A detailed history of the Crusades, told by bestselling author of The Templars and Plantagenets, Dan Jones. For more than a thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes in peace, sometimes at war. But when Christian armies captured Jerusalem in 1099, the most notorious period of confrontation between the two religions began. Expanding the usual time frame, Jones turns to the origins of Christian-Muslim relations in the 8th century and traces the influence of the Crusades to the present day. He also expands the geography of events, leading the reader to Spain, North Africa, the south of France, the Baltic countries, where the so-called “enemies of the Church” also lived. Telling the stories of individual participants in the crusades, Jones shows these centuries of conflict not only from the positions of popes and kings, but also through the eyes of an Arab-Sicilian poet, a Byzantine princess, a Sunni scholar, a Shiite vizier, a Mongol military leader, as well as ordinary Christian monks.