For your perfect summer read I’d recommend Zoé Oldenbourg’s 1949 classic medieval adventure The World Is Not Enough. It’ll comfortably occupy you for a good fortnight and while it’s thrilling, romantic and heartbreaking enough to keep you turning the pages, it’s also so beautifully written and historically illuminating that you won’t feel the emptiness and self-disgust you do when you’ve finally got to the end of a bog-standard airport thriller.
It begins in 12th-century France but then moves to the wonderfully exotic-sounding Outremer, the contemporary name for the crusader states on the far side of the Med, such as the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. These were the destinations to which Europe’s warrior-pilgrims headed to purge themselves of their sins by bathing in Muslim blood and defending the cross.
Many, if not most, would die horribly — some with their severed heads tied to the spears of victorious Saracens, some in dungeons, some of dysentery or heatstroke. But for those who could stick it the rewards were huge: untold riches, abundant citrus fruit and gorgeously furnished castles and palaces abounding in luxuries rarely encountered in cold, damp, miserable northern Europe.
Though you get a sense of this in Olden-bourg’s masterpiece, the non-fiction work I’d recommend as a companion piece (though it’s set a decade or so earlier) is Jeffrey Lee’s equally gripping God’s Wolf. I knew Jeff at Oxford — he was part of that extraordinarily brilliant Balliol generation that included Boris Johnson, Aidan Hartley, Robert Twigger, Lloyd Evans and Justin Rushbrooke, the QC who just won Cliff Richard’s case against the BBC — but I had no idea what he was reading.
Turns out that it was Arabic and Islamic History, which obscure knowledge he has put to hugely effective use in the form of a compulsively readable biography of Reynald de Châtillon.
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