The Crusader Storm

As hot desert winds to cobwebs, Nicholas Morton's bold, vital and urgent global history of the Crusades blows the old parochial Western accounts clean away -- Suzannah Lipscomb Nicholas Morton is a prolific and distinguished scholar of the Crusades whose work continues to reflect a sustained commitment to bringing the history of the medieval world to a broader readership -- Mohamad El-Merheb An innovative take on the early Crusades, firmly situating them within the broader medieval Near East. Approaching from over a dozen individual perspectives (empress, sultan, princess, nobleman, patriarch, assassin) Nicholas Morton weaves a dizzying array of contexts into a coherent whole, one in which the Crusades become an integral piece of a larger civilizational story. In these pages complexity reigns: adversaries become allies, political and religious interests intertwine, and fanaticism and avarice give way to tolerance and friendship - and back again. Challenging binary notions of Muslim-Christian, right-wrong, and good-bad -- John D. Hosler, author of Jerusalem Falls