Exciting re-creation of the epic mid-16th-century struggle
between the encroaching Ottoman Empire and the beleaguered Christian Europeans.
Crowley picks up where he left off in 1453: The Holy War for
Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West (2005). After the fall of
Constantinople to Mehmet the Conqueror and his army of Turks, the author
writes, it was only a matter of time before Mehmet’s great-grandson Suleiman
set out to achieve his own ambition to become “Padishah of the White Sea”—the
Mediterranean. From the 1520s on, Suleiman and later his son Selim II clashed
repeatedly with Charles V and then Philip II of Spain in a battle for holy
ascendancy that stretched from Rhodes to Tunis, Cyprus to Lepanto. Suleiman
unleashed his murderous corsairs, led by the Barbarossa brothers, to wreak
havoc on the Barbary Coast (North Africa), while Charles employed the astute
services of the valiant Genoese sea commander Andrea Doria. Radiating from
Madrid and Istanbul across Europe, the engines of imperial power collided
catastrophically in 1565 on the rugged island of Malta, a launch pad for the
crusading Knights of Saint John headed by the zealous Jean Parisot de La
Valette. Here Crowley lingers with chillingly detailed precision, depicting the
armada of Turkish galleys bearing down on the island. Seventy-year-old La
Valette and his 6,000 or so fighting men hastily prepared for defense against an
Ottoman force exceeding 20,000. The Knights and the rest of Europe were
convinced that this was the final redoubt, “the glorious last-ditch stand
against impossible odds, massacre, martyrdom, and death.” What ensued was a
four-month bloodbath, with the Christians routing the Turks and checking their
advance into the White Sea.
A masterly narrative that captures the religious fervor,
brutality and mayhem of this intensive contest for the “center of the world.”
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