A History of the Crusades III

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, 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 unimprovable account of events that changed the world and 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. This is 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.