Reddit reviews The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

In a historical context, it's difficult to call things war crimes if there were no treaties or agreements about how to treat people during war. I'm going to assume you mean war crimes in the present moral sense.

On Reddit in particular, historical massacres committed by Christians are well known, for example, the first crusade's sack of Jerusalem was described as having the crusaders wading up to their ankles in blood of the dead - although the bloodshed may have been exaggerated to increase the glory of the triumph.

However, there are examples of similar Muslim massacres as well.

• When Nur al-Din recaptured Edessa from the Franks, the native Christian population was massacred or enslaved because of their supposed cooperation with the Franks. A Muslim historian recorded that "the sword blotted out the existence of all the Christians".
  
  
• After the Battle of Hattin in 1187, Saladin executed captured Templars and Hospitallers because they could not be ransomed and were considered dangerous. In this instance, Saladin even turned it into a sort of spectacle by having them executed by scholars and ascetics - which led to some unnecessary suffering as some of them botched the executions and had to take turns.
  
  
• Al-Ashraf Khalil, the Sultan of Egypt who destroyed the Crusaders States also was responsible for several massacres. When he conquered their final stronghold of Acre, he killed a band of Dominican monks who stayed behind in their convent. Some Christians fled to surrounding outposts, and even after the sultan promised them safe passage, he reneged on that promise and had those prisoners killed.
  
  
• And finally, lots of people contrast Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem to that of the First Crusade, in that Saladin did not sack the city and massacre the populace. However, primary accounts indicate that given the opportunity, Saladin would have conducted a sack and massacre similar to the First Crusade. In a letter written by Saladin shortly after the battle, he wrote that they did not want to negotiate with the Christians, and were "wishing only to shed the blood of the men and to reduce the women and children to slavery". And after he accepted a negotiated surrender, Saladin actually felt he had to make excuses about why he did not butcher the city - he emphasized that he just followed the advice of his advisors.
  
  
  To finish this off, both sides committed what would be considered war crimes in the modern day. However, it's an open question whether they would have been considered as morally abhorrent back then as they are today. The First Crusade's sack of Jerusalem was really no different than what would be expected of any Christian army storming a besieged city up to the middle ages (and to some degree, up until the industrial revolution). The story is the same for armies before Christianity - Greek city states occasionally massacred and enslaved enemy cities, Rome did the same. It's a little odd to expect armies of that time period to treat foreign populations better than they would treat their own countrymen.
  
  Short Summary: Both sides killed unarmed civilians and prisoners, but that wasn't that unusual back then.
  
  All the above incidents drawn from Thomas Asbridge's, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War For the Holy Land, which I highly recommend.

says otherwise.

it was a papal response to the byzantine plea for assistance.
great read if you have the time.

Naked Economics - conforme /u/jpjandrade recomendou (a Economia Nua e Crua em PT-BR) é sensacional, o tipo de livro que dá vontade de comprar 10 para dar de presente.

Outro um pouco mais avançado é Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, o qual creio não ter edição em PTBR ainda.

De história vai depender muito do seu gosto... os de economia são simples de escolher pois o básico da economia é o seu próprio núcleo... história é muito ampla...

Eu adoro história e devo ter uns 50 livros, sendo uns 20 sobre episódios específicos da Segunda Guerra. Recomendo os seguintes livros como sendo bons mesmo pra quem nunca leu nada a respeito (creio que todos os abaixos existam em PTBR, caso não leia em Inglês):

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land;

Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War - Se gostou do filme, o livro é sensacional - totalmente baseado nos relatos das unidades presentes em combate;

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 - este livro é sensacional, se já ouviu alguma vez sobre a batalha de Stalingrado a leitura é obrigatória;

Por fim, caso goste de ciência (física e química especificamente) e de história militar, este foi o livro que mostrou pra mim que a ciência caminha de forma fantástica, e que muitas (se não todas) as explicações de descobertas são superhypermega simplificadas: The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

I honestly don't know what the longest book I've ever read has been. Some of the Harry Potter's were fairly long IIRC but it's been years. The Count of Monte Cristo was the longest I've read recently

The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge was decent-sized but I blew through it fairly quickly. Fantastic read

Recommended Reading:

• The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land
  
  
• The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam
  
  
• The New Concise History of the Crusades: Critical Issues in World and International History
  
  
• God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

If you are looking for a good survey of the Crusades, focusing primarily on the events thereof, I would highly recommend The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge. Not only is the book inexpensive and will give you a broad and relatively balanced overview (at least insofar as that is possible from only reading one book), but Asbridge is a leading scholar in the field and the book itself is quite readable as scholarly non-fiction goes.

Edit: this is essentially what I said when I recommended it to the book list, but unhelpfully there are two "middle ages" lists and the book on crusading was on the other list.

I love the Name of the Wind so much it hurts. Rothfuss is an absolutely amazing author, and if you love the subtlety, complexity, foreshadowing, and maturity of Martin's books you will love Rothfuss'.

Joe Abercrombie's series are thematically very similar. They're very dark, very visceral. Abercrombie brings more life to his characters than I think anyone else in the genre, including Martin. The story itself isn't nearly as complex as those written by Martin or Rothfuss, though that isn't to say it's simple and twist-free by any means.

Also, if you enjoy the world of the Seven Kingdoms, there's some great historical non-fiction that you might enjoy. I just finished the Crusades by Thomas Asbridge, which was fascinating. Edward I: A great and terrible king by Marc Morris was also excellent. The latter you will enjoy if you loved all the political wranglings of the nobility in Westeros, while the latter will appeal if you care more about the military aspects. Right now I'm reading Millenium: the end of the world and the forging of Christendom by Tom Holland, which is all about Europe at the turn of the first millenium AD, and the biblical prophecies of the apocalypse rampant at the time. It's the background for so much of the prophecies you see in fantasy series everywhere, and it's quite a fascinating read.

Edit: I suppose it's worth pointing out that the above books were recommended to me by Joe Abercrombie, when I asked him in the comments on his blog for some recommendations of well-written historical books to be used as source material for fantasy worlds.

Other fantasies that I can recommend: Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards books, Peter V Brett's The Warded Man and its sequel. Brent Weeks is good too, though I have mixed feelings on how he ended his first series. Wheel of Time is a classic, but it's long and drags (though Brandon Sanderson has apparently finished it up quite nicely, I just haven't found time to read the 12 books necessary to catch myself back up). Speaking of which, Brandon Sanderson is good too. He's written Elantris (meh), the Mistborn trilogy (quite a fun read, though it won't knock your socks off), and the Way of Kings (which is supposed to be utterly fantastic). He also wrote another book in the Mistborn world that is supposed to be amazing as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy-Land/dp/0060787295

There's so much information to convey so this book is very broad strokes. But it does a great job of covering both the Christian and Muslim worlds equally. I love it.

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_To-cV94Bo&feature=youtu.be

https://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy-Land/dp/0060787295/192-7147632-0755714?ie=UTF8&keywords=the%20crusades%20asbrige&qid=1370815963&ref_=sr_1_sc_1&sr=8-1-spell

there weren't christian nations in the middle east until the crusaders got there, the closest empire would have been the byzantine empire -- see http://www.amazon.com/The-Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy/dp/0060787295

sigh.

Are we just going to spew sources to back up our opinions? Here's a few of mine.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy/dp/0060787295

http://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Through-Arab-Eyes-Essentials/dp/0805208984/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=1HKV23ZQ71QA77PH9C9E

http://www.amazon.com/Pope-Urban-IIs-Council-Piacenza/dp/0199258597/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459174862&sr=1-1&keywords=pope+urban+ii

Sorry, I don't have any quick to digest youtube videos to show you.

Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades also covers this chapter of history quite thoroughly (relative to his coverage of the 4th and 5th Crusades). According to him, the Christians in the Levant considered the Mongols to be potential allies against the Muslims as far back as the Fifth Crusade, and the entire time Baybars was raising an army to defend against Mongol aggression the various Christian provinces in Outremer were regularly sending emissaries to the Ilkhanid court (to varying degrees of success).

To expand upon the answer about their religion, the term I've most frequently heard used to refer to Central Asian shamanism is Tengriism. I don't know hardly anything about it, but that would be a good place to start googling if you want to know more.

EDIT:

I was also under the impression that it was Ilkhan Ghazan Khan's wife (or one of them? I don't know anything about his marital status aside from him having at least one wife) that was the Nestorian Christian, and not him personally. I'll have to go back and check, but I figured I'd ask before digging back through my books. Did she convert him? Or am I getting confused with Constantine?

Just bought http://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy-Land/dp/0060787295 myself. While not technically about Islam it's supposed to be a good read nonetheless.