THE LAST CRUSADERS is narrative history at its richest and most compelling. It is about the carnage of Lepanto, the conquests of Don Juan, the pyramid of Spanish skulls that Dragut built in Jerba, about how the Spanish stabled their horses on a litter of Korans, the life of galley slaves, gunpowder, the casting of cannon and gold. This book is about the last great conflict between the East and the West. It is about the titanic struggle between Hapsburg-led Christendom and the Ottoman empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though it focuses on the great naval campaigns and the ferocious struggle to dominate the North African shore it was also, in its way, the first world war. The conflict spread out along trade routes into the Atlantic, Red Sea, Persian Gulf and across the Sahara. There was even a plan hatched for taking the war into the Caribbean. It consumed nations and cultures, destroyed dynasties, flattened cities and depopulated provinces.

Yet the borders they fought for stand to this day as defining frontiers - the dividing lines between languages, nations and religions.