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The Norman World Viking raids led to Viking settlement, most notably in the region of France that was to take its name from the Norse invaders. Normandy provided the base for a vigorous and aggressive expansionism that was to have profound implications for the whole of Europe and the Middle East. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was something of a sideshow in comparison with wider events: medieval history takes on an interesting new dimension if England is viewed as an outlying colony of a Norman-French continental empire. This empire shaped political events for centuries to come.
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William the Conqueror / David C Douglas The life of the bastard Duke of Normandy, his rise to power in a violent age and the impact of the Norman invasion on England. The threshold of the High Middle Ages.
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William of Malmesbury / R M Thomson The new Norman aristocracy were keen to legitimise themselves by association with the British past. This is an accessible account of the writings and world of William of Malmesbury (c1090 – c1143), one of the Norman scholars who began the mythologizing of English history. His Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (Deeds of the Bishops of England) and Gesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of the English Kings) and a number of other works are amongst the most important and distinguished texts of their time. The Antiquities of Glastonbury is something of a promotional exercise associating the site with the legendary arrival in the British Isles of Joseph of Arimathea, Christianity and the Holy Grail. Much harmless fantasy has followed.
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In the Name of the Cross The Crusades were a strange mixture of religious fervour, fanaticism, opportunism, politics and colonialism. The kingdoms of Outremer were won and lost as western campaigners and settlers confronted a fervent religious impulse and an alien culture. But confrontation and conflict aside, the Crusader kingdoms were exposed to classical works that had been lost to the west and scientific thought that was far in advance of European knowledge. Please note that there is considerable chronological overlap between the titles listed on this page and on our Rome & Byzantium page.
Crusading and the Crusader States / Andrew Jotischky The medieval period between 1095 and 1336 saw a series of military expeditions from Western Europe aimed at wresting Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Turks. The early Crusades resulted in the first Western European settlements in the Islamic east and a mingling of cultures that brought about distinctive forms of architecture, art and political and legal systems. Jotischky examines the monumental clash, between two societies and religions, that dominated much of the Middle Ages.
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The Crusades / Zoe Oldenbourg
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The Monks of War / Desmond Seward The creation and history of the religious military orders is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Crusades. The story is of a long and hard fought retreat from the Holy Land and the sieges of their Mediterranean bases of Cyprus, Rhodes and Malta. Desmond Seward covers Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights along with lesser known orders.
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Crusader Castles / TE Lawrence
“I had been many years going up and down the Semitic east before the war…” ( Seven Pillars of Wisdom). Between 1910 and 1914 Lawrence had worked on the British Museum excavations at Carchemish under Leonard Woolley; but his first experience of the Middle East came through his travels, mainly on foot, whilst researching for his BA thesis, ‘The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture to the end of the Twelfth Century’. This “most famous of all undergraduate dissertations” was first published, under the present title, in the year of his death. Lawrence’s aim was to disprove the prevailing view that the Crusader castles of Syria had taken their inspiration from the Byzantine East. In the process he undertook a series of arduous cycling tours in France and Wales, culminating in the expedition to Syria and the Holy Land in 1909. This new (2010) Folio Society edition is a mainly unrevised text that includes Lawrence’s own plans, sketches and photographs, together with the technical exegeses that supported his thesis. Of equal interest (and perhaps more so for the general reader) is the collection of letters, mainly to his mother, written during his 1906 tour of Brittany, his 1907 tour of Wales and his 1908 tour of France which took him from Normandy to the Mediterranean.
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The Assassins / Bernard Lewis This branch of the Ismaili faction of Shi’ite Islam was (and is) the subject of enduring myth in the west, which saw the Assassins as the equivalent of the crusading military orders. The myth was based on fairly limited contacts between the crusaders and the sectarians who used assassination as a political tool. Their main activities were concentrated well way from the Latin kingdoms and were predominantly involved with the internal politics of the Muslim world. The author explores myth and actuality, and scrutinises the sometimes facile parallels that are drawn between the Ismailis and modern terrorist groups.
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Montaillou / Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Constructed from the Inquisition’s register of interrogations of the villagers of the last surviving Cathar stronghold, Montaillou paints a picture of peasant life in the Languedoc between 1294 and 1324.
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Text & Photographs © 2011 History Unlimited & Hill House Publications
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