The information has to be presented in an info graphic. It can be on any of the crusades. Probably Middle East but I don't really mind so long as there is enough information to put down on paper.
I don't have those books on hand so if you wouldn't mind...
That's what libraries are for, silly! You've got three weeks, after all. And I'd be genuinely shocked if you couldn't find
God's War at any public library, let alone an academic one. Asbridge's
The Crusades also ought to be widely available.
"Infographic" is awfully vague. If you want to do maps, you certainly could. Ian Mladjov, at Michigan, has an excellent map resource
here that you could use as a base quite nicely; maybe make multiple maps layers in an animation to show change over time? It oughtn't be too hard to use those maps to calculate total land area, either, so you could maybe make that into a line graph. (Be careful, though, to make sure you have the right kind of temporal resolution, so you get the trends right.)
Otherwise, you could do something more complicated. One of Tyerman's coolest bits of research was on the so-called "second son" phenomenon. Supposedly, the Crusading armies were made up of second sons of noble houses, who couldn't expect to get anything out of inheritances because of primogeniture: the first son would inherit everything. This second son explanation was also used to describe why the Crusading armies were ostensibly so rapacious and vicious: they were in it for the loot, and religious war was just a cover. Tyerman actually compiled a list of crusading nobles by looking at the records of who left behind property for the Church to keep safe while he was away, and found that the second son theory was a load of nonsense. You could pie-chart Tyerman's conclusions up by taking the data from a table in one of his papers. JSTOR ought to have them easily available.
Didn't realise there were loads. The most interesting one, maybe?
Okay so.
The First Crusade was the big-deal one that everybody knows where a ragtag bunch of pilgrim-soldiers fought their way clear across the Middle East through several major battles and two epic sieges, slaughtered a bunch of people in Jerusalem, and founded the Crusader states.
The Second Crusade was the one that people kind of forget where a bunch of kings showed up in the East and mismanaged their way through a failed siege of Damascus.
The Third Crusade was the other one that people remember because it was called in response to Saladin's reconquest of Jerusalem. You know, the thing from the movie
Kingdom of Heaven. It's the one that had King Richard I and caused all of the Robin Hood stuff to happen.
The Fourth Crusade was the one where the Crusaders decided to kill a bunch of Christians instead, and broke the Byzantine Empire.
The Fifth Crusade was the one where the Crusaders tried to invade Egypt and failed. They also thought they had an alliance with the Mongols, which, lol. Nobody allied with the Mongols.
The Sixth Crusade was the one where the Holy Roman Emperor decided to avoid fighting and just bought Jerusalem. It worked pretty well.
The Seventh and Eighth Crusades were the ones with King Louis IX, who got sainted for his trouble. They named a city in Missouri after him. He spent a lot of time pointlessly invading North Africa and died on the Eighth Crusade.
The Ninth Crusade happened at the same time as the Eighth Crusade, and was mostly just the future King Edward I of England jaunting around the Levant. He's the old douchebag from
Braveheart.
There were also a
lot of other random Crusades! There was the Albigensian Crusade, which was fought in southern France allegedly against Cathar heretics and got super weird and complicated really fast. There were the Northern Crusades in Finland and the Baltic States which involved the Teutonic Knights and pagans and stuff, and there were Crusades in Spain and Portugal against Muslim Andalucia. There were later Crusades against the Ottoman Empire when that started to be a Thing. And then sometimes random wars in Europe between Christian and Christian got called 'crusades' because reasons.
If you're looking for dramatic interestingness, it's hard to go wrong with the First and Third Crusades. They are famous for a reason. The Fourth Crusade is also not bad, one of those 'deep cuts' that might impress some people. Unless it's an actual history class, though, I wouldn't do anything about the others. The Albigensian Crusade would just get people confused.
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*photographer fist bump*
