For God or Allah

I thought we might be on to a winner with this book after the opening sentence. ‘From an early age,’ Simon Mayall writes, ‘I loved stories and storytelling.’ Sounds simple, but in a world in which many professional historians tend to know more and more about less and less, and write for each other rather than the wider public, the grand narrative history is something which general readers will applaud and enjoy.

Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, to give him the full honours, is one of this country’s most distinguished soldiers and is steeped in the history of the Middle East. There is no doubting the pivotal nature of the ten military encounters he has summoned between Christendom and the caliphate over the past 1,300 years.

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We begin with the battles of Yarmuk and Qadisiyya in 636, in which Arab Muslim armies put an end to Christian rule in Syria and routed the once mighty Persian empire, setting the scene for the rise of an Islamic caliphate only four years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. We end with the fall of Jerusalem to the British in 1917, one of the nails in the enfeebled Ottoman empire’s coffin and the first time since the Crusades that a Christian-led force had taken control of the Holy City. These two events bookend a narrative teeming with battles, sieges and, of course, the Crusades – the latter covered in a rollicking trio of chapters, from Christendom’s blood-soaked victory in Jerusalem in 1099 to Saladin’s revenge at Hattin in 1187 and the fall of Acre in 1291.

Honours are more or less evenly distributed. There are epic Christian triumphs, including the heroic resistance of the Knights of St John at Malta in 1565, and top-tier Muslim feats of arms, such as the history-making conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by the 21-year-old Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.