Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

fabulous

Ben scritto, proietta il lettore nel contesto storico rendendolo vivo e affascinante, seguendo le orme di Steven Runciman ma con chiaro aggiornamento delle fonti e della visione d'insieme.Qualche anno fa questo titolo, insieme ad altri di Crowley, era tradotto nel catalogo Bruno Mondadori.

A wonderful book that gives a real sense of the history of this conflict, how the Greeks and a handful of Genoese and Venetian soldiers and sailors put up a fight against the might of the Ottoman empire, and how the rest of Europe ignored the conflict only to wake up to find that the great city of Constantinople had been lost. But of course Constantinople was already surrounded by Ottomans, only this small enclave at the end of Europe was left, countries like Bulgaria had already fallen, and it seems to have been only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. Roger Crowley manages to take the reader through the story, drawing on predominantly Greek and Italian sources (apparently there are few written Ottoman sources for this conflict), and it really coloured and gave depth to a visit I paid to Istanbul at the same time as reading this book. The story is a sad one, how the city was plundered, its inhabitants ravaged or led into slavery, precious relics tossed into the street, but then of course the city had been ransacked before - during the Fourth Crusade. I am curious now to find out what the Latins were doing in Constantinople two centuries earlier and what led them to ransack a fellow Christian city, which was already poor by the time the Ottomans arrived. An excellent read.

Very well worth reading. Excellently written. The last dozen—and more personal—pages, are particularly moving. As a side remark, even if it were not all real, this account would have made the core of an exceptional historical novel.

I had seen parts of the walls at Istanbul and questioned the events of 1453. The book is an informative, easy to read account of the siege and fall of the city. Recommended.