1291: The Crusaders' Last Stand

A thrilling history of the bloody climax to two centuries of crusading in the Holy Land

By the end of the thirteenth century, the great saga of the crusades had come down to a single city. Acre-a once-great Mediterranean metropolis on the shores of the Holy Land, home to the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights-was all that remained of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And as the balance of power in the Levant swung south, the Mamluk Sultanate set this last Christian stronghold in its sights.

Roger Crowley chronicles the tumultuous and violent siege that followed. Mightily fortified, richly provisioned and newly garrisoned by soldiers from across Europe, from Spain to the Venetian Republic, the Crusaders faced the heaviest bombardment of the age before gunpowder. In one of the most savage sieges of the Middle Ages, the city was reduced to a crumbling ruin.

This is the dramatic story of how two centuries of crusading ended with the fall of a single city-a catastrophe that remade the medieval world.