Gibbon Chapter LIX: The Later Crusades

In this chapter, the Crusades continue for almost two hundred years, as the Christian outposts in the Eastern Mediterranean dwindle and eventually disappear – some good descriptions of the eventual falls of Jerusalem, Louis IX and Acre. (The end of the Fourth Crusade is left for the next chapter.) See also comments on Bernard of Clairvaux’s penis, Pope Innocent III, the Kurds, colonialism, and the emperor Frederick II.