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  • Published: 30 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241298770
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $39.99

A History of the Crusades III

The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades



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 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.

  • Published: 30 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241298770
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $39.99

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Praise for A History of the Crusades III

When historical events are written about with this sort of command, they take on not only the universality of a fairy tale but also a certain moral weight. Runciman writes both seductively and instructively about the dignity and beauty of different religious beliefs and about the difficulties of their co-existence

Independent