Belknap Press
The First Crusade: The Call from the East
Key Metrics
- Peter Frankopan
- Belknap Press
- Paperback
- 9780674970786
- 9.2 X 6.1 X 0.8 inches
- 1.1 pounds
- History > Military - Wars & Conflicts (Other)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
According to tradition, the First Crusade began at the instigation of Pope Urban II and culminated in July 1099, when thousands of western European knights liberated Jerusalem from the rising menace of Islam. But what if the First Crusade's real catalyst lay far to the east of Rome? In this groundbreaking book, countering nearly a millennium of scholarship, Peter Frankopan reveals the untold history of the First Crusade.
Nearly all historians of the First Crusade focus on the papacy and its willing warriors in the West, along with innumerable popular tales of bravery, tragedy, and resilience. In sharp contrast, Frankopan examines events from the East, in particular from Constantinople, seat of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The result is revelatory. The true instigator of the First Crusade, we see, was the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who in 1095, with his realm under siege from the Turks and on the point of collapse, begged the pope for military support.
Basing his account on long-ignored eastern sources, Frankopan also gives a provocative and highly original explanation of the world-changing events that followed the First Crusade. The Vatican's victory cemented papal power, while Constantinople, the heart of the still-vital Byzantine Empire, never recovered. As a result, both Alexios and Byzantium were consigned to the margins of history. From Frankopan's revolutionary work, we gain a more faithful understanding of the way the taking of Jerusalem set the stage for western Europe's dominance up to the present day and shaped the modern world.
Author Bio
Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is Associate Director of the Program for Silk Roads Studies at King's College, Cambridge.
He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia/Iran, Central Asia, China and beyond.
Peter often writes for the international press, including The New York Times, Financial Times Guardian, and has a regular column in the London Evening Standard.
Peter has been described in The New Statesman as 'the history rock star du jour', and a rock-star historian (VLT - Sweden). He was named One of the World's 50 Top Thinkers by Prospect Magazine in 2019. He is a 'literary star', says The Times.
Silk Roads was named The Daily Telegraph's History Book of the Year 2015. it went to Number One in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction charts, remaining in the Top 10 for nine months in a row, as well as being #1 in China, India and many other countries around the world, selling more than 1.5m copies. It is one of 'ten books that change how you see the world' (The Times). It was named one of the 'Books of the Decade' 2010-20 by the Sunday Times.
His follow-up, The New Silk Roads, is a 'masterly-mapping out of anew world order', according to the Evening Standard, and 'a brilliant guide to terra incognita' (Sunday Times) that is reminiscent of Tolstoy (Daily Telegraph). It won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019
In December 2018, The Silk Roads was named one of the 25 most influential books translated into Chinese in the last 40 years, alongside One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pride and Prejudice, Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. In 2019, he won the prestigious Calliope Prize of the German Emigration Center, one of the richest prizes for the Humanities in Germany.
In 2016-18, Peter's Songlines audio channel in which he chose his favorite pieces of world music was part of British Airways' In-Flight Entertainment system. In 2018, The Silk Roads was chosen as part of the Government of Pakistan's Read to Lead program to encourage literacy in the country. It was the inspiration for a new character in The Vikings mini-series.
Source: peterfrankopan.com
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