Noted historian Thomas Asbridge offers a gripping account of a titanic three-year adventure filled with miraculous victories, greedy princes, and barbarity on a vast scale. Beginning with the electrifying speech delivered by Pope Urban II in 1095, readers will follow the 100,000 men, women, and children who took up his call. The siege of Nicaea and the pivotal battle for Antioch, the single most important military engagement of the entire expedition, are featured here in vivid detail. Asbridge also describes the horrific Jerusalem massacre of 1099 when the crusaders, driven on by an intense religious devotion, unleashed an unholy wave of brutality, slaughtering thousands of Muslims, all in the name of Christianity.