1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
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Roger Crowley’s 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, first published in 2005, is a gripping account of the siege that brought the Byzantine Empire to its end and transformed the history of the Mediterranean world. For more than a thousand years, Constantinople had stood as the formidable capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, its immense walls protecting a city of extraordinary wealth, religious significance and strategic importance. In April 1453, the young Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II arrived before its gates with an enormous army and an ambition that would define his reign. Against him stood the Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI and a desperately outnumbered force of defenders. Drawing upon contemporary eyewitness accounts, Crowley reconstructs the extraordinary fifty-five days of siege warfare, from the thunder of enormous Ottoman cannon and the movement of ships across land into the Golden Horn to the final assault on 29 May, when the city fell.
Crowley brings the military drama to life while exploring the religious convictions, imperial ambitions and political calculations that shaped the confrontation. His account reveals a world in which the Byzantine, Ottoman, Venetian and Genoese powers were bound together by commerce, rivalry and centuries of cultural exchange, even as religious hostility threatened to divide them. Particularly compelling is the contrast between Mehmed II, a young ruler determined to establish himself as a world-historical conqueror, and Constantine XI, whose final defence became an enduring symbol of imperial collapse. Combining the immediacy of eyewitness testimony with the pace of narrative history, Crowley makes the fall of Constantinople both a human tragedy and a turning point in world history. 1453 is the first volume in his celebrated exploration of Mediterranean history, followed by Empires of the Sea and City of Fortune.
From the book
“For a thousand years Constantinople was quite simply ‘the city’: fabulously wealthy, imperial, intimidating — and Christian.”
— Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
On 1453
“One of the most exciting, cliff-hanging stories in world history, and in Roger Crowley’s book it is told extremely well.”
— Sunday Telegraph