My Books

1096. A preaching monk who looks every inch a prophet sets half of Europe ablaze and drags a hundred thousand desperate souls — men, women and children — toward the Holy Land with a single cry: God wills it! They don’t know it yet, but they are marching straight into the deadly trap that the ruthless Muslim sultan Kilij Arslan has prepared for them at Civetot, to cut every last one of them down. Betrayal, heroism, blood, sex, tragedy and cowardice — Saga No. 1 of the Crusades.

Godfrey of Bouillon, Hugh of Vermandois, Baldwin of Boulogne, Bohemond of Taranto, Robert of Normandy and Raymond of Saint-Gilles take up the cause of the poor pilgrims massacred only months earlier at Civetot. From the siege beneath the walls of Nicaea to the Turkish ambush at Dorylaeum, all the way to the founding, in March 1098 — through a grand deception and a false adoption — of the Crusade’s first Catholic kingdom: the County of Edessa, at the hand of the French count Baldwin of Boulogne. Betrayal, heroism, blood, sex, tragedy and cowardice. Now the real war against Islam begins — Saga No. 1 of the Crusades.

Eight months of brutal siege beneath the walls of Antioch: hunger, desertion and despair eat away at the crusader army from within. The treachery of Firuz the Armenian, who works for the Turks and switches sides, opens a breach for them to take the city — but they have barely entered it when a vast Muslim relief army, led by the emir Kerbogha, leaves them besieged and trapped inside the very city they have just conquered. Amid prophetic visions and starvation, the Holy Lance of Jesus Christ is found in a church. And on July 15, 1099, Jerusalem finally falls into crusader hands. And here, as the chronicler and eyewitness Raymond of Aguilers tells us, the blood of the Muslim inhabitants slaughtered by the Christian troops rose to the ankles, and the funeral pyres built to burn the bodies stood as tall as mountains. Betrayal, heroism, blood, sex, tragedy and cowardice — Saga No. 1 of the Crusades.

1104. Hugues de Payens, the future founder of the Templars, arrives in a Jerusalem newly conquered by the Christians alongside his cousin, Count Hugh of Champagne. Ever since July 15, 1099, the Holy City has seethed with betrayal, murky political scheming, double games and poisonings carried out by the sect of the Assassins — plots that may have cost the life of the city’s first Christian king, Godfrey of Bouillon, and that of his cousin Werner of Grez. Amid this turmoil, nine French knights take a vow of poverty before King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, and the Order of the Temple is born: Christendom’s first warrior monks. From their first victory at Ascalon to the tragic fall at the Horns of Hattin against Saladin: the birth and the twilight of the Templar legend, with no esoteric myths attached. Betrayal, heroism, blood, sex, tragedy and cowardice — Saga No. 1 of the Crusades.

A none-too-decent king named Candaules shows his naked queen to Gyges, one of his guards, and unleashes a vengeance that lays waste to the entire kingdom of Lydia. Astyages, a king freshly turned grandfather, orders the death of his own newborn grandson over a dream and an absurd prophecy: and so, saved by the shepherdess Spako, Cyrus the Great of Persia is born. From the fall of King Croesus to the birth of the Persian Empire — and from there, in the books to come, all the way to the Battle of Marathon, the Thermopylae of Leonidas’s 300 Spartans, and the decisive clashes between Greeks and Persians in the great naval battle of Salamis and the land battle of Plataea. All of it under the shadow of the Oracle of Delphi. Betrayal, heroism, blood, sex, sweeping tragedy and cowardice — the No. 1 saga for precision, depth and detail on Ancient Greece, Egypt and Persia.

Herodotus travels the length and breadth of the Egypt of the pharaohs and takes apart its myths: the real Helen of Troy, it seems, never set foot in Troy, but spent the whole war hidden away in Egypt under the protection of the great pharaoh Ramesses; the real Cinderella, the inspiration for the famous tale, was a stunningly beautiful red-haired Greek courtesan named Rhodopis (“rosy cheeks”), who sold her body and her favors to the most powerful men in Egypt; and the Hebrew Joseph, who rises, with the help of his god Yahweh, from lowly slave to chief counselor and dream-interpreter of the biblical pharaoh Ramesses II. Pyramids, temples, mummies, a soulless embalmer who has sex with a freshly deceased young princess of royal blood, and all the secrets of the great Land of the Nile, as you’ve never heard them told before. Betrayal, heroism, blood, sex, tragedy and cowardice — the No. 1 saga for precision, depth and detail on Ancient Greece, Egypt and the Persian Empire.

In this third book, Cambyses, son of the late Cyrus the Great, conquers Egypt with a flawless strategic maneuver that takes him across the Sinai desert with 100,000 men. But, it seems, the "curse of the pharaohs" was lying in wait, and it drives him completely mad. First he desecrates the mummified corpse of a former pharaoh, tearing it apart and burning it; then he stabs the sacred bull Apis with his own hand in a temple, before his terrified priests. From that moment, madness takes hold of him, turning him into a cruel, wicked demon who will order the death of his own brother Bardiya over a premonitory dream, and of his own sister-wife, whom he himself will kill with a kick during a trivial argument. And while this madman is consumed with Egypt, a false prince Bardiya usurps his throne in Persia, seven powerful nobles conspire to overthrow him, and a trick starring a horse and its whinny at dawn crowns the new Great King, Darius I. Betrayal, heroism, blood, sex, great tragedies and cowardice — the No. 1 saga for precision, depth and detail on Ancient Greece, Egypt and Persia.

Dawn, May 18, 1565. Seven hundred Christian knights of the Hospitaller Order of St. John, under the command of Grand Master Jean de la Valette, a 71-year-old French nobleman, withstand the naval and land assault of the greatest Ottoman Turkish armada ever assembled up to that date. Forty thousand Muslim janissaries and levends under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent — the very best of his cavalry and his sailors — throw themselves screaming, scimitars in hand and bent on massacre, against one tiny island lost in the middle of the Mediterranean and defended by a mere few thousand Catholic Christian soldiers; mostly Maltese, Spanish and Italian, but also with a strong contingent of English, French, Portuguese and German knights and soldiers. Four long months of merciless siege, the fall into Turkish hands of the heroic Fort St. Elmo and the beheading of every last Christian found there, the death by a cannon blast to the head of the most famous and feared Muslim corsair of the 16th century, Dragut Reis. On the outcome of that siege hung the fate of Christendom and of Europe. And our men held the line — how they held it!