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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Jones
Read between
April 8 - April 9, 2025
This is a book about a seemingly endless war in Palestine, Syria and Egypt, where factions of Sunni and Shi’a Muslims clashed with militant Christian invaders from the West;
Oop
the Christian king of Jerusalem, a wealthy soldier from Boulogne known as Baldwin I.
Ok but fr? Baldwin??
Six miles to the south of Jerusalem he found Bethlehem “all ruined,” except for the large monastery of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which contained “the manger where the ox and ass stood” at the time of Christ’s birth, as well as a marble table where the Virgin supposedly had supper with the Magi.
Hmmmmmm I doubt that.
A fit of pique directed at one of his wives ended with her being summarily divorced and dragged to a stable block to be raped by his grooms while he watched.
A fit of pique?!? Fuck this guy
Gaza lay silent and empty. It had once been among the finest cities of the Near East: a stopping point on the coastal road from Syria through Palestine to Egypt, made rich by a thriving market and renowned for its mosques, churches and massive, airy houses built in marble.1
I want to travel back in time to see this!
Theoderic, an intrepid German pilgrim who humbly described himself as “the dung of all monks,”
Pardon me?!
He ate sparingly yet still grew so fat that his blubbery pectorals hung down to his waist like an old woman’s pendulous breasts.
A few years later a Templar knight turned up in Acre claiming not only to have escaped the field at Hattin, but to have made off with the True Cross and buried it for safekeeping, although he subsequently forgot where he had put it.
Sounds about right
By night they lay in the dark listening to the crusaders chant pilgrim prayers into the blackness and enduring swarms of giant tarantulas that crawled into the camp and bit anyone not alert enough to scare them away.
NOPE
“When they convene in their lairs late at night, after speaking of virtue by day they shake their hips in nocturnal folly and exertion,”
Just imagining a bunch of monks in a conga line now
Two weeks later, the Nile flooded and its waters washed away most of the crusaders’ baggage train. “The army of Christ lost its packhorses, equipment, saddlebags, carts and virtually all its essential supplies in the swamps,”
The army of Christ is struggling
Gregory’s displeasure was easily aroused, and during the course of his papacy he aimed it at heretical students in Paris, pagans in the Baltic and even cats, whom he suspected of being incarnations of Satan.
I mean how wrong is he about that last one though? And I like cats!
Louis himself had a recurrence of dysentery that was so bad he had to cut a hole in his undergarments.
That’s pretty bad!!
Some in the West actively welcomed the Mongols, seeing them as their saviors from the threat posed by the Saracens.
There had to be a better option than the mongol horde lol
He killed all but two of as many as fifteen hundred captives from Safad, piling up their bodies and building a small wall around them to preserve a well of bones and skulls for posterity.
SEE ABOVE?!
Brother Leo was spared, taken to the sultan’s tent and given a cup of mare’s milk to drink, whereupon he apostatized and became a Muslim.
Was it the horse milk that did it
