Product Description

THE LAST CRUSADERS is narrative history at its richest and most compelling. It is about the carnage of Lepanto, the conquests of Don Juan, the pyramid of Spanish skulls that Dragut built in Jerba, about how the Spanish stabled their horses on a litter of Korans, the life of galley slaves, gunpowder, the casting of cannon and gold. This book is about the last great conflict between the East and the West. It is about the titanic struggle between Hapsburg-led Christendom and the Ottoman empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though it focuses on the great naval campaigns and the ferocious struggle to dominate the North African shore it was also, in its way, the first world war. The conflict spread out along trade routes into the Atlantic, Red Sea, Persian Gulf and across the Sahara. There was even a plan hatched for taking the war into the Caribbean. It consumed nations and cultures, destroyed dynasties, flattened cities and depopulated provinces. Yet the borders they fought for stand to this day as defining frontiers - the dividing lines between languages, nations and religions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114510 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

Review
'Remarkable - Barnaby Rogerson has succeeded in isolating all the different strands of North Africa and weaving them into a clear and comprehensive narrative' - John Julius Norwich on A TRAVELLER'S HISTORY OF NORTH AFRICA.

About the Author
Barnaby Rogerson is the author of the four much-admired editions of Cadogan's guidebook on Morocco, and with his wife Rose Baring the two on Tunisia. He runs Eland Press, which specialises in classic travel writing.

Customer Reviews

achieving the (near) impossible
I just finished The Last Crusaders, which I picked up at Daunt the other day, and felt I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed it. Not just because it is so well written or because it is such a good read, the story so compelling: it is all the above, but a lot more.

My previous employer, Shell, used to evaluate its employees according to their score on 3 criteria: imagination, realism, and helicopter. No need to explain the first 2, or maybe even the 3rd, but what they had in mind was the ability to get up above the facts and small vignettes and see how things fit together in the overall puzzle of meaning. That's what this book did so superbly and apparently effortlessly, despite the need to bring together sources from Islamic and European sources spanning two centuries and more than two continents. Not that the detailed side was wanting, however: I loved the attention to things nautical, I guess blood will tell (the author's father was a Royal Navy officer whose career took his family to strategic points in the Med and elsewhere). So now I know what it felt (and smelt) like to be a galley-slave, knitting in between campaigns.

The combination of vividly described detail, fast-moving narrative that doesn't miss a significant move in what was the Great Game of the 16th century, makes for a unique read that will certainly become a reference on my shelf.

History for the insider and history for the outsider
"The Last Crusaders" by Barnaby Rogerson that I read in one stretch is a still rare example of a very learned historical account based on thorough and wide-ranged research told in a vivid style pleasing also the non-expert educated reader. It is a masterpiece only to be compared with few other bestselling history books like Ceram's (German) "Götter, Gräber und Gelehrte" about archaeological history. I thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly the sections I am less familiar with (Portuguese-Spanish Iberian squabbles in Africa and the Maghrib). "The Last Crusaders" - read with an eye open for the present - is a study of politics and psychology as well as history. Deserves a prize and to be a bestseller.