Roger worked for many years in the publishing world before he pursued a full-time writing career. He has also traveled from Portugal and Spain to the Black Sea. He has taught English in Istanbul, walked across Western Turkey, and traveled widely in the Greek-speaking world. They are: “Constaninople: The Last Great Siege” (for which he drew on his interest in Istanbul), “Empires of the Sea”, and “City of Fortune”. As a result of this, he has penned a loose trilogy of books about the Mediterranean’s history. Roger’s particular interests are in the Venetian, Ottoman, Portuguese, and Byzantine empires. The child of a naval family, his early experiences of life in Malta gave him a deep interest in the culture and history of the Mediterranean world, which has stayed a major subject of his work. He was educated at Sherborne School before reading English at Emmanuel College Cambridge. Though, be warned, it is a book that will make you want to read lots of other books, starting with Crowley's Empires of the Sea, which appears to be something of a sequel to this one.Roger Crowley was born in the year 1951, and is a British author and historian that is known for his books on Mediterranean and maritime history. Overall, the book is a great read, both informative and suspenseful. As is his description of how the defenders of the city made a virtue of necessity - when the Ottoman cannon smashed their stone walls, they rebuilt them as wooden palisades with dirt piled between them - which did a much better job of absorbing the impact of the cannon balls. Crowley's description of how they forged immense cannon in an attempt to bring down Constantinople's land walls is fascinating. I also hadn't known that the Ottomans were early adopters of field artillery. So, what did Mehmet II, sultan of the Ottomans, do when he couldn't break the chain? Well, he had his men carry a bunch of war galleys overland and rolled them into the water on the other side of the chain. For example, the Byzantines protected the entrance to the harbor of the Golden Horn by stringing a giant chain across the mouth of the harbor, preventing ships from entering.

And the technology of warfare was particularly remarkable at the time.

Crowley has a knack for vivid writing, and can really make you feel as though you were there.Ĭrowley is particularly good at explaining military tactics and the technology of warfare. 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West by Roger CrowleyĪ very vividly written account of the siege of Constantinople in 1453.

1453 by Roger Crowley