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A review by emilybryk
Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley
slow-paced
3.0
Fascinating and uneven.
The first part of the book is a pretty whirlwind overview of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is worth reading for the absolute terror of the Seventh Crusade alone. (Mansurah! Fariskur! People doing horrible things to each other in the name of religion isn't new (hell, this is a book about the Crusades in the high Middle Ages it is inherently not-new!), but this particularly horrified me -- the flooding, the mud, the barge disasters.)
The transition from the first part to the second -- and from the breakneck speed to the hour-by-hour siege timeline -- was jarring and felt like a separate book. A good book! But a separate one.
The first part of the book is a pretty whirlwind overview of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is worth reading for the absolute terror of the Seventh Crusade alone. (Mansurah! Fariskur! People doing horrible things to each other in the name of religion isn't new (hell, this is a book about the Crusades in the high Middle Ages it is inherently not-new!), but this particularly horrified me -- the flooding, the mud, the barge disasters.)
The transition from the first part to the second -- and from the breakneck speed to the hour-by-hour siege timeline -- was jarring and felt like a separate book. A good book! But a separate one.