Roger Crowley > Quotes

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“In the process, Albuquerque was consolidating a revolutionary concept of empire. The Portuguese were always aware of how few they were; many of their early contests were against vastly unequal numbers. They quickly abandoned the notion of occupying large areas of territory. Instead, they evolved as a mantra the concept of flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defendable coastal forts and a network of bases. Supremacy at sea; their technological expertise in fortress building, navigation, cartography, and gunnery; their naval mobility and ability to coordinate operations over vast maritime spaces; the tenacity and continuity of their efforts—an investment over decades in shipbuilding, knowledge acquisition, and human resources—these facilitated a new form of long-range seaborne empire, able to control trade and resources across enormous distances. It gave the Portuguese ambitions with a global dimension.”
― Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

“To carry out war, three things are necessary,” remarked the Milanese general Marshal Trivulzio presciently in 1499, “money, money and yet more money.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“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”
― Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

“The failure of Islam to take the city in 717 had far-reaching consequences. The collapse of Constantinople would have opened the way for a Muslim expansion into Europe that might have reshaped the whole future of the West; it remains one of the great “What ifs” of history. It blunted the first powerful onslaught of Islamic jihad that reached its high watermark fifteen years later at the other end of the Mediterranean when a Muslim force was defeated on the banks of the Loire, a mere 150 miles south of Paris.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“War was not dependent on personal volition; it was an unceasing imperial project, authorized by Islam.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“Pisani’s plan was simple but highly risky. He had closely observed the comings and goings of the Genoese; they had become complacent. Doria believed he held Venice in an iron grip, and that little more was required now to squeeze the remaining life out of a starving enemy. There were three maritime exits from Chioggia. Two, at either end of its lido, led directly out to sea; the third, the Lombardy Channel, ran behind the island and through the lagoon. Pisani’s idea was to block these exits, hemming the enemy in. The besiegers would become, in their turn, besieged.”
― Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas

“For fifty-three days their tiny force had confounded the might of the Ottoman army; they had faced down the heaviest bombardment in the Middle Ages from the largest cannon ever built – an estimated 5,000 shots and 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; they had resisted three full-scale assaults and dozens of skirmishes, killed unknown thousands of Ottoman soldiers, destroyed underground mines and siege towers, fought sea battles, conducted sorties and peace negotiations, and worked ceaselessly to erode the enemy’s morale – and they had come closer to success than they probably knew.”
― Roger Crowley, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Behind the Palace walls Mehmed indulged in an atypical pursuits of a tyrant: gardening, handicrafts and and a commissioning of the obscene frescos.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire

“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”
― Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

“Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The Knights of Saint John held services of thanksgiving and ignited fireworks in the night sky over Malta,”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The arsenal was physically and psychologically central to Venice. Everyone was reminded of 'the House of Work' on a daily basis by the ringing of the marangona, the carpenter's bell, from the campanile in St Mark's Square to set the start and end of the working day. Its workers, the arsenalotti, were aristocrats among working men. They enjoyed special privileges and a direct relationship with the centres of power. They were supervised by a team of elected nobility and had the right to carry each new doge around the piazza on their shoulders; they had their own place in state processions; when the admiral of the arsenal died, his body was borne into St Mark's by the chief foremen and twice raised in the air, once to betoken his acceptance of his responsibilities and again his fulfilling of them. The master shipwrights, whose skills and secret knowledge were often handed down through the generations, were jealously guarded possessions of the Venetian state. The arsenal lent to the city an image of steely resolve and martial fury. The blank battlements that shut out the world were patrolled at night by watchmen who called to each other every hour; over its intimidating gateway the lion of St Mark never had an open book proclaiming peace.”
― Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire

“The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave, and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult, but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“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:”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“In January 1453 Mehmet ordered a test firing of the great gun outside his new royal palace at Edirne. The mighty bombard was hauled into position near the gate and the city was warned that the following day “the explosion and roar would be like thunder, lest anyone should be struck dumb by the unexpected shock or pregnant women might miscarry.” In the morning the cannon was primed with powder. A team of workmen lugged a giant stone ball into the mouth of the barrel and rolled it back down to sit snugly in front of the gunpowder chamber. A lighted taper was put to the touch hole. With a shattering roar and a cloud of smoke that hazed the sky, the mighty bullet was propelled across the open countryside for a mile before burying itself six feet down in the soft earth.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The plunder of the coasts of Italy, Sicily, the Balearic Islands, and Spain continued almost unchecked. Ruinous economic and demographic decline particularly affected Southern Italy. Sometimes the wholesale evacuation of a patch of coast was ordered by the local governor to save the population from an Ottoman raid, as on the Adriatic coast in 1566. Five hundred square miles of countryside were devastated anyway. Sea trade between Spain and Italy was intermittently on the brink of paralysis; the whole structure of Spain’s Mediterranean empire seemed threatened by this merciless raiding.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“Qutuz and his army met the Mongols at Ayn Jalut—the appropriately named Goliath’s Spring, where David was said to have slain the giant—thirty miles southeast of Acre on September 3, 1260, for a contest that has been claimed as epochal in world history.”
― Roger Crowley, The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades

“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.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West