This book was not terribly analytical, but it does what it's supposed to: gives a broad narrative overview of the Crusades, to be used as a textbook. It was quite depressing to see how stupid we (Christians) could be, believing that God would deliver the Muslim enemy into our hands with little to no planning or training. Madden makes the point that the most obvious modern solution - not taking Jerusalem, but finding a way for all Abrahamic faiths to share it - was simply blasphemous to the medieval absolutist mind. What a great reminder of the narcissistic dangers of identifying any one group of people as God's chosen.

The best part of this book was the chapter on the legacy of the Crusades. Madden argues that despite decades of historical research on them, popular presentations of the Crusades ignore it. Contemporary Western ones, influenced heavily by [[Sir Steven Runciman]], see it as no more than a foolish war, motivated by misguided piety and pure evil. Muslim views exaggerate its importance, casting it as a massive devastation of the Islamic world. They forget that Islam was already powerful and these groups of crusading Europeans hardly constituted a threat to Islamic civilization. Both views are wrong. And despite public interest, post-9/11 comparisons between then and now are mostly unuseful. ( )