I read this after reading Crowley's other work City of Fortune which I found more engaging. You can see his writing style being developed slowly throughout the course of this work. His major success in these books is finding a personality or character that you can connect with throughout history....
Amazing. Although we Americans don't learn much European let alone Middle Eastern history, this book details a conflict between Christianity and Ottoman Empire that rivals WWI in numbers of dead and treasure destroyed. What a colossal waste that led to both sides leaving off due to sheer exhausti...
It is amazing the cruelty and horror of life in the 1500s and how much we've forgotten/didn't know. This book describes battles that, for the people who fought in them, were a matter of life and death, heaven and hell, but that are all but forgotten and ultimately ended in a stalemate over and ar...
Now in trade paperback, a gripping exploration of the fall of Constantinople and its connection to the world we live in today The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history, and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's readable and comprehensive account of the battle betwe...
Turgut again pointed out the Ottoman blind spot in the whole operation: their failure to close the supply route across the harbor to Birgu had allowed the fort to be continuously resupplied. The Turks started a new trench down the shoreline to the point below the fort where boats from Birgu were ...
The citizens of Amalfi and Pisa had loyally fought alongside their Greek neighbours when Dandolo attacked the sea walls. The Venetian merchants probably barred their doors and stayed inside. But as the Greek population surveyed the aftermath of this attack – hundreds of homes gutted by fire, an u...