The Crusades Trilogy - Jan Guillou

The Road to Jerusalem (Crusades #1)

In 1150 Arn Magnusson is born to an aristocratic Swedish family and spends his childhood at the Cistercian monastery of Varnhem where he is taught the best of spiritual and worldly learning. He is also trained to become a master archer and swordsman by the giant Brother Guilbert, a former knight. At seventeen, equipped to become a monk or a warrior, Arn returns home, a young man and yet an innocent in the ways of the world. Two sisters cross his path: he is seduced by one yet falls deeply in love with the other. In loving the two sisters he has committed a serious crime and he is sentenced to serve twenty years as a Knight Templar in the Holy Land...


The Templar Knight (Crusades #2)

A knight in the Holy Land.
A woman in the frozen north.
A war that kept them apart . . .

The second volume in the internationally bestselling trilogy begun with "The Road to Jerusalem"--the critically acclaimed epic "destined to become a classic" (Sharon Kay Penman)

Exiled to the Holy Land for two decades, Arn Magnusson has risen in the ranks of the Knights Templar, serving as master of the order's Gaza fortress. Among the last bastion of God's holy warriors determined to save Jerusalem from the Muslims, Arn has cultivated a shrewd understanding of his enemy. Known as Al-Ghouti among the Saracens--Saladin and his Muslim followers--he is renowned as a man of compassion, strength, and faith.
Yet neither time nor distance can lessen the pain of separation from his beloved Cecilia. Confined to a cloister back home in western GOtaland, Arn's betrothed is a pawn in a war between clans vying for control of the crown. Yearning for him and their newborn son, who is being raised by relatives, Cecilia must also endure the cruelties of a vindictive abbess from a rival clan.

When an accident of fate brings together Arn and Saladin, a friendship is forged that will alter the course of the Templar knight's life, and the history of Jerusalem itself. After the bloody Battle of Hattin, Arn finally becomes a free man. But the road home is long and treacherous, and he is uneasy about the fate that awaits him and uncertain whether his betrothed still lives.

Broadening the scope of Arn's epic path to redemption, "The Templar Knight" continues the story of the founding of a nation--and of the warrior and the love that made it possible.


Birth of the Kingdom (Crusades #3)

An exiled warrior determined to unite his homeland returns to face his greatest battle yet in this stirring final volume in the trilogy that began with The Road to Jerusalem—a critically acclaimed epic "destined to become a classic" (Sharon Kay Penman).

Exiled from his home and the woman he loves, Arn de Gotha became one of the fiercest and most feared warriors of the Knights Templar. But now that Jerusalem has been lost to the man who saved him—his longtime enemy and trusted friend Saladin—the weary nobleman, ravaged by wounds and illness, can finally return to his beloved Sweden.

During his twenty years of exile, warring clans have torn Arn's homeland apart. Determined to reunite it under the Folkung lineage and establish lasting peace, he sets off with a band of skilled craftsmen and doctors from the Holy Land whose talents and knowledge are unknown to the northern world. With the superior skills of the foreign men, Arn sets about building an estate to rival those of the most powerful in the region.

And waiting for him is his beloved Cecilia. Emerging from a convent after their unfathomably long separation, Cecilia is beset by the clan's demands that she return to monastic life, while Arn is urged to marry into a competing family, for the sake of avoiding war. Arn and Cecilia are reunited, but new obstacles have been set in their path. They can only hope to convince their clan that love ranks higher than politics, and that it can sustain a new quest: to create a new people, a new society—both Christian and Muslim, craftsmen and warriors—with Arn at its helm.

A rousing, satisfying conclusion to an unforgettable and original epic, Birth of the Kingdom tells the story of a warrior's transformative journey, and of the love that founded a nation.



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