With 'Kingdom of Heaven' about to open, we offer a crash course on an extraordinary chapter of medieval history , The Crusades are the stuff of fairy tales. For God and king, armored knights wearin… ...

In 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, Crusaders diverted from their mission to the Holy Land and instead sacked Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire. Driven by a mix of financial debts, ...

Things came to a head in 1204, when the Fourth Crusade sacked and looted Constantinople, making that Greek-speaking city the capital of a shaky "Latin Empire” that endured for 57 years. Eleven ...

The Crusades are often painted with a broad and simplistic brush—but how accurate are the popular narratives? In this video, we explore and challenge a few persistent myths surrounding the ...

So successful was this process that in 1204, rather than reclaiming Jerusalem, members of the Fourth Crusade ended up sacking Constantinople, capital of the Orthodox Byzantine empire.

Jonathan Phillips reviews God's War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman. It is more than 50 years since Sir Steven Runciman's epic three-volume A History of the Crusades was ...

A lot has been written on medieval Christian holy war (often called "the Crusades") - some of it good and some bad. Here's a short reading list to start your exploration of the topic.

The history of Western involvement in the Middle East began with the Crusades some 900 years ago. NPR's Mike Shuster begins a special six-part series on the troubled history.