Peter Frankopan successfully provides a fresh perspective on a topic that has attracted no shortage of popular and scholarly attention in the last few years. Challenging the notion that it was primarily the religious ideologies of the Latin West that impelled thousands of Christians to fight Muslims in the Holy Land at the turn of the twelfth century, he finds the “real origins” of the First Crusade in the deft, if sometimes desperate, policies that the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Comnenus formulated to save his empire from a myriad of external threats. Although scholars will find that this book follows a distinctly traditional narrative structure, it effectively draws the reader into the internal vicissitudes of Byzantine rule as well as the intricate and multifaceted geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean. As such, it follows in the tradition of historians who have sought to understand the Crusades as political and military expeditions rather than simply outlets for western religious enthusiasm.

Frankopan acknowledges that Pope Urban II and the reforming traditions of the eleventh-century Latin Church shaped the way Christians understood the expedition that captured Jerusalem in 1099, but he argues that neither the pope nor the reform movement could have launched the Crusade without the initiative of Alexios. Even if he is not the first to make this point, it is important that he has done so in a well-written book that will appeal to undergraduates and general readers. The book is at its best in chapters 2–6, which follow the emperor as he outmaneuvers his domestic rivals while carefully making alliances with Muslims against his various foreign enemies. Much of the traditional scholarship, when considering the Byzantine origins of the First Crusade, has seen the call to the West as a delayed but inevitable reaction to the calamitous defeat of Romanos IV Diogenes by the Seljuk Alp Arslan at Manzikert in 1071. Frankopan instead shows us a Byzantium that, thanks to Alexius, had largely stabilized its position by 1091 only to see its position in Asia Minor collapse by 1094. As result, he can argue that the Crusade stemmed from Alexios's resolution in the face of a bewildering set of difficulties. Alexius did not make a reckless, frantic, plea for help; rather, he negotiated western military aid over a period of several years. Although Frankopan allows that Urban II was himself opportunistic in calling the Crusade, it was Alexios's machinations that truly precipitated it.

Those machinations continued as Alexios bargained with the western princes who arrived in Constantinople in 1097. Here the emperor proved a master at provisioning armies and a sharp-witted negotiator with their leaders. Abandoning the traditional practice of maintaining a mysterious distance from foreigners, he met with the Crusaders in person and charmed them into accepting some of his terms for their expedition. Frankopan also sees Alexios behind many of the decisions that the Franks made as they crossed Asia Minor: in this account, for example, Baldwin of Bouillon's capture of Tarsos “had nothing to do with profiteering, but was a foray executed under the direction of the emperor,” as part of a larger strategy that included Cyprus and Antioch (151). When Baldwin took Edessa, he essentially received it as a reward for fostering Byzantine interests in the region.

When Frankopan's Crusaders reached Antioch, however, they began to resist Alexios's vision for the expedition. The emperor's chosen commander Tatikios did not abandon them, as Latin historians later claimed. Rather, the Franks, and especially Bohemond of Taranto, on whose fidelity Alexios had counted, decided to go their own way. Despite the resistance of Raymond of St. Gilles, the leadership took advantage of the atrocious conditions in Antioch to renege on their oaths to hand their conquests over to the Byzantines. Their conquest of Jerusalem and establishment of the “Crusader States” thus represented, from the Byzantine point of view, an “unraveling” of the Crusade.

Given the author's decidedly revisionist agenda, it is both surprising and odd that he offers a very familiar description of Franks improbably triumphing over the Saracens and then sacking Jerusalem in chapter 8, “The Crusade Unravels.” To be sure, Frankopan writes in an engaging style, and he recounts the piles of corpses, ankle-deep blood, and massacres of Jews better than many have, but here the plan of the work seems to come unmoored from its central thesis. While this may help the book resonate with a popular audience, it effectively confirms the common understanding that Alexius instigated but could not ultimately control the Crusade. What is different here is that the “unraveling” has as much to do with the Crusaders' political decision to desert Alexius as with runaway religious or even apocalyptic frenzy.

Despite these quibbles about the presentation, scholars should refer to this book in all future discussions of Crusades historiography. Its two central arguments—that political manipulation matters and that Alexios's skill at it shaped the Crusade—are persuasive and will encourage future students to consider teleological and ideological explanations carefully and with serious reservations. Even more important, Frankopan has given us a First Crusade set firmly in a complex and diverse Mediterranean context.