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My new book is out this autumn � and I hope it will prove a gripping read.



The UK and US editions
In March 2018 I made a trip to Acre in Northern Israel � Akka in Arabic, Akko in Hebrew  � as part of the research for writing the book. I wanted to explore the place where the crusaders made their last stand in the Holy Land in 1291 against an enormous Islamic army.
I thought I was prepared. I had read all the research literature I could get hold off. I had studied archaeologists� reports and pinned their various attempts to map the medieval city on my study wall. I wanted to get a sense of thirteenth century crusader Acre, its topography, quarters, principle buildings, the position taken up by the besieging Islamic army of the Mamluks. Above all I wanted to find out as much as I could about its defences. My unfolding book was full of the names of its towers and gates, descriptions of its moats and bridges. Where had the Accursed Tower been? The crucial Gate of St Anthony? The ominous Tower of Blood? And what did they look like?

The only picture we have of the Accursed Tower: in a thirteenth century map.





Our information about the layout of crusader Acre comes from contemporary maps like this.
I left a snowy England on the last day of February and stepped into brilliant Mediterranean sunlight. What confronted me was much more complicated than my months of book work had suggested. Old Acre, the ancient city, is a tiny place, but deceptive and as dense as Venice � winding streets, tiny squares, arches, dead ends, the domes of mosques, glimpses into courtyards � always ending somewhere by the sea. Above all it’s a Middle Eastern city, largely Palestinian, in which calls to prayer mingle with the sound of church bells.

A skyline of turquoise domes

Everything leads back to the sea: ‘Akka won’t be afraid of the sound of the waves� (Arab proverb)


I found the city walls impressive. Double-lined, with a deep ditch, they ring the peninsula of the old city from shore to shore. From the ramparts it’s possible to look out over the new town of Akko outside and imagine the defence, or back into the harbour: 


The problem is that the walls I was standing on were constructed in the eighteenth century, probably from plundered medieval stone. They kept Napoleon at bay in a much Mediterranean power struggle. I spent a little time with archaeologist Danny Syon of the Israel Antiquities Authority who disabused me of many of my more fanciful assumptions. Almost nothing remains of the famed defences. He showed me the one small stretch of crusader footing to a section of wall that’s now gone:


All the towers that the crusaders defended have vanished. Archaeological digs have discovered the remnants of some foundations, burnt in the final sacking of the city, but nothing exists above ground. I was little the wiser. Academic debate continues as to the size of the medieval city and the exact position of the walls.
Instead I found a much more complex scattering of crusader fragments built into later additions in a city whose street plan probably dates back to the long Arab presence. Everywhere Acre tantalises and perplexes, offers clues that one can’t quite read. My pleasantly cool Airbnb was vaulted with arches probably built during the crusader period.  

A confusing jumble of interlocking arches � in a medieval Airbnb?


This is a city � if we can call it one now � of immense antiquity and importance to the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. Everyone’s been here from the Bronze Age on: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, the Ottomans and Napoleon. The layers of history lie one on top of another in rich profusion. And it’s absolutely fascinating.



This chunk of rock is all that’s left of a small port used by the Pisan merchant colony in the city.
Everything in Acre leads down to the harbour, once one of the most important in the Mediterranean. Here goods were loaded and unloaded in an inner basin � archaeologists are still pondering exactly what was where. Fishing � the traditional activity of the local people � has declined, due largely to industrial pollution from nearby Haifa. (Perhaps nothing’s quite recent about this: all the sewage and the offal from butcher’s shops and the stinking effluent from tanneries poured into the medieval harbour � which was known as the Filthy Sea.)

Now the harbour’s main function seems to be providing speedboat thrill rides for tourists. The boats make tight turns, throwing out massive bow waves to the sound of blasting Arabic technopop. The passengers squeal in fear and delight. The last remnant of the medieval Tower of Flies that once enclosed the breakwater watches impassively.



One morning I walked out of Acre through modern suburbs to get a perspective from a prominent hill a few hundred metres to the south. Here the first inhabitants settled in the Bronze Age, and from this vantage point a succession of armies have conducted siege campaigns: Guy de Lusignan and Richard the Lionheart bottled up Saladin’s garrison for 683 days from 1189-91 before taking it back. Then in a final reversal of fortune the siege by the Mamluk Sultan Khalil a century later in 1291 that killed off the Holy Land crusades. I tried to imagine Khalil’s ceremonial red tent erected on the hill’s summit and his massive army ranged below, surrounding the Christian city in a great arc that stretched from shore to shore. Now the crest is surmounted by a later aspirant to Acre, the metal outline of Napoleon looking like a brandy advertisement. 


I strolled along the fine sandy beach that stretches ten miles south to Haifa, as far as the mouth of the river Naiman that waters the fertile Acre plain and provided the city with food. The fine sand created a local industry in glass making from the time of the Phoenicians on.

Bird prints in the sand that once provided glass for the Middle East � and Europe

The Naiman
Back in Acre I made a visit  to the compound of the Knights of St John, the Hospitallers, which remains the most impressive remnant of its crusader days � and its touristic highlight � a warren of pillared halls, vaults and courtyards, displays of medieval pottery and graffiti, which give a sense of the enormous wealth that the military crusading orders possessed.




The refectory � the dining hall � of the Hospitallers

A gargoyle shines in the dark





In a courtyard, a replica banner provided me with the emblem of the Knights that became the cover to the UK edition of the book.
At the entrance to the compound there are collections of perfectly spherical limestone balls � the artillery that bombarded the city from giant Mamluk catapults. Some of these were quarried and transported from rock strata twelve miles away � harder than the city walls. The heaviest weigh up to 165 kilos.

I was also desperate to see what, if anything was left of the Templars� Castle. Situated on the sea shore, it had been a formidable and magnificent complex, and the site of a dramatic last stand until its outer walls were undermined and collapsed. Instead I found just a shallow basin of sea, in which, when the water is still, you can discern the faint outline of foundations.
Across the street from the lost castle there’s a more imposing Templar memorial. A nondescript doorway leads down steps into the cool dark. For a small entrance fee you can descend into a subterranean world and gain a real sense of the Order’s wealth and power. The Templars� tunnel runs for three hundred metres beneath the city. Constructed from extraordinarily well-cut stone, it’s an eerie place, dimly lit, curving away from you in an unknown direction. As the street noise fades, you hear, or think you can hear, ominous sounds: the mutter of voices, a cock crowing, the trickle of running water. Some of it is faked � an audio installation � but it’s a place where the distant past seems close. You emerge, surprised and blinking into brilliant sunlight close to the port. As with so many aspects of the city there’s uncertainty about the tunnel’s function. The most likely explanation is that it provided the Templars with secure access to and from the harbour, safe from quarrelling rival factions who controlled access above ground.

For ten days I poked and pried among Acre’s courtyards and alley ways. A day with local guide Andrew Abado helped me understand the medieval city more deeply. He took me into people’s cellars � deep underlayers � and picked out discernible features of medieval houses, gateways and warehouses, rebuilt or incorporated into other structures. 

A fragmentary crusader building

This building is probably constructed out of the shell of the Pisans� warehouse

The pleasures of wandering in Acre seemed endless, despite its small size. I sat in mosque courtyards and in the caravanserais that accommodated Ottoman merchants, put my ear to the doors of churches where services were being conducted in Greek and in Arabic, stumbled on small squares � tiny breathing spaces in a dense urban space - where children played football, and experienced a lot of street art.


The courtyard of the Al-Jazzar mosque � a pleasant place to while away time

A caravanserai for Ottoman merchants


In a backstreet, a monument to Britain’s wars with Napoleon

A household celebrates a return from the Hajj
The people of Acre seem to have a taste for creating murals and surrealist sculptures




The long covered market street is a souk for tourist souvenirs � toy boats, water pipes, evil eyes � as well as more useful things: fish, fruit and falafels:







Outside, the sweets department


And a fish restaurant

The city’s soundscapes were vivid: squeals of kids on the speedboat rides, the somnolent cooing of pigeons, the more bloodcurdling shriek of a peacock that seemed to live on my roof, the echo of footfalls fading down alleys, the almost silent swoosh of electric bikes surprising the unwary from behind, the rustling of palm trees in the spring breeze. 


At evening Acre reverts. The shop shutters in the market street close with a firm clang. The gawdy souvenir stalls vanish. The street turns to stone. 


The theatre of twilight is entrancing. A Jewish shopkeeper unhooks the dresses hanging from his stall with a long pole. Backgammon games in a barber’s shop. A woman cooking in a kitchen. A tailor sewing by lamplight.  A man leads a gamely trotting pony that shies at the sparks from a welding torch as someone erects a metal structure over a gate. A cyclist swishes by, holding flowers in one hand with a snake round his neck.
At the day’s end the sea wall overlooking the vanished Templars� castle becomes the place to promenade, meet friends and listen to the waves. A group of women in headscarves occupy a semi-circle of stone benches, chat and smoke waterpipes; a horse is hitched to a No Parking sign; the café is illuminated. Offshore, anchored merchant ships look like aircraft carriers. From here in late May 1291 the last desperate defenders of Acre scanned the horizon in vain for signs of rescue.
The speed boat thrills go on into the gathering night. Then sounds die away. My book closes where the Holy Land crusades stopped - at the sea’s edge: ‘After dark, just the slap of water, the fruit stalls still lit, the lighthouse and the moon.�

High summer in Gloucestershire. We drive over the Cotswolds through lanes of flickering shade and blond wheat fields shimmering in the heat haze, to two of my favourite villages: the wonderfully named Eastleach Turville and Eastleach Martin - separated by the River Leach.

Across the ancient clapper bridge spanned by giant slabs of limestone. Water mint in the clear shallow water. Meadowsweet and rosebay willowherb. The river lined with willows.


From the next bridge up, a trout holds itself in the current to catch food coming downstream. A family of moorhens on a tiny island. The parents try to shoo their chicks into the water to practise their swimming skills. A huge gathering of rooks riding the thermals rise higher and higher into the blue, wheeling, scattering and reforming as they work their way effortlessly up the vortex of air like particles of dust.

From over the meadow the church of Eastleach Martin looks intact from the medieval past.

Inside fragments of medieval glass and quizzical faces that look down on us. 


100 yards away across the river there's another church - its rival - the church of Eastleach Turville, equally old, equally peaceful. Swifts zoom round the ancient tower emitting tiny high pitched screams. They look like small fighter planes engaged in some complex aerobatic display. The sky is blue. Apart from the joyful carnival of the birds the silence of high summer at midday.

On this day, Vasco da Gama sailed to India...

The website updated with news of the new book. Men being thrown off battlements, heroic looking crusaders whacking unfortunate Muslims. To look at you'd think this is a Christian victory, rather than the crusaders' last stand in the Holy Land at the siege of Acre 1291. It's of course a completely unhistorical piece of nineteenth century French romanticism. The book will offer something more factual, but hopefully as gripping in its own way...

I spent a couple of hours in the company of my web designer the other day looking again at pictures of the remarkable painted monastery of Moldovita in Romania. They form the header for my website, which is having an overhaul, and this blog. They're remarkable for their warm, vibrant colours. Five hundred years old they still glow, though they've suffered from some wear - and the occasional graffiti.



This one appeared on the cover of my first book fourteen years ago and I have a deep fondness for it.
Here's the whole church:
 I've never been but I'd love to see them.

The blog has been having a pretty long holiday, some might say a mid-life crisis. Partly this is down to pressure of writing life, and partly to laziness. But it's back; there will be regular new posts. More importantly I have a new book out in October - Accursed Tower - the story of the crusaders' last stand in the Holy Land. A tale of giant catapults and the desperate defence of the city of Acre on the shores of Palestine - the Alamo of the crusades. If you've been watching Knightfall on Netflix, this is the true story!



Here are the the covers for the UK and US editions.

UK



US




More info at:



and




"Know that the day was terrible to behold."

I have been on a week long book tour to promote the Chinese editions of my books. A fascinating whirlwind visit:  three cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing) , five talks with the aid of my excellent book translator and interpreter Hans Lu, ten interviews (I think), about two thousand books signed. The enthusiasm of Chinese readers for Mediterranean history has taken me - and indeed, I think, my Chinese publishers - by surprise.



A little practice at signing my name

The size, the energy and the sheer gaudiness of the cities was surreal. Christmas musak in hotels, giant teddy bears dressed up as Father Christmas - China appears to have the appetite to absorb all traditions and festivals in its rush to consumerism after the decades of Maoist austerity
The castle is entirely edible. The bricks are cinnamon flavoured biscuits; its snow capped turrets are icing.

I was whisked from city to city on bullet trains at about 200 miles an hour, through flickering landscapes of fields, huddled traditional villages, lakes, rivers and the repeated sightings of new mega towns and their stooping cranes rising on the horizon like mirages in a desert.

The attention of the audiences, the depth of their questions, and their desire to take photographs at book signings were amazing and surprising. Not to mention the limitless dedication to social media on all occasions. 30, 000 people watched the last talk on live streamed video.





The talk in Nanjing was held in one of the most extraordinary bookshops I've ever been to. The Librairie Avant-Garde is in a converted underground car park. It's a vast temple to literate  book loving, owned by a Christian, hence the cross. The welcome there included a hat, as worn by the bookshop staff, and a fabulous piece of travel luggage, courtesy of a Chinese travel company who helped sponsor the visit - the must-have marketing tool for all authors!



There were brief opportunities for sight seeing. The Forbidden City in Beijing on a clear, smog-free sunny day was extraordinarily impressive, followed by a ramble through the hutongs (the network of traditional narrow lanes with houses built round courtyards),







Street food in the hutongs
I also had an enjoyable morning's tour of central Shanghai - the Bund, the old European trading centre on the banks of the Yangtze, now facing an immense panorama of twenty first century skyscrapers across the water - Stockholm remade as Manhattan - and the streets around.






I got to sample a wide range of Chinese cuisine - and  my chopsticks skills held up reasonably well!

Thanks so much to Mr Li, Hans, Joan and Fengyun - the man who made it all happen.

The largest double font in the world?I rediscovered this blog post...I've been in southern France recently, with occasional forays into Catalonia - the north east Mediterranean corner of Spain. North of Barcelona I spent a few hours in the wonderful little medieval town of Castelló d'Empúries, just behind the mass tourist coast. It was a visual treat.

Walls of sulphur yellow
�
The spectacular doorway of the Romanesque Santa Maria de Castelló.






Doors and signs - the last a homage to Ovidi Montllor, Catalan singer and actor


And lunch...

During research for my book °ä´Ç²Ô±ç³Ü±ð°ù´Ç°ù²õÌýabout the Portuguese voyages of discovery I unearthed a remarkable connection to England and the region in which I live. When the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounded Africa in 1498 he was not just the first man to discover a sea route to India and join up the world â€� he was also the descendant of a Gloucestershire family.
It’s often said that England and Portugal are Europe’s oldest allies. Both are seafaring countries on the Atlantic sea board which traded with each other in medieval times. English crusaders stopped off at Lisbon in 1147 and helped the king of Portugal expel the Muslim rulers of the city. Many of the English stayed and settled down. Trading links and agreements followed. In 1373 Edward III concluded a treaty with the envoys of the Portuguese king to send archers to resist attacks from the larger neighbouring kingdom of Castile.
It was eight years before an expeditionary force could be assembled. The Duke of Cambridge gathered some 3000 men at Plymouth. Amongst those who went was ‘Frederick Sudley of Gloucestershire�.  Frederick evidently originated from Sudeley, near Winchcombe, but his exact origins seem uncertain. He could not have been a son of John de Sudeley, 3rd Baron Sudeley, who died in 1367, as he had no direct heirs, but it’s possible to hazard a guess that he was a member of the family, and a figure of some importance.  If so, Frederick would have contributed his own band of men-at-arms and archers to the expedition. Eight ships from Bristol sailed round to Plymouth to join the Duke of Cambridge � it seems likely that Sudley and his Gloucestershire contingent made the journey on these ships. They finally landed at Lisbon in June 1381.Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire
The English expedition achieved nothing. The men were unpaid and the whole enterprise quickly collapsed. After a few months they returned home. However Frederick Sudley decided to stay in Portugal where he prospered. His name, rendered as Sodré in Portuguese, became prominent.  He had a son João (John) and a grand-daughter Isabel who married Estêvão da Gama, from a wealthy and titled family. Vasco, their son, was Frederick’s great-grandson.

Vasco da GamaIt has to be said that the Sodrés and the Gamas were a rough lot. Two of Isabel’s brothers, Vicente and Brás Sodré, accompanied Vasco on his second expedition to India. These Sodrés were Vasco’s uncles but were hardly older than him. The anglo-portuguese crusading tendency remained strong.  Vicente was a member of the powerful Christian Order of Christ, the Portuguese successor to the Templars, and the governor of its fortress town at Tomar.  It’s likely that the Sodré brothers and Vasco da Gama had grown up together at Sines on the coast of Portugal and had shared experiences of piracy, raiding Muslim ports and capturing ships.  When Vasco returned from his second voyage to India in 1503 Vicente Sodré remained in control of Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean, accompanied by his brother Brás . Unfortunately the Sodré brothers became distracted by the lure of plundering Arab merchant vessels and ended up being shipwrecked off the Arabian Peninsula. Vicente was drowned. Brás died in mysterious circumstances � it’s been suggested that the Sodré brothers had greedily kept the lion’s share of the plunder for themselves and that  Brás was so hated that he was murdered by his own men.  Recently there’s been the probable discovery of the remains of one of their ships off the coast of Oman.


Cannon balls and the ship's bell from the shipwreckThe Sudeley connection is still recorded in modern Lisbon � the family gave its name to a riverside area beside the river Tagus, the Cais do Sodré (Sudeley’s Quay). Once a rough sailor’s haunt it’s now a trendy area of bars and restaurants, and a transport hub. There’s a Cais do Sodré railway and metro station and a ferry terminal across the Tejo.  The ships that carried Vasco da Gama and a Gloucestershire name to India in the fifteenth century were built on the river banks nearby. In the wake of Vasco’s arrival in India, the Portuguese developed a wide-ranging empire and Frederick’s descendants sailed with them. Today you can find Sodrés across the Portuguese speaking world, particularly in Brazil. The Sudelies have travelled a long way from the slopes of the Cotswold Hills.
Cais do Sodré in the past

And now

'So often, in the past as well,' Van Gogh wrote in a letter, 'a visit to a bookshop has cheered me up and reminded me that there are good things in the world.'

Whenever I travel I like to go into bookshops, even if I can't understand the language. One bookshop I always visit when I'm in Istanbul - or actually two on opposite sides of the popular road between Sultanahmet and the Grand Bazaar in the middle of the historic city - are the English language bookshops of Galeri Kayseri.




They have an unbeatable collection of book on Turkey in English - art books, history books, novels - everything from ancient Turkey to modern times, the Byzantines to the Ottomans, from Orhan Pamuk to...well me! It also showcases a lot of English language publishing on history and art produced in Turkey itself, books you can't find anywhere else. They're simply the best bookshops on Turkey in the world for English language readers.

I always drop in to see what's new and to talk with the two brothers who run the shops, Selahattin and Şener Tüysüz, about books and the history and architecture of Istanbul, on which they're immensely knowledgeable.



Selahattin in the main shop

Whereas everyone else in Istanbul is trying to sell me carpets, Selahattin and Şener sell me ideas for new books that I should write. Just now - or rather for my last couple of visits - they've been urging me to write a book about Suleiman the Magnificent, the greatest of sultans in the Ottoman golden age. It's a fantastically rich period of history. Or historical thrillers. I might just be tempted, one way or another!
 I'd always recommend a visit to Istanbul - and a trip to Galeri Kayseri in the process.