In western historiography Acre's fall in 1291 stands as the coda to the effective end of a Latin Christian presence in the Holy Land. Hence the scholarly consensus dates the "crusade era," at least for significant crusade activity in the Eastern Mediterranean, as 1095-1291 CE. The date of the preaching of what became the First Crusade marks the beginning and the siege of Acre denotes the terminus, as it was the last major Latin Christian toehold in Outremer. After the siege the victors, members of the army of the Mameluke sultan, destroyed it to prevent it ever being used again as an outpost. While westerners, Latin Christians, crusaders or would-be crusaders continued to cry out for Jerusalem, without a secure coastal base on the Levantine coast there was no realistic chance of its recovery.
Roger Crowley has written a fast-paced, readable, engaging narrative for a popular audience of the chronological book-end of the crusade era. The Accursed Tower is a strictly narrative retelling of events, mostly devoid of analysis except for one chapter (nine) on the siege weapons employed during the siege. By the end of the story the reader gains a sense of the stakes, who the major figures were, and the tragic violence accompanying a bloody event.
The early chapters trace the history of the crusader states from the Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) on, including the systematic conquest of Christian fortresses in the 1260s and later, especially by the Sultan Baybars. This ramped-up aggression stemmed as much from self-preservation as it did jihad, because the Mongols exploded into the region in the thirteenth century. After the Mongols took and destroyed Baghdad in 1258, the eastern Mediterranean Muslim world rightly saw itself untenably sandwiched between the Mongols to the east and the crusaders to the west. This provided the impetus in the later thirteenth century for the Mamelukes to divest the weaker of their two enemies of their coastal possessions. The actual siege of Acre takes up most of the second half of the book.
Crowley has written four other books dealing with the later Middle Ages or the early Modern Mediterranean that have sold very well. He presents his material as if he just learned it, offering his readers a sense of freshness rather than a stuck-in-the-furrow plow horse scholar repeating the same things countless times. As an author writing for a popular audience, however, Crowley forgoes some protocols that scholars typically demand of each other. Thus academics might be nonplussed to see large narrative chunks go by without reference to either a primary or secondary source, leaving one at a loss as to where and from whom the author derived his facts. The bibliography does not always match the end notes. For example, Crowley cites the fourteenth century The Deeds of the Cypriots (Les Gestes des Chiprois) from Recueil des historiens des croisades: Documents arméniens volume 2, ed. C. Kohler (Paris, 1906), dozens of times in the book through various chapters. Given the importance of one of the authors of this source (commonly called the Templar of Tyre) as an eyewitness to the siege, this only makes sense. In his bibliography Crowley lists Paul Crawford's translation of part III of this work, The 'Templar of Tyre'. Part III of the 'Deeds of the Cypriots' (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003),but does not cite it once in an endnote. One suspects Crowley used Crawford's translation repeatedly, for it is certainly more accessible than the RHC edition in terms of both its language and availability but there is no direct evidence that he did. Using the translation is not a bad thing here, especially considering Crowley's audience and intent; it is the failure to cite that is problematic.
Crowley's secondary source base is not extensive. By itself this is not a scholarly crime, but providing numerous titles in his bibliography without citing them in the end notes is perhaps. Thus the reader cannot know if Crowley even looked at them. Labeling the bibliography a "Works Consulted" or "Further Reading" section would have been more accurate and displayed truth in advertising. Occasionally Crowley relies on obsolescent sources, such as the numerous citations from E. J. King's 1931 The Knights Hospitallers in the Holy Land. This may be a wonderful book, but surely Jonathan Riley-Smith's extensive works on the Order over the last fifty plus years, including one as recently as 2012, were worth consulting. Crowley actually lists Riley-Smith's two monographs devoted to the Hospitallers in the bibliography but they remain uncited. In addition to being more recent and accessible (at least by one of the two being in print) Riley-Smith was the acknowledged world expert on this monastic military order as well as the leading Anglo-phone crusade historian of the last half century.
Therefore there is much in this book to give a scholar pause though the general reader will not mind and might even be grateful to be freed from being mired in an overly scrupulous critical apparatus or tangled up in scholarly argument and equivocation. In an after chapter on the evidence available on the siege, Crowley performs a yeoman's job at discerning what literary and archaeological evidence remains and its problems without getting bogged down in detail. The map of Acre during the siege was quite helpful and the other illustrations well-chosen and appropriate. The Accursed Tower's readability recommends it, and the story it tells is accurate in the aggregate. One can learn a great deal from a narrative even if sometimes an engaging story trumps the evidence. While lacking a discernable argument or much analysis, Crowley's book keeps the reader's attention. For the general reader then, this book will be far more efficacious and valuable than say, spending the day down the rabbit-hole of social media. Popular retellings can stimulate a casual reader's interest in other things medieval even if the academic must point out their lack of scholarly rigor.