The First Crusade by Peter Frankopan: review The epic song cycles of the First Crusade, like Led Zeppelin's debut album, plucked the same brash chord that was heard in Crusades Two, Three, Four and Five. They presented a Western view of the Byzantine Emperor, from which he never recovered, as a treacherous double-dealer, in sympathy with Islam, who knowingly encouraged up to nine-tenths of a Crusader force of 80,000 to their doom. This vitriolic portrait resounded through the centuries and was strummed in the 18th by a misled Edward Gibbon who claimed the Emperor's widow inscribed on his tomb: "You die as you lived - an HYPOCRITE." Not true, says Peter Frankopan, an Oxford historian whose ambition is to restore Alexios I to his bold and rightful position, from which French and Italian chroniclers airbrushed him: as a figure who was crucial in galvanising a moribund 11th-century Europe to expand its horizons. After more than 900 years in the gloom, Alexios should once again take centre stage in the history of the First Crusade. The First Crusade reshaped the medieval world. It restored the authority of a divided papacy set the course for the Reformation and is "one of the most written-about events in history." And yet its narrative is one-sided, Frankopan argues, dominated by Western voices and by grossly over-promoted characters like the Frankish Prince Bohemond, a charismatic liability who failed three times to capture Ephesus and was not even present at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. Frankopan's passion to redress the balance was born during an early morning Cambridge lecture on ruthless Pecheneg nomads who would do anything for pepper. I was suddenly transfixed... as though I had just been given a triple espresso. His book has much the same effect. In his project to give fuller credit to those Byzantine and Turkish leaders who actually caused the First Crusade, Frankopan proves refreshingly undaunted by the prospect of scaling the citadel of almost a thousand years of scholarship. He is like the Byzantine warrior he describes who invented an ingenious flying bomb, "coating young birds with pine resin mixed with wax and sulphur before setting fire to them and despatching them back to their nests inside the walls of the city he was besieging." Scholarly and yet accessible, and unapologetically partisan, The First Crusade, as any vibrant history should, is bound to set a lot of feathers flying, even if its Constantinople-centric thesis is not so revolutionary as its publishers claim: it was a Byzantinist, after all, Steven Runciman, who wrote one of the best-regarded accounts of the crusades. Frankopan is not only a senior research fellow at Worcester College but a Croatian prince, and he uses his Balkan patrimony to interpret contemporary Slavonic texts. His principal source, though, is The Alexiad, completed by Alexios's daughter Anna Comnena, who took over from her husband, Nikephoros Bryennios. The only problem is that Anna says nothing about the origins of the Crusade, merely its course. For origins, Frankopan has to rely on French and Italian sources, and the inferences he can make. He challenges Anna's version that Byzantium was about to lose Asia Minor to the Turks before her father seized power, and suggests that the Turks" occupation of Nicaea and Antioch, towns that were a rallying call for the Crusaders to liberate, occurred with Alexios's connivance and even at his invitation, in order to stabilise his eastern provinces. Frankopan also rehabilitates Byzantine commanders like Tatikios, who covered his slit nose with a gold proboscis and was accused by Crusaders of reneging on a promise to send ships to relieve the besiegers at Antioch. "He is a liar and always will be," wrote the author of the Gesta Francorum, the principal Western chronicle. In fact, Tatikios delivered. The Crusaders who besieged Antioch had marched an astonishing 3,000 kilometres in response to Alexios's appeal in 1095 for help in fighting the Turks. Alexios shrewdly championed Jerusalem as the prize that would "pull their emotional trigger." An enfeebled Pope seized his call to arms as a godsend to unite a schismatic church and two Holy Roman Empires. Pope Urban II turned into a peripatetic Jihad-preacher, kindling religious hysteria with relics of the True Cross sent from Constantinople. A stairway to heaven was guaranteed to those who set off on August 15 to liberate the Holy City. The response was phenomenal, although "there was no clear plan." By the time the Crusaders reached Antioch, the expedition's aim and scope had changed and its numbers shrunk, nibbled away by brigands, disease and starvation. The author (also a hotelier) is particularly convincing on the logistics of provisioning. He charts the Crusaders" progress by their diet; from eating only "the best rump," they end up in desperation devouring thistles, rats, "the seeds of grain found in manure," horses" blood and, finally, "the flesh from the buttocks of dead Muslims." All in all, The First Crusade is a persuasive and bracing work. Peter Frankopan is not yet well known, but he deserves to be. One trusts him to go on ploughing his own furrow and not join the brat-pack of historians. The First Crusade: the Call From the East by Peter Frankopan 288PP, BODLEY HEAD t £18 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £20, ebook £10.98)