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Product Description
The First Crusade received its name and shape late. To its contemporaries, the event was a journey and the men who took part in it pilgrims. Only later were those participants dubbed Crusaders--"those signed with the Cross." In fact, many developments with regard to the First Crusade, like the bestowing of the cross and the elaboration of Crusaders' privileges, did not occur until the late twelfth century, almost one hundred years after the event itself.
In a greatly expanded second edition, Edward Peters brings together the primary texts that document eleventh-century reform ecclesiology, the appearance of new social groups and their attitudes, the institutional and literary evidence dealing with Holy War and pilgrimage, and, most important, the firsthand experiences by men who participated in the events of 1095-1099.
Peters supplements his previous work by including a considerable number of texts not available at the time of the original publication. The new material, which constitutes nearly one-third of the book, consists chiefly of materials from non-Christian sources, especially translations of documents written in Hebrew and Arabic. In addition, Peters has extensively revised and expanded the Introduction to address the most important issues of recent scholarship.
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Average Customer Review:
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent collection of source material, 2006-03-09
I'd like to offer a counterpoint to the rather harsh reviews of this book offered elsewhere on Amazon. While the other reviewers' points about the limited scope of Peters's collection and his choice of organization have some basis, they do not significantly weaken his achievement.
The introduction is worth the cost of the book itself; in it, Peters gives an excellent summary of the continent-wide debate preceding the First Crusade about killing in a Christian context: in a surprisingly short period, a new idea arose that actually encouraged Christian knights to go on crusade. While killing was normally wrong, avenging the deaths of other Christians and meting out God's justice on earth came to be seen as positively redeeming for Christian soldiers; one result of this was the birth of a new epoch in the West, the Crusades. I cannot think of a better way to characterize the ethos of the half-millennium from 1095 to 1565 (the Christian knights' successful defense of Malta) than to call it the Age of Crusade. The introduction also does a good job of setting up the geopolitical chessboard of the day, explaining some of the political reasons that inspired Urban II to make his seminal speech at Clermont.
Peters makes no claim that I can find to being exhaustive; rather, his book is intended to give the average student of the First Crusade a background in the original sources. Surely this is a worthy goal; I would rather have my students read 50 pages of orignal, 900-year-old text than 300 pages of wordy academese or casual potboiler history. Furthermore, this book inspires the reader to seek out complete editions of Fulcher, William of Tyre, and the other writers represented. I can think of no better introduction to the First Crusade than this.
13 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
 Book organization and content not for general reader., 2001-08-18
Having read Penguin's very good "Chronicles of the Crusades" (covering the 4th and 7th Crusades) I ran across this book and thought it would provide some intersting stories from the 1st Crusade. But it has taken me months to get through it, in large part because it seems to have been organized principally to suit a scholar of the Crusades and not the general reader. Book I of the Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres is fine enough, but hardly stirring. While the rest of the book then assembles other sources by subject. The chapters follow on "Peter the Hermet", "Journey to Constantinople", "At Constantinople", "Siege of Nicea", "Siege of Antioch", and "Siege of Jerusalem", where in each chapter the sources are broken up so you read each version of the same event one after the other. It is really just a collection of translations with minimal explanation, no extras (such as maps), and does not seem suited for the general reader. It is for this reason that I rate it lower. If the sources were presented in full and not broken up by subject, I would have given it an extra star. Although as the content goes it seems thorough to me (including parts from the accounts of Raymond d'Aguilers, Peter Tudebode, The Gesta Version, and Anna Comnena), even including a few Arabic sources. However, only buy this if you are a Crusade scholar, for the general reader it does get tedious very quickly.
9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Peter's Collection of Primary Sources Only Partial, 2000-05-08
While this collection of chronicles of the First Crusade from primary sources is certainly valuable, it is limited by the fact that the editor has chosen to include only those sources that have already been translated, thus leaving many other valuable and informative accounts absent. As many of the chroniclers' accounts possess bias and errors, or were written secondhand or after events had taken place, only a reading of all the primary sources offers the reader the chance to sift and attempt to reassemble events through comparison. In this regard John France's book "Victory in the East," while a secondary retelling from a largely military perspective, perhaps offers greater value.Certainly a must for any scholar of the period, but likely to tire the ordinary or casual reader. This printing is further marred by a flimsy binding that falls apart before one can complete the reading.
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