Steve Tibble

Pretty Good Maps are a feature of this effort at analyzing the warfare. As the Author points out "History is a detective story with the last pages written and presented first." We know how things turned out, and thus we are short of explorations of the might-have-beens. To the people alive at the time, there was a larger number of possibilities, for good or ill. His explanations are fairly simple: the types of manpower available, and the amount of usable cash were heavily in favour of the Islamic powers. The Crusaders could not afford to lose even one big battle, and their biggest chance was to create or increase Islamic disunity. When the Turkic Nur-ed-din died, and the Kurd Salahaddin linked Egypt and Syria under one government, the gig was up. The prose is not striking, but the ideas are clearly presented. There is also a chronological list of the major clashes.… (more)