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One of the biggest favors you can do for yourself in this life is to read Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades. If you are daunted by its length, know that just reading Volume 1 will enrich your knowledge of the millenium-old struggle between Islam and the west a hundred fold.

This first part takes you from the launching of the Crusades by Pope Urban II at Claremont through the bloody and merciless conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders that ended the First Crusade. Along the way, you will learn a great deal about medieval politics and culture, Catholic and Orthodox theology, medieval warfare, feudalilsm, the history of Islam, and any other number of things.

The only thing this history lacks is much probing of medieval culture beneath the upper crust of the social stratum. You wont' learn much about the lives of women, the poor, the rural peasantry, etc....but Runciman is far more sensitive to the moral complexities of the subject than many other earlier historians. For one thing, this is not a tale of righteous Christians and barbarous, backwards Muslims. If anything, the historical facts cannot help but continually position the Crusaders as the backwards barbarians, particularly in the amusing episode of their arrival in the Orthodox Christian capital of Constantinople, where the Greeks (particularly Anna Comnena) are horrified by the boorishness of their Frankish and Norman guests.

Anyway, if you are interested in the Crusades, stop watching bad Ridley Scott movies and pick this up: you won't regret it.