instigation and culminated in July 1099, when western European knights liberated Jerusalem. But what if the First Crusade’s real catalyst lay far to the east of Rome? Countering nearly a millennium of scholarship, Peter Frankopan reveals the First Crusade’s untold history.
Download or read book Criticism of Crusading written by Elizabeth Siberry and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1985 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike most historical works on criticism of crusading, which focus on the 13th century, this detailed study traces the subject from the time of the First Crusade to the Second Council of Lyons. Drawing on a wide range of Latin and vernacular sources, Siberry argues that most critics were actually more concerned with abuses of crusading ideals and practices than with their justification, and even made suggestions for improvement. Each chapter covers a different type of criticism--from bitter criticism of those who were capable of fighting but failed to fulfill their vows to complaints about the behavior of the crusading armies--and assesses its significance. Siberry refutes many scholarly misconceptions about the nature and extent of the critics' protests, and concludes that there was still much popular enthusiasm for crusading in 1274.
Download or read book American Crusade written by Benjamin J. Wetzel and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When is a war a holy crusade? And when does theology cause Christians to condemn violence? In American Crusade, Benjamin Wetzel argues that the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I shared a cultural meaning for white Protestant ministers in the United States, who considered each conflict to be a modern-day crusade. American Crusade examines the "holy war" mentality prevalent between 1860 and 1920, juxtaposing mainline Protestant support for these wars with more hesitant religious voices: Catholics, German-speaking Lutherans, and African American Methodists. The specific theologies and social locations of these more marginal denominations made their ministries highly critical of the crusading mentality. Religious understandings of the nation, both in support of and opposed to armed conflict, played a major role in such ideological contestation. Wetzel's book questions traditional periodizations and suggests that these three wars should be understood as a unit. Grappling with the views of America's religious leaders, supplemented by those of ordinary people, American Crusade provides a fresh way of understanding the three major American wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Download or read book The Crusades Christianity and Islam written by Jonathan Riley-Smith and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claiming that many in the West lack a thorough understanding of crusading, Jonathan Riley-Smith explains why and where the Crusades were fought, identifies their architects, and shows how deeply their language and imagery were embedded in popular Catholic thought and devotional life.
Download or read book Antifascism written by Paul Gottfried and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A conservative take on the antifascist movement Antifascism argues that current self-described antifascists are not struggling against a reappearance of interwar fascism, and that the Left that claims to be opposing fascism has little in common with any earlier Left, except for some overlap with critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. Paul Gottfried looks at antifascism from its roots in early twentieth-century Europe to its American manifestation in the present. The pivotal development for defining the present political spectrum, he suggests, has been the replacement of a recognizably Marxist Left by an intersectional one. Political and ideological struggles have been configured around this new Left, which has become a dominant force throughout the Western world. Gottfried discusses the major changes undergone by antifascist ideology since the 1960s, fascist and antifascist models of the state and assumptions about human nature, nationalism versus globalism, the antifascism of the American conservative establishment, and Antifa in the United States. Also included is an excursus on the theory of knowledge presented by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. In Antifascism Gottfried concludes that promoting a fear of fascism today serves the interests of the powerful—in particular, those in positions of political, journalistic, and educational power who want to bully and isolate political opponents. He points out the generous support given to the intersectional Left by multinational capitalists and examines the movement of the white working class in Europe—including former members of Communist parties—toward the populist Right, suggesting this shows a political dynamic that is different from the older dialectic between Marxists and anti-Marxists.
Download or read book Accursed Tower written by Roger Crowley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city of Acre, powerfully fortified and richly provisioned, was the last crusader stronghold. When it fell in 1291, two hundred years of Christian crusading in the Holy Land came to a bloody end. With his customary narrative brilliance and immediacy, Roger Crowley chronicles the tumultuous and violent attack on Acre, the heaviest bombardment before the age of gunpowder, which left this once great Mediterranean city a crumbling ruin.The ‘Accursed Tower’ was the focal point of this siege. As the last garrison of the Crusader defences, it came to symbolise the disintegration of the old world and the rise of a new era of Islamic jihad. Crowley’s narrative is based on forensic research, drawing heavily on little known first hand sources, both Christian and Arabic. This is a fast-paced and gripping account of a pivotal moment in world history.
Download or read book A Twentieth Century Crusade written by Giuliana Chamedes and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive history of the Vatican’s agenda to defeat the forces of secular liberalism and communism through international law, cultural diplomacy, and a marriage of convenience with authoritarian and right-wing rulers. After the United States entered World War I and the Russian Revolution exploded, the Vatican felt threatened by forces eager to reorganize the European international order and cast the Church out of the public sphere. In response, the papacy partnered with fascist and right-wing states as part of a broader crusade that made use of international law and cultural diplomacy to protect European countries from both liberal and socialist taint. A Twentieth-Century Crusade reveals that papal officials opposed Woodrow Wilson’s international liberal agenda by pressing governments to sign concordats assuring state protection of the Church in exchange for support from the masses of Catholic citizens. These agreements were implemented in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, as well as in countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In tandem, the papacy forged a Catholic International—a political and diplomatic foil to the Communist International—which spread a militant anticommunist message through grassroots organizations and new media outlets. It also suppressed Catholic antifascist tendencies, even within the Holy See itself. Following World War II, the Church attempted to mute its role in strengthening fascist states, as it worked to advance its agenda in partnership with Christian Democratic parties and a generation of Cold War warriors. The papal mission came under fire after Vatican II, as Church-state ties weakened and antiliberalism and anticommunism lost their appeal. But—as Giuliana Chamedes shows in her groundbreaking exploration—by this point, the Vatican had already made a lasting mark on Eastern and Western European law, culture, and society.
Download or read book Crusade in Europe written by Dwight D. Eisenhower and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic of World War II literature, an incredibly revealing work that provides a near comprehensive account of the war and brings to life the legendary general and eventual president of the United States. • "Gives the reader true insight into the most difficult part of a commander's life." —The New York Times Five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower was arguably the single most important military figure of World War II. Crusade in Europe tells the complete story of the war as he planned and executed it. Through Eisenhower's eyes the enormous scope and drama of the war--strategy, battles, moments of great decision--become fully illuminated in all their fateful glory. Penned before his Presidency, this account is deeply human and helped propel him to the highest office. His personal record of the tense first hours after he had issued the order to attack leaves no doubt of his travails and reveals how this great leader handled the ultimate pressure. For historians, his memoir of this world historic period has become an indispensable record of the war and timeless classic.
Download or read book The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading written by Damien Peters and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Riley-Smith’s 1986 book gives convincing case for a ‘revisionist’ view of the crusades, challenging the common belief that the crusades were motivated by fanaticism and were designed to plunder the Holy Lands. After studying handwritten documents held in churches across Western Europe in which crusaders explained their personal reasons for heading out on the “holy war,” he pioneered the use of computer spreadsheets to cross-reference data on individual crusaders and their families allowing him to paint a much more complete picture than had been possible previously. Riley-Smith determined that most crusaders were motivated by spiritual devotion and a genuine desire to atone for past sins.
Download or read book Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil written by Robert Jewett and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2004-06-14 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grasping this vision honored by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike includes recognizing the dangers of zealous violence, the illusions of current crusading, and the promise of peaceful coexistence under international law.
Download or read book Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors written by Brian A. Catlos and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth portrait of the Crusades-era Mediterranean world, and a new understanding of the forces that shaped it In Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors, the award-winning scholar Brian Catlos puts us on the ground in the Mediterranean world of 1050–1200. We experience the sights and sounds of the region just as enlightened Islamic empires and primitive Christendom began to contest it. We learn about the siege tactics, theological disputes, and poetry of this enthralling time. And we see that people of different faiths coexisted far more frequently than we are commonly told. Catlos's meticulous reconstruction of the era allows him to stunningly overturn our most basic assumption about it: that it was defined by religious extremism. He brings to light many figures who were accepted as rulers by their ostensible foes. Samuel B. Naghrilla, a self-proclaimed Jewish messiah, became the force behind Muslim Granada. Bahram Pahlavuni, an Armenian Christian, wielded power in an Islamic caliphate. And Philip of Mahdia, a Muslim eunuch, rose to admiral in the service of Roger II, the Christian "King of Africa." What their lives reveal is that, then as now, politics were driven by a mix of self-interest, personality, and ideology. Catlos draws a similar lesson from his stirring chapters on the early Crusades, arguing that the notions of crusade and jihad were not causes of war but justifications. He imparts a crucial insight: the violence of the past cannot be blamed primarily on religion.
Download or read book The Seventh Crusade 1244 1254 written by Peter Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Seventh Crusade, led by King Louis IX of France, was the last major expedition for the recovery of the Holy Land actually to reach the Near East. The failure of his invasion of Egypt (1249-50), followed by his four-year stay in Palestine in order to retrieve the disaster, had a profound impact on the Latin West. In addition, Louis's operations in the Nile delta indirectly precipitated the Mamluk coup d'état, which ended the rule of the Ayyubids, Saladin's dynasty, in Egypt and began the transfer of power there to a military elite that would prove to be a far more formidable enemy to the Franks of Syria and Palestine. This volume comprises translations of the principal documents and of extracts from narrative sources - both Muslim and Christian - relating to the crusade, and includes many texts, notably the account of Ibn Wasil, not previously available in English. The themes covered include: the preparations and search for allies; the campaign in the Nile delta; the impact on recruitment of the simultaneous crusade against the emperor Frederick II; the Mamluk coup and its immediate consequences in the Near East; Western reactions to the failure in Egypt; and the popular 'crusade' of the Pastoureaux in France (1251), which aimed originally to help the absent king, but which degenerated into violence against the clergy and the Jews and had to be suppressed by force.
