A diminishing power

This resource is a pamphlet titled ‘The Byzantine Empire on the Eve of the Crusades’ and written by R. J. H. Jenkins in 1953. As such, some of the scholarship has been updated since then, although it can provide useful historiography.

It is not strange that there should in recent years have been a notable revival of interest in the Crusades. The origins of the Crusading movement in the west during the latter part of the eleventh century have long been studied, and traced to the operation of social and spiritual factors adroitly manipulated by statesmen of the western church. But it is an inadequate survey which would regard the contest, even in origin, as a simple duel between the Catholic west and the Muslim east...