Steven Runciman

Runciman's great Crusades trilogy reissued in Penguin Modern Classics. "The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion." The Christian and Muslim empires of the Middle East had fought each other for centuries, two ancient, powerful civilisations, in some ways very familiar to one another. In 1095, something extraordinary happened. The Pope issued an...

Runciman's great Crusades trilogy reissued in Penguin Modern Classics 'The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion' The triumph of the First Crusade transformed the eastern Mediterranean, creating a series of European-ruled states along the coast and in Armenia. But the region's Muslim rulers were far from defeated, and the major cities of...

Runciman's great Crusades trilogy reissued in Penguin Modern Classics 'The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion.' 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,...