Quotes from Roger Crowley

On the Doncella, Federico Venusta had his hand mutilated by the explosion of his own grenade. He demanded a galley slave cut it off. When the man refused, he performed the operation himself and then went to the cook's quarters, ordered them to tie the carcass of a chicken over the bleeding stump, and returned to battle, shouting at his right hand to avenge his left.

The Venetians briefed shamelessly on both sides according to the set of tested maxims: "It is better to treat all enemy rulers as friends," one seasoned politician advised, "and all friends as potential enemies.

Albuquerque practiced the intimidatory tactics that had made the Franks so feared along the coast of India. Passing vessels were captured and ransacked for provisions. The unfortunate crews had their hands, noses, and ears cut off and were put ashore to announce the terror and majesty of Portugal. The ships were then burned.

War was not dependent on personal volition; it was an unceasing imperial project, authorized by Islam.

To carry out war, three things are necessary," remarked the Milanese general Marshal Trivulzio presciently in 1499, "money, money and yet more money.

Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.

The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.

Perhaps no defensive structure summarized the truth of siege warfare in the ancient and medieval world as clearly as the walls of Constantinople. The city lived under siege for almost all its life; its defenses reflected the deepest character and history of the place, its mixture of confidence and fatalism, divine inspiration and practical skill, longevity and conservatism.

He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance; a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta – he swam ashore clutching his manuscript above his head while his Chinese lover drowned.

For Albuquerque, everything was at stake. All the principal figures of the Indian administration were besieged in the Mandovi in the rain, with the shots of the enemy crashing in; the men and their captains cursed him for the lack of food, for his obstinacy, his obsessiveness, his vanity. All he had was his belief in a certain strategic vision, encouraging words, and the severities of discipline. It was perhaps his supreme moment of crisis.

Instantly Mehmet had clarified the practice of Ottoman succession, which he was later to codify as a law of fratricide: "whichever of my sons inherits the sultan's throne, it behooves him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order.

Behind the Palace walls Mehmed indulged in an atypical pursuits of a tyrant: gardening, handicrafts and and a commissioning of the obscene frescos.

It was the beauty of the liturgy in St. Sophia that converted Russia to Orthodoxy after a fact-finding mission from Kiev in the tenth century experienced the service and reported back: "we knew not whether we were in Heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour and beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there God dwells among men.

The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam.

The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam. One offered the abstract simplicity of the desert horizon, a portable worship that could be performed anywhere as long as you could see the sun, a direct contact with God, the other images, colors, and music, ravishing metaphors of the divine mystery designed to lead the soul to heaven. Both were equally intent on converting the world to their vision of God.

The laws of Islam required mercy to conquered peoples, and the Ottomans ruled their subjects with a light hand that seemed frequently preferable to European feudalism.

Each mason was assigned two helpers, one to work each side of him, and was held responsible for the construction of a fixed quantity of wall per day. Discipline was overseen by a force of kadis (judges), gathered from across the empire, who had the power of capital punishment; enforcement and military protection was provided by a substantial army detachment.

Constantinople was the first European city to experience the Black Death:

When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited, he found even the emperor's palace "in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot," before adding with true Christian charity, "which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.

After 350 years the defeat at Varna extinguished the appetite in the West for crusading; never again would Christendom unite to try to drive the Muslims out of Europe.

The Orthodox, in reply, claimed that the addition was theologically untrue; that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, and to add the name of the Son was heretical. Such issues were the stuff of riots within Constantinople.

In early April, while the big guns were busy pounding the land walls, Mehmet began to deploy the fleet, his other new weapon, for the first time.

Here are two good-humored men, always ready to take coffee and opium, about to take a pleasure trip around the islands together.

Europe was on the receiving end of the slavery it was starting to inflict on West Africa – though the numbers slaved to Islam far exceeded those of black slaves taken in the sixteenth century;