Monks, the Pope, and the Origins of the Crusades

A fascinating history of the growth in monastic and papal power that preceded the Crusades—excerpted from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s award-winning New York Times bestseller, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years . A product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years stretches from the Greek Platonists and the origins of the Hebrew Bible to the present and encompasses the globe. In this excerpt, MacCulloch chron