The Atlas of the Crusades: The Only Full Mapped Chronicle of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith (Editor)

The Atlas of the Crusades chronicles Christendom's Holy Wars, charting the entire 700-year history of the Crusades with a brilliant integration of text, illustrations, and more than 150 maps.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Reference, Islam, Atlases, Maps

192 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1990

About the author

Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, was educated at Eton College and Trinity College Cambridge. He received his BA (1960), MA (1964), PhD (1964) and LittD (2001) from Cambridge.

From 1964–1972 Dr. Riley-Smith taught in the Department of Medieval History at the Unversity of St Andrews, first as assistant lecturer, until 1966, then as lecturer. From 1972 until 1978, he served on the history faculty at the University of Cambridge. He was professor of history at the University of London from 1978 until 1994. Since 1994, Professor Riley-Smith has served on the faculties of history and divinity at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. From 1997 to 1999 he was chair of the faculty of history.

He was a founder member (1980), acting secretary (1980–1982) and president (1987–1995) of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Other positions he has held include Knight of Grace and Devotion, Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Officer of Merit, Order Pro Merito Melitens, and Knight of Justice, Most Venerable Order of St John.

Reviews

[Helena Schrader · Rating 5 out of 5]

First rate and comprehensive reference with useful maps, diagrams and illustrations of such critically important features as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The city maps are very valuable, showing what the cities were like then, rather than now. The breakdown of the crusader states into their constituent baronies was alone worth the price of the book. There is also much information usually excluded from books about the crusades: ships and shipbuilding, colonial settlements, the patterns of recruitment, the chains of command on the Muslim side, and more. The book also includes the peripheral crusades (the Albigensian Crusade, the Baltic Crusades, Crusading in the Iberian Peninsula, etc.) as well information about the Byzantine Empire, the Hospitallers on Rhodes and Malta, the rise of the Ottomans and other topics not integral to "crusades" but related. I keep this book readily at hand as I work on my current novel set in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

[Suzannah Rowntree · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel that the most important takeaway from this book is that the Mamluk sultans had a special post in their household specifically for someone to carry the royal polo mallet.

OK, I kid.

I edited my most recent novel with this book open in front of me half the time. It was incredibly helpful in getting my mind around the geographical spaces at play, whether as regards the maps of the Levant, the plans of crusader towns and villages, the marvellous cutaway of the Holy Sepulchre as it was in the late 1100s, or, yes, the detailed diagram of Mamluk court hierarchy. Owing to the dozens and dozens of helpful and beautiful maps covering crusader movements from the 1100s as late as the 17th and 18th centuries, this would also make a great resource for anyone who's studying history with children.

[Walt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The maps and images are good. Riley-Smith has written extensively about the Crusades, so the text is more relevant and informative than similar titles.

[Googoogjoob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thorough and comprehensive- this covers not just military campaigns and the dispositions of the states involved, but also has thematic maps on economics, mobilization, missionary efforts, and ideological developments; and it defines "the Crusades" in the broadest way possible, with maps covering "Crusades" in the Levant, Egypt, the Baltic, Iberia and Languedoc, Italy, and elsewhere; and encompassing in time the High Medieval heyday of the Crusades all the way to the quenching of the last feeble ashes of the Crusading idea (with Napoleon's takeover of Malta), and the legacy of the Crusades on the modern world.

There are, probably inevitably, occasional cartographical errors. The most embarrassing of these, on the map of the Baltic Crusades, sees Lake Peipus labelled "Lake Chud" (the Russian name for the northern lobe of the lake), but Lake Vortsjarv (to the west, in south-central Estonia) labelled "Lake Peipus"- and the famous Battle on the Ice is thus shown on the map as happening on the wrong lake.

Despite that, this is an indispensable book if one is interested in the history of the Crusades at all.