Talk Back

[Eisworth]

While I was doing my postdoc in Israel, I did a lot of reading about the Crusades since crusader ruins were everywhere to be found. On their way to Palestine, the armies of the First Crusade passed through Constantinople during the reign of Alexius Comnenus. His daughter Anna is the author of this book, which details his life and reign.

It is quite readable --- when she wrote it, she was an aging woman kept in confinement and writing helped her pass the time. It is also quite amusing to see how these crusaders appeared to someone from an actual 'civilized land'. You get a real sense of the barbarity of these people, who for the most part were a generation or two removed from Viking raiders. Robert Guiscard (who carved out a Norman kingdom in Italy) is prominent, as are his son Bohemond and Great-nephew Tancred.

I found the text very lively when compared to writers such as Livy and Tacitus from the Roman empire. Her frequent interjections were lambasted by Gibbon in his "Decline and Fall", but I found them charming.
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Todd Eisworth
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ohio University