Constantinople is narrative history at its very best: an intense, extraordinary tale of courage and cruelty, technological ingenuity, endurance and luck. In the spring of 1453, the Ottoman Turks advanced on Constantinople in pursuit of an ancient Islamic dream: capturing the thousand-year-old capital of Christian Byzantium. During the siege that followed, a small band of badly organised defenders, outnumbered ten to one, confronted the might of the Ottoman army in a bitter contest fought on land, sea and underground, and directed by two remarkable men - Sultan Mehmet II and the Emperor Constantine XI. In the fevered religious atmosphere, heightened by the first massed use of artillery bombardment, both sides feared that the end of the world was nigh. The outcome of the siege, decided in a few short hours on 29 May 1453, is one of the great set-piece moments of world history.
Constantinople - The Last Great Siege, 1453
Roger Crowley
Faber and Faber
2006
336 páginas
11h 12m
ISBN-10: 0571221866
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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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