Jerusalem had fallen. All of Europe was aghast. 

Muslim Saracens of the Ayyubid Dynasty had slaughtered a Christian army at Hattin, and then gone on to take the Holy City itself. Their leader, Saladin, swept all before him.

But Richard the Lionheart's crusading fever became inflamed when he heard, and once his father, Henry II, had died, he committed the entire Angevin Empire to Jerusalem's recapture.

This is the incredible story of Richard's journey to the Holy Land, the epic recapture of its port-city, Acre, and why - with Jerusalem in sight - Richard had to make a fateful decision that affected the rest of his life.

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Henry II's life rose and fell like a rough sea. After winning the English throne at just 21 years old, he put England back together again after the ravages of the civil war known as The Anarchy.

He wed the beautiful and famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, and had with her 7 children who survived into adulthood - including Richard the Lionheart and the later King John. 

And it was he who created the Angevin Empire.

But he was also the King who inadvertently ordered the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the King who suffered no less than three rebellions from his sons, and the man who went to his grave knowing that his favourite, John, had finally joined them. 

Henry II was a man whose energy and vitality thrust the Angevins into the international limelight, but who ultimately could not control his own family.

This is his story, and the beginnings of the famous Richard the Lionheart.

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The year is 1120 and the mood aboard The White Ship is exultant. The young lords of England and Normandy are celebrating beating the French by drinking and carousing late into the night. Among them, England's heir - William Aetheling. 

But leaving for a crossing of the English Channel so late and completely half-cut, the party was about to be cut savagely short.

The outcome led to one of England's most brutal civil wars, The Anarchy, and to the rise of the Angevins and an Empire that stretched from Scotland to the borders of Spain. 

Listen now to the stories of one of England's greatest dynasties, of the likes of Richard the Lionheart and King John, and cataclysmic battles in France, Scotland, Sicily and the Holy Land. 

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This is it. It all comes down to this moment. 

Ever since Alfred the Great had come surging out of the swamps he had been hiding in to defeat the Vikings at Edington, he and his children and grandchildren had been inexorably pushing the Vikings out of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Aethelred was soon to conquer Northumbria which had been held by the Danes for a hundred years, and England was born.

But no sooner had the new nation come screaming into the world than a massive Norse-Irish-Scottish alliance came screaming into Aethelred's new kingdom. It threatened to undo everything that had been achieved. 

At Brunanburh in 937 AD the future of England would be decided.

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The King of Wessex had been hunted as a fugitive by marauding Vikings, and he'd been hiding as one in a swamp. Wessex had been overrun and King Alfred had fled, setting up camp amidst the reeds of the Somerset Levels.

But despite his survival, it seemed the same could not be said of Wessex.

But in one of history's greatest comeback stories, he rebuilt his forces whilst in hiding, conducted a guerrilla campaign from the marshes, and then came surging out to rendezvous with the armies of his still-loyal Earldormen. 

It resulted in one of England's greatest ever battles, and led confirmed that Wessex, England's last Anglo-Saxon kingdom, would not fall to the Vikings after all.

In doing so, Alfred the Great laid the foundations for the future reconquest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the dawn of England.

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When the Viking warlord, Guthrum, ambushed King Alfred the Great of Wessex while he was celebrating Christmas at Chippenham, Alfred had no choice but to run with his family and a few guards. 

Hearing that Guthrum's forces were spreading out all over Wessex, the only safe place for Alfred to go was the marshland of Somerset which he knew as a boy.

Alfred was now a fugitive in his own kingdom, hiding out in a swamp with his family and just a few guards. Mercia had fallen four years earlier, crushed by the Vikings just as Northumbia and East Anglia had been before it.

It seemed Wessex was going the same way.

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The Vikings shot onto the international scene when they ransacked, burned, looted and slaughtered their way through the peaceful monastic community on the island of Lindisfarne in 793 AD.

But it wasn't an isolated incident. 

It began the so-called Viking Age and 300 years of bitter warfare between Anglo-Saxon and Viking for control of the fertile land of England. 

For 60 years after Lindisfarne the Vikings contented themselves with raiding and terrorising the coastal communities and riverways of Anglo-Saxon England, but by 865 their thoughts had turned to invasion. The Sea Wolves were coming to stay.

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The Battle of Osowiec in 1915 was darkly horrifying despite the bright summer's morning. The Germans gassed the stubborn Russian defenders of the Osowiec Fortress with a vicious mix of chlorine and bromine, killing every single one.

Or so they thought.

Because as the Germans advanced they spotted a single figure jerk suddenly upright, skin blistered and torn, eyes peeled back, teeth bared where lips had once been.

The dead had risen and now they were coming for their revenge.

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Once Vercingetorix was in chains and the Gallic Wars over, you might have thought Caesar would be in for a well-earned rest.

But Pompey and the Optimates in the Roman Senate were jealous and wanted Caesar back in Rome so they could prosecute him for any number of crimes - including his conquest of Gaul, which they had never given permission for.

But Caesar wasn't about to spend the rest of his life in court, jail or exile, and sought to outmanoeuvre the Senate.

The Optimates and Pompey sought to drag Caesar back to Rome.

It ended in a tussle which led Caesar to the banks of the Rubicon, and the biggest decision of his life.

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​Vercingetorix was a proud, young Gallic chieftain who gave Caesar his first bloody nose of the Gallic Wars and led a rebellion so serious that it nearly cost Caesar everything.

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