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The First Crusade to the Holy Land
Four years prior to the death of Pope Urban II, his holiness delivered a sermon that would transform the history of Europe. It was a brisk autumn morning in the year 1095 when crowds gathered around him in the small French town of Clermont. Each individual transfixed on every arousing word he spoke. In the months that followed, his message reverberated across the west. The Age of the Crusades had begun…
The Pope proclaimed a new Holy War against Islam for ownership and control of the most hallowed site in the Christian world; the sacred city of Jerusalem. Urban’s call to arms initiated a struggle that would rage for more than two centuries. One that fires the imagination and fuels debate even to this day.
The tale of the Crusades is remembered as a story of religious fanaticism and unspeakable violence, of medieval knights and Jihadi warriors, of castles and kingdoms, crooked Kings, of heroism and betrayal and of sacrifice.
Fresh research and contemporary evidence from both the Christian and Islamic cosmos sheds new light on how it was that these two powerful religions waged war in the name of Almighty God. It also reveals why hundreds of thousands of Christians and…