The rise and fall of the Venetian empire stands unrivaled for drama, intrigue, and sheer opulent majesty. In City of Fortune, Roger Crowley, acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author of Empires of the Sea, applies his narrative skill to chronicling the astounding five-hundred-year voyage of Venice to the pinnacle of power. Tracing the full arc of the Venetian imperial saga for the first time, City of Fortune is framed around two of the great collisions of world history: the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, which culminated in the sacking of Constantinople and the carve-up of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, and the Ottoman-Venetian War of 1499-1503, which saw the Ottoman Turks supplant the Venetians as the preeminent naval power in the Mediterranean. In between were three centuries of Venetian maritime dominance - years of plunder and plague, conquest and piracy - during which a tiny city of "lagoon dwellers" grew into the richest place on earth. Drawing on firsthand accounts of pitched sea battles, skillful negotations, and diplomatic maneuvers, Crowley paints a vivid picture of this avaricious, enterprising people and the bountiful lands that came under their dominion. Defiant of emperors, indifferent to popes, the Venetians saw themselves as reluctant freebooters, compelled to take to the open seas "because we cannot live otherwise and know not how excepted by trade." From the opening of the spice routes to the clash between Christianity and Islam, Venice played a leading role in the defining conflicts of its time - the reverberations of which are still being felt today. Only an author with Roger Crowley's deep knowledge of post-Crusade history could put these iconic events into their proper context. Epic in scope, magisterial in its understanding of the period, City of Fortune is narrative history at its most engrossing.
City of Fortune - How Venice Ruled the Seas
Roger Crowley
Random House
2012
464 páginas
15h 28m
ISBN-13: 9781400068203
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Roger Crowley
Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and educated at Cambridge University. As the child of a naval family, early experiences of life in Malta gave him a deep interest in the history and culture of the Mediterranean world. After finishing school he spent his summers pottering in Greece; after university the Mediterranean took a firmer hold with a year spent on and off teaching English in Istanbul, exploring the city and walking across much of Western Turkey. In recent years he has made return trips to the Greek-speaking world, including two visits to Mount Athos, spiritual home of the Byzantine tradition. His writing interests are focused on producing page-turning narrative history based on first-hand eyewitness accounts. He is the author of a loose trilogy of books on the history of the Mediterranean, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege/1453 (2005), Empires of the Sea (2008) – a Sunday Times (UK) History Book of the Year in 2009 and a New York Times Bestseller – and City of Fortune on Venice (2011), as well as Conquerors (2015), a rare break out into the Atlantic with the Portuguese.
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