Quotes from Roger Crowley

Only two months after the battle he wrote a sad description of his own fate: "I spend my time building castles in the air, but in the end all of them, and I, blow away in the end." It is an epitaph that might serve all the empire builders of the violent century.

All the inhabitants of Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians," wrote the visitor Martin von Baumgarten in 1508, "obliged to pay to the state a third of all their increase or income…and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together.

Constantinople is a city larger than its renown proclaims. May God in his grace and generosity deign to make it the capital of Islam.

So huge was the architecture of the conflict between Islam and Byzantium that no Muslim banners would be unfurled again before the city walls for another 650 years – a span of time greater than that separating us from 1453 – but prophecy decreed that they would return.

It is far better for a country to remain under the rule of Islam than be governed by Christians who refuse to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic Church. Pope Gregory VII, 1073

Flee from the papists as you would from a snake and from the flames of a fire. St. Mark Eugenicus, fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian

With this force de frappe, Orseolo put down a clear marker of Venetian intentions,

Looking down on the scene in the spring of 1453 one would also be able to make out the fortified Genoese town of Galata, a tiny Italian city state on the far side of the Horn, and to see exactly where Europe ends.

The Sinhalese were perplexed by their endemic restlessness and their eating habits, declaring the Portuguese to be "a very white and beautiful people, who wear hats and boots of iron and never stop in one place. They eat a sort of white stone and drink blood." Such

The Ottomans were probably already casting guns at Edirne by this time; what Orban brought was the skill to construct the molds and control the critical variables on a far greater scale.

Between them they estimated a fleet of something between 12 and 18 full war galleys composed of a mixture of triremes and biremes, then 70 to 80 smaller fustae, about 25 parandaria – heavy transport barges – and a number of light brigantines and other small message boats, a force of about 140 boats in all. It was an awesome sight to glimpse over the curve of the western horizon.

the unfamiliar appearance of the people, "of a tawny complexion," so unlike the Portuguese experience of Africans; the men variously shaved or heavily bearded; the women, "as a rule, short and ugly

He feared its potential to furnish a cause for endless war with Christian powers in the future. Captured, it would provide the centerpiece of the empire, "without it, or while it is as at present, nothing we have is safe, and we can hope for nothing additional.

Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet's nature.

So rapid was the Ottoman assimilation of cannon technology that by the 1440s they had evidently acquired the unique ability, widely commented on by eyewitnesses, to cast medium-size barrels on the battlefield in makeshift foundries. Murat transported gunmetal to the Hexamilion and cast many of his long guns on the spot. This allowed extraordinary flexibility during siege warfare:

It was the emergence of the Turks that reawakened the slumbering spirit of jihad.

The lure of the Red Apple was dangled before the expectant gaze of the faithful. It was on these dual promises, so attractive to the tribal raider, of taking plunder while fulfilling the will of God, that Mehmet prepared his strike.

By the middle of the eleventh century a Turkish dynasty, the Seljuks, had emerged as sultans in Baghdad, and by its end the Islamic world, from Central Asia to Egypt, was largely ruled by Turks.

The spirit of militant Islam suited the Turkish fighting spirit perfectly; the desire for plunder was legitimized by pious service to Allah.

Mustapha then had some of the bodies of the knights and a Maltese priest—"some mutilated, some without heads, some with their bellies ripped open"—dressed in their distinctive red-and-white surcoats and nailed to wooden crosses in parody of the crucifixion. The bodies were launched into the water off Saint Elmo's point, where the current washed them across to Birgu.

All the Turkish prisoners were taken out of the dungeons and slaughtered on the ramparts. He sent a messenger to the commander of the garrison at Mdina with orders to kill all his prisoners, but slowly, one a day, every day. Later that day the guns of Saint Angelo opened up. A volley of human heads bombarded the Ottoman camp across the water. There would be no repeat of the chivalrous truce at Rhodes.

In truth the Byzantines often preferred their settled Muslim neighbors, proximity with whom had bred a certain familiarity and respect over the centuries following the initial burst of holy war:

No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making.

It was the possibilities of this site – what it offered for trade, defense, and food – that made Constantinople the key to imperial destinies and brought so many armies to its gate. "The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople," wrote George Trapezuntios, "and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole earth.