Rather than burn at the stake as a witch, Ursula accompanies her feeble father on the march from Cologne to Constantinople. It's an uneasy match: Gentle, pacifist Bruno and 16-year-old Ursula, with her preference for hot baths and disdain for money, are not credible products of their times, and are never seriously affected by the violent events.
Bradford yokes a conventional romance between a young stonemason and the daughter of an apothecary to an ugly account of the unreasoning fervor, multiple treacheries, genocide, and bloody massacres that marked the People's Crusade, from Cologne to Jerusalem, in 1096. A harsh, patchy tale of the first Crusade.
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