Review: 13th Century Acre/Tripoli Battles and Intrigues
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 19, 2014
In the latter part of the 13th century, Ronan MacAlasdair is a young Scots warrior who cripples a man in a fight over the man's wife. Ronan can be outlawed or give up to the injured man's clan who will surely slay him.  A visiting Templar Knight offers instead to take Ronan as his squire, for him to serve penance while defending the Holy Land.  Because of his fighting skills, Ronan himself soon becomes a Templar Knight and bodyguard to the Temple Master.Ronan seems to be the sort of person who makes enemies easily.  Often he has to defend himself in individual sword play or against paid assassins.  If that isn't enough, there are also tens of thousands of Mamluk natives that want to seize control of the Levant and oust the infidels. There is plenty of battle action, either  individual, in small groups or full scale assaults on city walls.  There is also much intrigue as to who will have control of the various cities and the riches via trade agreements that go with that power.  There are the three Military Orders -  the Templars, the Teutonic Knights and the Hospitallers, not to mention mayors and kings and the Genoese and Venetians  who all have their own ideas of who should have power and trading rights in the area.All of this makes for a very fine novel.  One sees that all that occurred  on in the Levant in the latter part of the 13th century was not purely devotion to a religious call to protect the Holy Land but also included greed and desire for power.  I look forward to the next book in the series.