The theme of the Crusades attracted Scott throughout his writing career, from his 1796 translation of Gottfried August Bürger's poem ‘Leonore’ (as ‘William and Helen’), the historical background of which he shifted from King Frederick of Prussia's victory over the Austrian army in 1757 to the Third Crusade, to his last, and unfinished, novel The Siege of Malta. Other key texts charting Scott's continuing engagement with Crusading material are his 1805 review of George Ellis's Early English Metrical Romances and his ‘Essay on Chivalry’ of 1818, in which he suggests that the real history of the Crusades was founded on the spirit of chivalry, and that this spirit led to the creation of the earliest chivalric orders, all originally devoted to the service of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Most importantly, there are the four novels Ivanhoe (1819), The Betrothed and The Talisman (published as Tales of the Crusaders in 1825), and Count Robert of Paris (1831). While the first two of these describe the impact of the Crusades on European societies, the other two take their readers to the contested spaces of Palestine and Constantinople, respectively. Thus, The Talisman returns to the Third Crusade, which was led by Richard the Lion-Hearted and had been triggered by the conquest, in 1187, of almost the whole of Palestine, including Jerusalem, by Salahed-Din Yusef ibn Ayub, or Saladin.