Part I. The Last Evening “A man rarely notices where one chapter of his life ends and another begins. Sometimes the boundary is a river. Sometimes it is a ...

Part I. The Second Rome “Some cities astonish a man with their walls. Others with their palaces. But there are cities that change his very understanding ...

“A man rarely notices when one world ends and another begins. There is no wall, no boundary stone, no river dividing one from the other. You simply wake one ...

“Until Rome, we were pilgrims. When we left it, we were crusaders. Yet the greatest revelation for me was not the Holy See, but the city itself—a city that had ...

“We thought we were marching with our duke. Only after several weeks on the road did I understand that an entire world was moving with us.” From the ...

“It seems strange to me now that we spent so long preparing for an expedition which most of us believed would be over within a few months. No one intended to ...

“People like to say that the First Crusade began at Clermont. Perhaps, for history, that is true. But for me it began several days later, in a quiet chamber of ...

“Memory is remarkably selective. I can no longer remember how many times I sharpened my axe in those years, yet until my dying day I will remember the smell of ...

“People think a knight is made in battle. That is not true. Battle merely reveals what he was taught during the long months when no one was watching.” From ...

“When I was a boy, I thought war was made up of battles. Later I learned that a battle lasts only a few minutes. The rest of the time, a soldier lives, works, ...