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

by Thomas Asbridge

By 800, a descendant of these Franks, Charlemagne (768–814), had united such a huge swathe of territory–encompassing much of modern France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries–that he could lay claim to the long-dormant title of emperor of the West. Charlemagne and his successors, the Carolingians, presided over a short-lived period of renewed security, but their empire crumbled under the weight of succession disputes and repeated invasions by Scandinavian Vikings and eastern European Magyars. From the 850s onwards, Europe was again ripped apart by political fragmentation, warfare and unrest. The embattled kings of Germany still sought to claim the imperial title and a royal house in France survived in a desperately emasculated state. By the eleventh century Constantine and Charlemagne had passed into legend, the embodiments of a distant era. In the course of medieval