Armies of Heaven

The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse

By: Jay Rubenstein

Narrated by: Brian Holsopple

At Moson, the river Danube ran red with blood. At Antioch, the Crusaders, their saddles freshly decorated with sawed-off heads, indiscriminately clogged the streets with the bodies of eastern Christians and Turks. At Marra, they cooked children on spits and ate them. By the time the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, their quest and their violence had become distinctly otherworldly: blood literally ran shin-deep through the streets as the Crusaders overran the sacred city. Beginning in 1095 and culminating four bloody years later, the First Crusade represented a new kind of warfare: holy, unrestrained, and apocalyptic.

In Armies of Heaven, medieval historian Jay Rubenstein tells the story of this cataclysmic event through the eyes of those who witnessed it, emphasizing the fundamental role that apocalyptic thought played in motivating the Crusaders. A thrilling work of military and religious history, Armies of Heaven will revolutionize our understanding of the Crusades.

©2011 Jay Rubenstein (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"An engaging, cautionary account emphasizing the consequences of untrammeled irrationalism." ( Kirkus Reviews)

"[A] rich harvest of legends and writings from the period, often apocalyptic in nature, that give us a keener insight into the minds of those who lived these tumultuous years. Rubenstein offers up a heady mix of soldiers and prophets, militants and supplicants, weaving it all into a wonderfully readable account that puts flesh on the story. A satisfying and highly recommended read in every respect." ( Publishers Weekly)

"The most fascinating and readable book about the Crusades I have read. Jay Rubenstein gets into the heads of the Crusaders in a way no other book has. And it’s a page-turner." (Terry Jones, director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and author of Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives and Who Murdered Chaucer: A Medieval History)

Riveting

Jay Rubenstein brings medieval characters and battles to life giving me both a deeper understanding of the subject but also a greater love for the topic. Written with both detail and clarity, I appreciate that he can make himself understandable to an amateur history buff like me.

An amazing journey

A good tale of an amazing event, the journey of a massive army across 2000 miles. Slightly bogged down at times, but this barely detracts from capturing the spirit of the first crusade.

The unabashed storytelling

Worth a listen, this book tells the story of the first crusade. It is raw and does not paint a polished picture.

Narrative style

Occitan was not a dialect of French, this scholar as many specialists for many centuries labels the crusade more french that was

very informative

I liked the book, there is just so much information it's hard to follow. Audio format is especially challenging.

most comprehensive so far

I loved it till the end The way it was written and narrated kept me wanting to know more it was as I was there in the midst of the battles Awesome

Detailed story of 1st Crusade & the Miricles

this is one of the best detailed stories about the Crusade that also includes the Miracles that they encountered and saw that most Crusade history books always leave out

A Convincing but Not Revelatory Apocalyptic Thesis

The convincing thesis of Jay Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (2011) is that the first crusade was driven by apocalyptic vision, that the participants believed the end of the world was nigh, if not already occurring, and that that way of thinking is useful to analyze historically, because many people today still believe in immanent apocalpyse and the religious-cultural conflict between east and west still continues.

In his book, Rubenstein recounts:

--the background of Jerusalem as a holy city for Christians;

--the rise of pilgrimage as a booming industry, at first at home in Europe and then abroad to the Holy Land when a land route through Hungary opened up;

--the 11th-century arrival of the Seljuk Turks in that area endangering Christian pilgrims;

--the inspiring of the first crusade by Pope Urban (and Peter the Hermit) in 1095 by appealing to Christian outrage at Turkish atrocities and to the desire to unite Eastern and Western Christian churches;

--the warming up for crusade abroad by massacring or force converting Jews at home first;

--the recruiting of various princes with various motives (including greed and ambition), like Bohemond, Tancred, Baldwin, Godfrey, Raymond, and Hugh;

their different routes and progresses towards Constantinople (some of them wanting to conquer that city first);

--the tricky diplomacy of Alexius the Byzantine Emperor vis-à-vis the distrustful and scornful crusader princes, paying them to not pillage his people and to return any territories or cities they’d capture from the Turks to Byzantine control;

--how the christians saw “Saracens” as inverted (evil) Christians;

--how the Crusaders started a new kind of brutal merciless holy war based on Old Testament “feats” of the Israelites in Deuteronomy and on apocalyptic passages in Revelations;

--how they laid seige to cities like Antioch (including catapulting decapitated Saracen heads into the cities and butchering, roasting, and eating Saracen defenders outside the walls);

--how they ginned up morale by “finding” and worshiping potent holy relics like the holy lance that pierced the savior’s side and a fragment of the true cross;

--how they fragmented, lost leaders and pilgrims and soldiers to death and desertion, but nonetheless succeeded in sacking Jerusalem, wading through “rivers of blood” and massacring instead of ransoming prisoners;

--how they finally decided who would rule the holy city;

-- and how the first crusade both unified western Christendom and divided it from the Eastern church and its people.

Throughout, Rubenstein is a capable, clear writer with a pleasingly acerbic wit, as in lines like these:

--“But caution was not a virtue of God’s army.”

--“…as Bohemond engaged in stealth diplomacy—or duplicity.”

--“The route they traced would be roughly equivalent to that later invention and pious fraud, the Stations of the Cross, or Via Dolorosa, which pilgrims of Jerusalem still follow.”

I didn’t care for the times when Rubenstein paraphrases the crusaders in contemporary English idiom, like “Robert chided him, telling him to lighten up, given all that he had accomplished.”

Audiobook reader Brian Holsopple is has a clear voice and a straightforward, no frills manner, not unlike Grover Garland.

Finally, I didn’t learn so much new from this book than I did from earlier ones covering the crusades (and this one is limited to the first crusade), and I got the feeling that Rubenstein is perhaps playing the apocalyptic vision chord of his book a little too often.

But readers wanting an introduction into the cursader world view and the start of the crusades should like Armies of Heaven.

Long, too much moment-to-moment detail, dull

I was hoping for more summary and historical analysis and perspective. This books is, rather, a lot of moment-to-moment detail about battles, minor nobles, and many names of minor historical figures. If you are a crusades enthusiast, you might like it.