Coraje

Did you know that the first crusader king to arrive in Jerusalem was the Viking Sigurd of Norway, that Eleanor of Aquitaine was the first woman to embark on a crusade, that the sect of the assassins tried three times to end the life of Saladin himself, and that St. Francis of Assisi presented himself as a crusader. That St. Francis of Assisi went to the Sultan of Egypt to convince him to convert to Christianity and managed to achieve a truce in the middle of the Fifth Crusade? Or that Emperor Frederick II recovered Jerusalem without firing a single arrow and after being excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX? Conceived as an armed pilgrimage in the name of God, the Crusades are a decisive event in the Middle Ages whose memory and debate are still highly topical today. The adjective "crusader" continues to be used among the fighters of the self-styled Islamic State to refer to the West, almost a thousand years later, and their influence and fascination is the subject of study, research and interest on the part of historians, history buffs and readers fond of the legends and enigmas that adorn their protagonists. From the incandescent call of Urban II to take up the cross in 1095 to the bloody fall of St. John of Acre in 1291, the religious-military expeditions of the so-called crusaders are full of singular and almost always cruel episodes, but they also reveal acts of piety and mutual admiration, such as the one between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin as they confronted each other with all possible harshness. In this book, Francisco José Bocero de la Rosa goes through those two hundred years with simplicity and rigor, drinking from the sources of both sides, to relate details and curiosities of kings and sultans, of popes and their quarrels, of the countless battles that took place and of the political games of one and the other that ended up marking the destiny of the West. A historical review of the most outstanding chapters of the titanic enterprise for the conquest of the so-called Holy Land, a region whose longings keep it involved in a permanent and insurmountable conflict.