Christians Gone Wild - a book review

If you're in the mood for a blood-drenched tale of sex,ultra-violence and historical skullduggery, let me direct you to "The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople" by Jonathan Phillips. Despite my lurid intro, it's a well-researched, well-conceived and well-written book on a crucial event in history.
For those of you who slept through much of Medieval History 101 in an 8 a.m. class, let me hit the high points of this particular cockup.
The misleadingly named Pope Innocent III had a hissy fit about the Muslims re-conquering much of the Holy Land, particularly Jerusalem, and succeeded in firing up the home team (particularly the French) for Round 4 of the Crusaders vs. Muslims for the Championship of the Middle East.
This lot of Crusaders decided to try a novel approach, first attacking Egypt and then moving onward to Jerusalem and what was left of the Crusader states hugging the coastline.
But due to a series of bad decisions the Crusaders became heavily indebted to the Venetians (who provided the ships for transportation) and were forced to besiege another (Christian) city and hand it over to Venice as partial payment.
This should have been a minor detour on the way to the Holy Land, but due to political and economic reasons, it instead led to the Crusaders deciding to pay a visit to Byzantium, specifically Constantinople, then the largest, richest Christian city in the world.
The visit didn't go well. The western Christians (Catholics) thought the Byzantine crowd (Greek Orthodox) was a bunch of lying sissies and the Byzantines considered the westerners to be no better than baboons who bathed in their own excrement, if at all.
Both sides may have been at least partially correct.
Pretty soon a vicious dustup took place and the great walled city fell to the small, hungry, dispirited western baboons, who took this as God's OK to rape, pillage, steal, desecrate and destroy until there was nothig left to be raped, pillaged stolen, desecrated or destroyed.
It was a classic Number 9, as fans of "Blazing Saddles will recall.
Phillips does a fine job of telling this story. His knowledge of the subject shines through and his writing is clear and concise, despite the 300-plus densely written pages. He brings in numerous "extraneous" elements and shows how they came to matter in the story.
I give this fine piece of non-fiction a solid A.