The Accursed Tower is Roger Crowley’s fifth book and brings the same page-turning narrative style as his earlier works. Having previously covered Christian and Muslim competition around the Mediterranean (Constantinople: The Last Great Siege 1453, Empires of the Sea, and City of Fortune), then Portuguese conquest in the Indian Ocean (Conquerors), The Accursed Tower represents Crowley’s first foray into the history of the Crusades.
More ink has been employed by historians on this subject than the Mongols spilled into the Euphrates when they sacked Baghdad in 1258. So, Crowley has wisely chosen to avoid the better-known period and begins The Accursed Tower with Saladin and Richard the Lionheart departing from the historical stage. Instead, the book’s focus is the second hundred years of Outremer: the disastrous Nile campaigns of Louis IX, the Mongol incursions, rise of the Mamluk Sultanate and the era’s bloody culmination at Acre in 1291.
One of Crowley’s great strengths is his ability to explain a complex political landscape without losing any impetus in his narrative. He draws on an impressive range of Arabic and Latin sources, quoting them within the flow of his own account, almost like dialogue in an historical novel. His keen eye for topography and efficient writing style paint a clear picture of the layout and fortifications of what, to many readers, will be an unfamiliar city.
Although Crowley never draws parallels, a clear thread connects this book thematically with his others. Beyond the obvious clash of religions, Crowley’s subject is empire – often the spluttering fag-end of it. Acre’s plight – surrounded by enemy territory, facing a desperate last stand against an army of slave-soldiers – evokes parallels to Crowley’s compelling tale of Byzantine Constantinople.
There are broader echoes of colonial decline here too: accounts of European newcomers to Acre at once scandalised and seduced by a place both exotic and familiar, has the ring of an Edwardian diarist in Bombay; the image of French and Italians crowding onto escaping ships and leaving the locals to their doom as Tripoli fell, has a whiff of Saigon helicopters.
By the late 13th century, the Latin families of Outremer were multi-generational inhabitants. Their relationship with the Sultans of Cairo was complex and intertwined. A tension existed between macro-level geopolitical competition and micro-level cooperation and trade. As much as Acre represented a bone in the throat of Islam, it was also an important commercial hub through which the Islamic world bought and sold vital goods with Europe, including weapons and slaves.
Perhaps the grimmest irony to emerge from The Accursed Tower is that it should have fallen to the Mamluks to end both the Ayyubid Sultanate and Latin kingdoms. A Mamluk began as an enslaved child, harvested from the northern shore of the Black Sea then compelled into lifelong service to the Sultan and Islam. It was a human traffic monopolised by Christian merchants – Genoese and Venetians – based in Acre and Tripoli. Thus, the book’s final chapters vividly describe a very biblical reaping of what had been sown.
