Excerpt from Warriors of God by James Reston Jr., plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In its entirety the population of the precious kingdom was about 250,000. Its leading cities of Jerusalem and Acre had about 25,000 residents (although in the aftermath of the massacre of Jerusalem, only a few streets were occupied and the new Crusader lords were forced to recruit inhabitants from other regions, as the crusading army went home). The north of the kingdom was divided into nominally independent provinces: the principality of Antioch, and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, whose lords were vassals of the King of Jerusalem to their south. With a few exceptions the grand personages of the Crusader kingdom had been the lesser personages of Europe, younger sons of minor households who had no real future on the Continent and had come to the Orient in search of wealth and position and adventure.

Against the seemingly inexhaustible manpower of the Muslim world the Christians had built their formidable network of great castles. This defensive system of strongholds stretched along the coast, and the castles were within sight of one another, so that signal fires could be seen from one to another. By a system of smoke and fire, the great fortress of el Kerak in the Transjordan, for example, could communicate with Jerusalem at night, over a distance of seventy miles. On mountaintops hovering over strategic valleys, these fortresses dotted the landscape at regular intervals.

The military monks, the Templars and the Hospitalers, were the backbone of Christian power. These zealots were former nobles who had given up their jewels and castles and ladies in Europe to take a solemn and chaste vow to defend the Holy Land. For a monk in a Christian order to bear arms spoke to the profound transformation that the concept of Holy War had wrought in the church. St. Martin had expressed the original orthodoxy in the fourth century: "I am a soldier of Christ. I must not fight." To shed blood in combat was sinful, and on no account could a holy man have anything to do with temporal conflicts. The church strictly forbade not only fighting but the bearing of arms.

Excerpted from Warriors of God by James Reston, Jr. Copyright 2001 by James Reston, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.