1453

A gripping exploration of the fall of Constantinople and its connection to the world we live in today.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley’s comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmet II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantine XI, the 57th emperor of Byzantium, illuminates the period in history that was a precursor to the current conflict between the West and the Middle East.

For a thousand years Constantinople was quite simply “the city”: fabulously wealthy, imperial, intimidating—and Christian. Singlehandedly it blunted early Arab enthusiasm for Holy War. When a second wave of Islamic warriors swept out of the Asian steppes in the Middle Ages, Constantinople was the ultimate prize: “The Red Apple.” It was a city that had always lived under threat. On average it had survived a siege every forty years for a millennium—until the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, twenty-one years old and hungry for glory, rode up to the walls in April 1453 with a huge army, “numberless as the stars.”

1453 is the taut, vivid story of this final struggle for the city, told largely through the accounts of eyewitnesses. For fifty-five days a tiny group of defenders defied the huge Ottoman army in a seesawing contest fought on land, at sea, and underground. 1453 is both a gripping work of narrative history and an account of the war between Christendom and Islam that still has echoes in the modern world.

• "One of the most exciting, cliff-hanging stories in world history, and in Roger Crowley’s book it is told extremely well."
  Sunday Telegraph
• "In this account of the 1453 siege, written in crackling prose by former Istanbul resident Roger Crowley... we are treated to narrative history at its most enthralling."
  Daily Express
• "Crowley manages to invest his retelling with almost nail-biting drama."
  The San Francisco Chronicle
• "Crowley’s fascinating account of the years leading up to and the final sacking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire reads more like lively fiction than dry recounting of historical events."
  Los Angeles Times
• "A vivid and readable account of the siege…]And] an excellent traveler’s guide to how and why Istanbul became a Muslim city."
  The Guardian
• "Gripping…Mixes intriguing details of military history with rich references to the religious imagery that influenced both parties."
  The Economist