Lionheart! Saladin! Massacre! There is no shortage of larger-than-life characters and drama in the epic, two-year siege of Acre, the great set-piece of the Third Crusade. But, as John Hosler relates in this accomplished study, there was so much more besides. Acre proved the strategic point for armies from across Europe, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Maghreb; and the siege provided a kaleidoscope of competing ambitions, objectives and self-serving manoeuvrings amid the most arduous conditions, in which Bedouins ‘exchanged the severed heads of their victims with Saladin in return for robes and gifts’.