A History of the Crusades III. The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades

In 1187 the catastrophic Battle of Hattin resulted in Saladin's destruction of the crusaders' main army. In an atmosphere of total crisis, the three principal leaders of Europe, Philip Augustus, Richard the Lionheart and Frederick Barbarossa decided that they should personally lead armies to relieve the beleaguered survivors.

A triumph of prose-writing, argument and research, Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades is an un-improvable account of events which changed the world and which still resonate today. In this final volume he starts with the glamorous Third Crusade and then tells the later story as the crusader states collapsed, a less well-known but fascinating period where crusaders found themselves fighting everywhere from Egyptian swamps to the Great Hungarian Plain and the apparent clarity of the original urge to liberate Jerusalem seemed a distant dream.