The Crusade was a Pope and Catholic sanctioned Christian takeover of Jerusalem. This book is the first in a trilogy that covers the first Crusade. Tancred, a young warrior, is told by Pope Urban if he fights in the Crusade, all of Tancred's sins will be absolved. Tancred really doesn't like playing by the rules but he wants to make his previous troubles go away.


I had never read any fictional books about the Crusade. I thought it was really interesting to see the Crusade from the perspective of the people who were fighting to boot the pagans out of the Holy City of Jerusalem. You can see from Tancred's perspective alone that people fought in the Crusades for all sorts of reasons. Some did fight because they believed they had a religious duty to remove the pagans from the Holy Land. Other fought for more selfish reasons. I guess I didn't realize that there was such a broad range of reasons for people to fight.


One of the things that I liked about this book is that although it takes place during a war, there isn't a lot of time spent on the battles themselves. The book covers more of the behind the scenes of what's going on. It talks more about what people were thinking as they marched towards the unknown. To me, this was way more interesting than a bunch of battle sequences.


Bottom line: This was a great adventure story with an interesting perspective.