Roger Crowley

Conquerors by Roger Crowley transports readers back to the Age of Discovery, chronicling the audacious and adventurous journey of Portuguese explorers during the 15th and 16th centuries. The book delves into the ambitious maritime expeditions that saw Portugal emerge as a formidable seafaring nation, pushing the boundaries of the known world. It presents an intricate narrative of how these explorers...

The story of the sixteenth-century's epic contest for the spice trade, which propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific. Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans, they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese...

The story of the sixteenth-century's epic contest for the spice trade, which propelled European maritime exploration and conquest across Asia and the Pacific. Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans, they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese...

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...

A magisterial work of gripping history, City of Fortune tells the story of the Venetian ascent from lagoon dwellers to the greatest power in the Mediterranean—an epic five hundred year voyage that encompassed crusade and trade, plague, sea battles and colonial adventure. In Venice, the path to empire unfolded in a series of extraordinary contests—the sacking of Constantinople in 1204,...

Empires of the Sea presents the Mediterranean as a majestic and bloody theatre of war. Opening with the Ottoman victory in 1453, it delivers a breathtaking story of military crusading, Barbary pirates, white slavery, and the Ottoman Empire, all set against the larger picture of the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Coupled with dramatic set-piece battles, a wealth of riveting...

The city of Acre, powerfully fortified and richly provisioned, was the last crusader stronghold. When it fell in 1291, two hundred years of Christian crusading in the Holy Land came to a bloody end. With his customary narrative brilliance and immediacy, Roger Crowley chronicles the tumultuous and violent attack on Acre, the heaviest bombardment before the age of gunpowder, which...