The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars If only-- If only the self-serving Genoese, Venetians, and Pisans weren’t always fighting each other and trading vital martial slaves and material to the Mamluks. If only the military orders (Templars and Hospitallers etc.) weren’t always treating each other like rivals. If only the heads of the Crusader states could all get on the same page. If only the European countries were not always at loggerheads with each other and or the different Popes. If only the Mamluks were (finally) less organized, less united, and less proficient at treaty loopholes, military logistics, and drum and trumpet walls of sound. Then maybe Acre might've carried on Christian for a few more years (but THEN what?). The catchy main title of Roger Crowley’s The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades (2019) conjures up images of repeated foiled Muslim attempts to take a particularly stubborn and vital tower, but actually the final siege of Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land does not really hinge on this one tower among the many defenses of the city, and the “accursed” appellation doesn’t really have any particular application to the history Crowley relates. Really the book is about its subtitle. The first seven chapters—occurring from 1200 to 1290—set the historical and cultural context for the siege, including Crusader debacles in Egypt, the influential advent of the Mongols, and the increasing importance of the Mamluks of Egypt, with the Outremer Christian cities and castles getting captured or sacked one after the other in the thirteenth century, till the siege of Acre ends the two-hundred-or-so-year Crusader attempt to maintain a Western Christian presence in the Holy Land. The next six chapters relate the last siege of Acre led by the Mamluks from about April 10 till May 28 of 1291. The fourteenth chapter cleans up the last loose Crusader ends thereabouts, and the Epilogue gives a glimpse at the Acre of today superimposed over the Acre of a thousand and more years ago. I found this book less suspenseful, absorbing, detailed, and informative than Ernle Bradford’s The Great Siege: Malta 1565 (1961), but I did get some interesting points from it: --The disastrous disunity among the Christians. Through much Crusader history, the Muslims were not much more unified, but they got their act together in the latter half of the thirteenth century under Mamluk sultans like Baybars. --The effective use by the Mamluks of religious fervor, booty lust, defenses mining, trebuchet engineering, Greek fire, kettle drums (mounted on camels!), and treaty loopholes. --“A sixty-day siege [by an army of 25,000 men] would need the removal of a million gallons of human and animal waste and 4,000 tons of solid biological waste,” which is probably one reason the Mamluks catapulted their waste into Acre! --The inherent unsustainability of Crusader satellite states so far away from Europe, and the precarious way they lasted as long as they did via trade with Muslim states. I appreciated that Crowley quotes from a fair number of Muslim sources and seems even-handed in his depiction of the attackers and the defenders of Acre. His Epilogue made me want some day to visit Acre (in today’s Israel…) About the audiobook… If only a better reader than Matt Kugler read it! Although he reads clearly, he also reads like a sensational documentary narrator, too often overly dramatically emphasizing what he sees to be key words or syllables, such that he numbed me to the impact of the truly important key words: “the Sultan’s SENior engineer” (why is it so important that we know this is “the Sultan’s SENior engineer”?) “the equally imposing COMpound of the Knights Hospitallers.” (why is that syllable stressed so much there?) Etc. In short, Kugler is no Simon Vance! (Vance intelligently reads The Great Siege: Malta 1565, which must be one reason why I so prefer it to Crowley’s book.) I’m not sorry to have listened to The Accursed Tower, but I didn’t learn enough or have a good enough time to recommend it highly, and probably other books by Crowley like 1453 and Empires of the Sea (read by better readers) would be better. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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