Snow Dan. Battle Castles: 500 Years of Knights and Siege Warfare

HarperCollins , 2012. — 336 p.Join TV’s Dan Snow as the fully illustrated ‘Battle Castles’ brings to thrilling life a cavalcade of medieval fortifications and the clashes that turned empires to dust and mortals into legends.Castles and their ruins still dominate the landscape and are a constant reminder to us of a time when violence, or the threat of it, was the norm.Dan Snow explores the world’s greatest medieval castles: from Dover Castle to Château Gaillard, Richard I’s fortress in Normandy, and Castillo de Gibalfaro, the last vanguard of Moorish rule in Spain, to Krak des Chevaliers in Syria – an astounding feat of engineering by the Crusaders.Each castle’s story is dramatically recounted: the building techniques, the weapons used and daily life within the walls. Spanning the globe, and using the latest CGI reconstructions, Dan Snow gets to the very heart of the bloodshed and battles of the greatest fortresses of the Middle Ages.Dan Snow is an historian who has researched, written and presented several documentaries on British and world history for the BBC including Twentieth Century Battlefields, the BAFTA award-winning Battlefield Britain, which he co-presented with his father Peter Snow, and his BBC2 series on the history of the Royal Navy. His writing has appeared in The Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Daily Express and BBC History Magazine. He is the author of Death or Victory – a history of Wolfe’s siege of Quebec. Educated at the University of Oxford, he has joint British and Canadian citizenship. He lives in London.