
Armies of Heaven
The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse
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Narrated by:
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Brian Holsopple
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By:
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Jay Rubenstein
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.Listeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
Riveting
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An amazing journey
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The unabashed storytelling
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Narrative style
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very informative
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most comprehensive so far
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Detailed story of 1st Crusade & the Miricles
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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.
A Convincing but Not Revelatory Apocalyptic Thesis
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Long, too much moment-to-moment detail, dull
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