Spanning a period of two hundred years, this book re-creates in dramatic, human terms all the pageantry, bloodshed, suffering and exaltation of the Crusades from Pope Urban's appeal at Clermont in 1095 to the fall of Acre in 1291. There has never been a popular book about the Crusades to match this volume in authenticity and human impact. History written long after the events is often given a romantic gloss and reflects the author's viewpoints and prejudice. This volume, however, is actually written by the men and women who were there—who lived and died during this turbulent era in history and observed or participated in its world-shaking events. Crusaders and Saracens tell in their own words, through letters and chronicles, what they saw and did during those two centuries of complex struggle and uneasy truces. In what they wrote is the immediacy of dispatches from the battlefield and the incomparably sharp detail and color that can be imparted only through eyewitness accounts. We read of the horrors of thirst and plague in besieged cities, of intrigue, treachery and parleys with the enemy. There are participants' accounts of military triumphs and disasters, stories of individual feats of arms, and examples of chivalry as well as of extreme cruelty and bloody slaughter on both sides. And there are vivid portraits of such leaders as Richard Couer de Lion and Saladin; of Saint Louis, who built the port of Aigues Mortes from which to sail to the Holy Land; of kings and sultans and emperors; of knights and their ladies; of peasants and warriors, heroes and villains. Compiled entirely from primary source materials, with lucid explanatory text weaving the diverse accounts into a unified narrative of all nine Crusades, this is a work of history that sparkles and lives—an invaluable book for the student and an exciting experience for every reader.