In August 1099, Abu Saad al-Harawi, a judge from Damascus, stormed into the Caliph's court in Baghdad, condemning its luxury while Muslims in Syria and Palestine were slaughtered by the Frankish invaders.

With this charged scene, Amin Maalouf opens his exhilarating narrative history of two centuries of war that, nearly a millennium later, still cast their shadow on Arab-Western relations. The Crusaders' first major triumph came with the sack of Jerusalem in 1099. After two days of carnage, not a single Muslim was left alive within the city walls. Yet it would take another fifty years before the Arab East mounted a united resistance.

Maalouf recounts in gripping detail the fall of city after city: Antioch, betrayed from within; Tripoli, besieged and stripped of its priceless library; Ma'arra, where the Franj committed unspeakable atrocities. Against this devastation, he sketches vivid portraits of the Arabs who rose in response: Nur al-Din, the 'Saint-King' who forged the first united defence of Muslim nations, and Saladin, the reluctant leader who would ultimately reclaim Jerusalem.