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The Last Crusaders: The Hundred-Year Battle for the Center of the World
The Crusades were the bridge between medieval and modern history, between feudalism and colonialism. In many ways, the little explored later Crusades were the most significant of them all, for thy made the crisis truly global. The Last Crusaders is about the period's last great conflict between East and West, and the titanic contest between Habsburg-led Christendom and the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From the great naval campaigns and the ferocious struggle to dominate the North African shore, the conflict spread out along trade routes, consuming nations and cultures, destroying dynasties, and spawning the first colonial empires in South America and the Indian Ocean.
The Last Crsaders is narrative history at its richest and most compelling. REVIW: "This is an ambitious project and The Last Crusaders provides narrative history on the grand scale." --Daily Telegraph
"Barnaby Rogerson paints a vivid canvas, sweeping n scope and full of memorable detail...The author is especially good at narrating in gripping, andoften grisly, detail the great sieges and battles that punctuated thi struggle. The book is furnished with excellent maps, a useful chronologial chart, numerous illustrations, and a very full bibliography. The wriing is engaging and vivid, never pedantic. Any history buff will find this bok a pleasure." -ForeWord Review
"Rogerson's narrative colorsthe conflicts of the sixteenth century with the derring-do of kings, corsair, and crusaders; this book will keep readers up long past bedtime" -- Foreord Magazine
"This thoroughly readable book provides a vibrant ad well-organized account of this tumultuous, lesser-known period of histoy. Highly recommended for both students and general readers." - Library Jornal STARRED REVIEW
"The Last Crusaders is a fascinating istory of the great conflict between Christianity and Islam from the mid-140s to the mid-1500s...Rogerson proves himself a skillful storyteller as he recunts the deeds and misdeeds of both sides." -Internet Review of BooksAUTHORBIO: Barnaby Rogerson is the author of more than a dozen books, ncluding The Heirs of Muhammad: Islam's First Century and the Origins ofthe Sunni-Shia Schism, The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography, and A History of Noth Africa. He has lived and worked in many parts of the Arab world, and currently resides in London.
The Last Crsaders is narrative history at its richest and most compelling. REVIW: "This is an ambitious project and The Last Crusaders provides narrative history on the grand scale." --Daily Telegraph
"Barnaby Rogerson paints a vivid canvas, sweeping n scope and full of memorable detail...The author is especially good at narrating in gripping, andoften grisly, detail the great sieges and battles that punctuated thi struggle. The book is furnished with excellent maps, a useful chronologial chart, numerous illustrations, and a very full bibliography. The wriing is engaging and vivid, never pedantic. Any history buff will find this bok a pleasure." -ForeWord Review
"Rogerson's narrative colorsthe conflicts of the sixteenth century with the derring-do of kings, corsair, and crusaders; this book will keep readers up long past bedtime" -- Foreord Magazine
"This thoroughly readable book provides a vibrant ad well-organized account of this tumultuous, lesser-known period of histoy. Highly recommended for both students and general readers." - Library Jornal STARRED REVIEW
"The Last Crusaders is a fascinating istory of the great conflict between Christianity and Islam from the mid-140s to the mid-1500s...Rogerson proves himself a skillful storyteller as he recunts the deeds and misdeeds of both sides." -Internet Review of BooksAUTHORBIO: Barnaby Rogerson is the author of more than a dozen books, ncluding The Heirs of Muhammad: Islam's First Century and the Origins ofthe Sunni-Shia Schism, The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography, and A History of Noth Africa. He has lived and worked in many parts of the Arab world, and currently resides in London.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published March 18, 2010
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398 people want to read
About the author
Barnaby Rogerson
41 books53 followersBarnaby Rogerson (1960-) is a British author, television presenter and publisher. He has written extensively about the Muslim world, including a biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and numerous travel guides. Rogerson was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, and studied Medieval History at St Andrews University
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December 25, 2018
"In the forward to The Last Crusaders, the author, one Barnaby Rogerson, proclaims, "I have resisted the temptation to be polemical or judgmental" (page 6). This is a sure sign that the author plans to be polemical and judgmental, and Rogerson fulfills this expectation in spectacular fashion. The Last Crusader is a veritable tour de force of inaccurate history and deeply ingrained prejudice.
The first warning sign appears on page 35 when Rogerson declares, "Leonardo DaVinci can be numbered among the many such successful mulatto children of this period..." Rogerson, of course, does not provide a source reference for this (he provides a total of five - let me repeat, five - source references in the entire book). As a result, we have no clue as to the basis upon which his announcement relies. The likeliest source seems to be the hypothesis -- based upon reconstructions of DaVinci's fingerprint -- that his mother was of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin. This is far from certain, but even if it were, it would not mean that DaVinci was a mulatto.
People smarter than I am would close Rogerson's book at this point, and move on to a more worthwhile use of their time.
Regrettably, I did not, and it only takes another five pages for Rogerson to provide a fuller preview of what he has in store for his readers: his colorful description of the 1458 Portuguese invasion of Ksar es Seghir, or Alcácer-Ceguer, which he describes as a "pretty but insignificant town, sited above a lovely bay and overlooked by hills."
As it turns out, Rogerson cannot resist the temptation to offer his judgment that the siege was "an instance of massive overkill", an act of bullying a "little settlement" when Portuguese forces were too timid to attempt to take on the larger Muslim town of Tangier. Rogerson melodramatically describes the "gunfire from the [Portugese] fleet devastat[ing] the Moroccan troops who had massed amid the surf to defend their homeland", and the heroism of those who held out for "another three days before the last Moroccan soldiers were cleared from the town and its walls." After painting these scenes of butchery, Rogerson condemns the war-mongering Portuguese for rebuilding "the old Moorish town...as a fortress" and can barely conceal his disdain when they "carefully raised a new church over the ancient old mosque with its brick-tiled floor." Truly a tale of brutal European savagery visited upon a vulnerable and peaceful Muslim village!
In this passage we first encounter the blueprint to which Rogerson adheres throughout the book: without citing any references whatsoever (but, then, how could he?), he mixes historical falsehoods and omissions with polemical denunciation that he reserves almost exclusively for the Christian powers.
In fact, Alcácer-Ceguer in 1458 was a small, but well-defended Muslim port. It was a centuries-old Islamic military base, centered around the fortress for which it is, in Arabic, named ("Small Castle" not, as Rogerson mislabels it, "Castle of the Crossing"); it was not, as Rogerson conjures it, some idyllic little fishing village on a bay. After just two days of Portuguese bombardment, the Moroccan garrison offered to surrender on the condition that the troops and the inhabitants of the town were assured of free passage to depart along with their possessions. King Alfonso V agreed to these terms and honored them: the Moroccan garrison and the population of the town peacefully evacuated with their possessions before the end of the third day.
Rogerson's images of heroic citizen-soldiers being mowed down in the surf (which would, after all, have been an odd place for a besieged to take up defense) and persistently defending "the town and its walls" to the last until they were "cleared" by Portuguese forces are the stuff of pure fiction.
Afterwards, the Portuguese expanded and strengthened the port's existing fortifications, which had proven to be quite inadequate as a defense against contemporary firepower. Rogerson's assertions that the Portuguese transformed "the old Moorish town" into a fortress, and that the "ruined castle that still sits in the bay is entirely the creation of the Portuguese" are fictional. His insinuation that the Portuguese demolished the town's "ancient old mosque" and "carefully" built a new church on its foundations is also fiction. The Portuguese re-consecrated the Moroccan mosque as their church of St. Mary of Mercy.
It's appalling to fabricate history, but the second element of Rogerson's modus operandi is as appalling: his striking lack of objectivity. This emerges in his discussion of the Portuguese siege of Alcácer-Ceguer most clearly when set against his later accounts of Ottoman sieges of Christian towns and fortifications.
To start, consider his judgment that the Portuguese siege was an "instance of massive overkill." Perhaps, Rogerson means that the resources that Portugal applied to the siege massively exceeded those that would have been required to militarily prevail over this "little settlement." If that is his meaning, then this remark would merely be stupid. In discussing the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople, Rogerson correctly observes that "in terms of numbers there was no question as to where the advantage lay, for there were at least ten Ottoman soldiers to every active defender. This sort of proportion was vital for the successful prosecution of any siege" (page 81).
The objective of this siege, as in most any siege, was to overawe the besieged, and thereby compel them to peacefully surrender the town or fortifications. That is precisely the outcome that the Portuguese obtained. All of the sources (other than Barnaby Rogerson) agree that it was over within one or two days, and involved no notable casualties among the besieged - either during or afterwards.
Rogerson can only be using the term "massive overkill" to foster the impression that the Portuguese engaged in a gratuitous level of violence and destruction; note that his judgment is followed immediately in the text by his fabricated image of Moroccan soldiers being "devastated...amid the surf" by Portuguese gunfire. This frames a narrative that is as viciously bigoted as it is false.
Let's return to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople. This siege and its aftermath was an epic of violence and destruction, followed by an orgy of death, destruction, and rapine visited by Islamic forces upon a largely unarmed Christian population in one of Christianity's greatest and most important cities. Whereas Rogerson disdains the Portuguese for (fictitiously) building their "new" church over the foundation of the "old ancient" mosque in the "little settlement" of Alcácer-Ceguer, he dispassionately recounts the Islamic desecration of the greatest and most important church in Orthodox Christianity, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and - after "the blood of the Christians who had been slaughtered in this last sanctuary had been cleaned from the marble floors and walls" (page 87) - the conversion of it to a mosque. Further, unlike the Portuguese and the Alcácer-Ceguer mosque, the Ottomans did, in fact, demolish an "old ancient" church in Constantinople: the Church of Holy Apostles, Constantinople's second most important church, which was not only older than the comparatively tiny Moroccan mosque but was older than Islam itself. Rogerson omits to mention that the Ottomans demolished it, and renders his judgment that "[Mehmet] rounded off this central government block by laying out a vast mosque over the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles....to the great benefit of Istanbul's skyline" (page 92). It was good of Mehmet to get rid of that old eyesore
Yet, for Rogerson, Alcácer-Ceguer was "massive overkill"; Constantinople was not.
In recounting the 1522 surrender of the remnants of the 7,000-strong garrison of the Knights of St. John on Rhodes to the 100,000-strong Ottoman besieging force, Rogerson gushes over the magnanimity of Suleyman the Great in allowing remaining Knights and Christians to leave their island in safety and in promising that "no church would be desecrated." Rogerson declares that the "terms given by Suleyman were astonishingly mild....[and it] was an incredibly peaceful culmination." He sings the praises of the "Sultan who kept his word and offered generous peace terms..." (page 265).
Rogerson has no such praise for the generous and peaceful terms offered by King Alfonso V at Alcácer-Ceguer; in fact, he doesn't mention them. Nor does the Christian Alfonso warrant Rogerson's notice, let alone praise, for actually keeping his word; the Ottomans still looted Rhodes after the Knights had surrendered. Not to be bothered by this detail, Rogerson faithfully rushes to defend the Sultan's honor: "...but [Rhodes] was not given over to the full appalling horrors of a sack." How magnanimous.
Rogerson has more in store for Alfonso. Barnaby's deep penetration of Alfonso's psyche detects in prosaic contemporary accounts of the King that he suffered "a hint of instability" (page 49) and "was losing his grip on reality" (page 50). He mocks Alfonso as "that model of Christian chivalry" for allegedly sacking the Muslim port of Arzila after "he refused to countenance an offer of surrender from the Governor" (page 48). There is some reason to doubt the veracity of Rogerson's account, starting with, as always, his neglect in providing source references, but also the absence of this pertinent detail in every other account of the conquest that I could uncover, and, of course, Rogerson's demonstrated capacity to fabricate history. The evidence that shrouds Rogerson's account in the most doubt, however, is that Tangier then surrendered to the Portuguese, without resistance, to avoid the fate of Arzila. It is hard to follow how the massacre at Arzila if it followed the town's offer to surrender would terrorize Tangier to offer to surrender.
Speaking of terrifying massacres: At the end of the 1570 siege of Nicosia in Cyprus by at least 60,000 Ottoman besiegers, Rogerson recounts that "the slaughter would continue as the city of Nicosia was given over to the sack: that orgy of licensed plunder, murder, extortion, rape, and revenge that lay behind the zeal of all the besieging armies" (page 381). Unlike "all the besieging armies", however, the Ottomans massacred at least 20,000 Greek Christians and looted every church, public building and palace. With the same gory imagery he used for the desecration of the Hagia Sophia, Rogerson dispassionately recounts: "the Gothic cathedral at the centre of the city was washed clean of the last of its bloodstains. The stone floor was covered with carpets and the army assembled to sanctify the new mosque with prayer." Needless to say, the Ottoman massacre that avenged Nicosia's resistance terrorized nearby Kyrenia to surrender without resistance.
There is no similar lack of passion when Rogerson's recounts the sack by Christian Portuguese forces of the Muslim town of Brava in Somalia in 1506. Rogerson bewails that "the resulting sack of the city, the rape and murder of the women and children who were trapped in the streets, exceeded anything that had yet been witnessed" (page 192) - including, one must assume, what the Ottomans did in Constantinople just fifty years earlier. Unlike the atrocities committed by the Ottomans in Nicosia, Rogerson doesn't chalk up the Portuguese behavior as just another example of "the zeal of all the besieging armies" -- far from it. He agrees with an unnamed chronicler that it was "a judgement of God" to avenge the Portuguese when one of their departing boats was "rolled on to the rocks by the surf." Not surprisingly, Rogerson never sees the need for such a judgment to avenge countless Muslim atrocities against Christians.
The Muslim pirate, and Rogerson hero, Barbarossa's 1535 sack of tiny port of Mahon in Minorca - in which he burned down the city and enslaved 6,000 innocent Christians - was also not "massive overkill"; it was "a fabulous piece of defiance" (page 301). I am sure that the enslaved Christians understood that.
On page 47, Rogerson quotes the chronicle of a soldier in Portugal's wars against the Moors: "We had therefore to storm the majority of towns and castles, and we slew all the infidels. The rank and file had orders to kill the women and children, which was done." Rogerson emotionally asks us to wonder with him "What ghastly scenes of mass murder lie behind such crisp, taciturn sentences?"
Rogerson's emotions suddenly go missing as he crafts crisp, taciturn sentences to recount ghastly scenes of mass murder visited upon the terrorized and innocent Christian populations all over the Western Mediterranean by his heroic Muslim corsairs, or pirates. During the "golden decade for the Algerine corsairs...innocent Christians along the southern Italian shore, and the islands of Majorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were hit time and again by the hungry corsairs" (page 283). Barbarossa "scorched the Italian coast of Apulia, then proceeded to methodically wreck all the remaining Venetian-held islands" (page 302). Barbarossa "struck southern Italy with precision, encircling the town of Reggio and deporting its entire population as slaves to Istanbul. Avoiding the well-defended cities of the Neapolitan coast...he fell upon little Sperlonga" (page 294). Dragut "concentrated on the Sicilian and Italian coasts before assisting the French in once more despoiling the Genoese Riviera....Dragut's squadron once again joined up with the Ottoman fleet to raid southern Italy (Reggio, opposite Sicilian Messina, was hit yet again)....When Dragut raided the countryside around Bastia, taking some six thousands captives, he was weakening Corsica for the next French invasion" (page 319). "The Italian city of Nice...was bombarded, besieged, stormed, and sacked" by the Ottoman fleet (page 313). And so on and so on. What ghastly scenes of mass murder lie behind such crisp, taciturn sentences?
You get the picture.
After all of this, one is astonished to read Rogerson claim that it is a "false image of Islam being spread by invading armies, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other" (page 97). This is a book that documents little else than the expansion of dar-al-Islam by invading armies. This is a book that documents some of the greatest Christian churches being converted into some of the greatest Muslim mosques - after, of course, being cleaned of the blood of the massacred Christians. Evidence of the absurdity of Rogerson's claim -- and his deeply, profound personal confusion -- is that just nine pages earlier, he writes that "when the Arabs occupied the capital city of Ctesiphon they were on their way to destroy the ancient Persian Empire but spread the gift of Islamic faith" (page 88).
On page 69 and 70, Rogerson writes: "The curious phenomenon of a slave army owed its existence to an old Muslim tradition, dating back to the first years of the Arab conquests....as part of the contract of surrender [non-Muslims] were thereafter to be defended by Arab Muslim armies." (He also characterizes the enslavement and conversion of a fifth of each subjugated Christian community's teenage boys to form the Ottoman jannisary corps to be a "brilliant response" to the conquering Muslim power's military manpower shortage. Yet, Rogerson doesn't see much brilliance in the Spanish Kingdom's forced conversions of its Muslims and Jewish populations - and these people weren't even enslaved and forced to fight the Kingdom's wars.)
Rogerson's profound confusion returns by page 171. He lavishes praise on Sultan Bayezid II: "Considering peace to be at the heart of the Islamic message as revealed to the world in the Koran, the Sultan worked hard and consistently to fulfill this obligation....It may be that Sultan Bayezid II was the most genuine Muslim ever to have sat on the throne of the Ottomans." One page earlier (I am not kidding):
"In 1499 Bayezid's preparations were complete. He struck against Venice by land and sea in a brilliantly conceived campaign which isolated her Aegean and Adriatic fortresses at the same time as Ottoman cavalry armies carried out raids within a few days ride of the fabled city itself."
The most genuine Muslim revealed something quite unlike peace to the Venetians. A little farther along on page 171, Rogerson is back to saying, "The Ottoman Empire had been created as an instrument of war, fine-tuned by annual campaigns of conquest...."
How instruments of war and military conquest fit into the teachings of Islam, and whether the Ottomans, and their conquering brethren such as the Mongols, Seljuk Turks, and the Abbasid and Umayyad Arabs were acting as true Muslims I leave to Islamic scholars and theologians (among whom, it seems, Barnaby Rogerson qualifies himself when he bizarrely opines that the Ottomans "had no God-ordained right to rule [as did those] descended from the Prophet [and] the Arab dynasties of Caliphs that succeeded him.").
On the other hand, whether the practice of Islam actually spread as a consequence of the military conquests of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Seljuks, and Ottomans is an historical question. And it is beyond debate: all of the territory outside of the Arabian peninsula that Muslims came to "occupy" and that the Islamic faith came to dominate in the Middle East and the west - which is to say, Persia and Iraq, Syria and the Levant, modern Turkey, the Balkans, Greece, Sicily, Spain, North Africa, and Egypt - were occupied and dominated as a direct result of the great Muslim Arab conquests and those of their successors, the Turks. To deny that these conquests "spread the gift of Islamic faith" is a display of colossal ignorance.
Rogerson's book has an undercurrent - which it shares with much of the current literature - in which history commences only after Muslim conquests. The underlying premise of this is that whatever extent of territory has been conquered by an Islamic power represented the natural order of things, and, by contrast, attempts by a Christian power to reclaim such lands were acts of illegitimate aggression and bigoted religious zealotry.
Rogerson strikes an indignant tone in writing about the alien Christian Portuguese campaigning where they don't naturally belong in Morocco or Algeria (and, for that matter, alien Christian Spanish who have no business "occupying" Ceuta today). Rogerson's exultant finale is the glorious destruction of the Christian Portuguese and their final expulsion from Morocco at the Battle of Three Kings.
Oddly, he doesn't strike this same tone when it comes to Muslim Turks campaigning in Byzantium, or Constantinople, or Greece, or Italy, or Hungary, or Austria. He doesn't seem to question how the Turks came to rule over the great cities of ancient Greece in Anatolia. He doesn't seem to wonder how Muslims came to rule over four of the five Apostolic sees of Christianity (Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Alexandria) or the home of St. Augustine (the same Algeria in which Rogerson sees Portuguese or Spanish Christians as unnatural interlopers). He doesn't seem to wonder how Muslim tribes from the Arabian peninsula came to rule over the Christian Iberian peninsula and Maghreb; to Rogerson, all of this was just the natural state of things. But the "conquest" of Granada by the Spanish was an unnatural act of aggression, a historical crime."
The first warning sign appears on page 35 when Rogerson declares, "Leonardo DaVinci can be numbered among the many such successful mulatto children of this period..." Rogerson, of course, does not provide a source reference for this (he provides a total of five - let me repeat, five - source references in the entire book). As a result, we have no clue as to the basis upon which his announcement relies. The likeliest source seems to be the hypothesis -- based upon reconstructions of DaVinci's fingerprint -- that his mother was of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin. This is far from certain, but even if it were, it would not mean that DaVinci was a mulatto.
People smarter than I am would close Rogerson's book at this point, and move on to a more worthwhile use of their time.
Regrettably, I did not, and it only takes another five pages for Rogerson to provide a fuller preview of what he has in store for his readers: his colorful description of the 1458 Portuguese invasion of Ksar es Seghir, or Alcácer-Ceguer, which he describes as a "pretty but insignificant town, sited above a lovely bay and overlooked by hills."
As it turns out, Rogerson cannot resist the temptation to offer his judgment that the siege was "an instance of massive overkill", an act of bullying a "little settlement" when Portuguese forces were too timid to attempt to take on the larger Muslim town of Tangier. Rogerson melodramatically describes the "gunfire from the [Portugese] fleet devastat[ing] the Moroccan troops who had massed amid the surf to defend their homeland", and the heroism of those who held out for "another three days before the last Moroccan soldiers were cleared from the town and its walls." After painting these scenes of butchery, Rogerson condemns the war-mongering Portuguese for rebuilding "the old Moorish town...as a fortress" and can barely conceal his disdain when they "carefully raised a new church over the ancient old mosque with its brick-tiled floor." Truly a tale of brutal European savagery visited upon a vulnerable and peaceful Muslim village!
In this passage we first encounter the blueprint to which Rogerson adheres throughout the book: without citing any references whatsoever (but, then, how could he?), he mixes historical falsehoods and omissions with polemical denunciation that he reserves almost exclusively for the Christian powers.
In fact, Alcácer-Ceguer in 1458 was a small, but well-defended Muslim port. It was a centuries-old Islamic military base, centered around the fortress for which it is, in Arabic, named ("Small Castle" not, as Rogerson mislabels it, "Castle of the Crossing"); it was not, as Rogerson conjures it, some idyllic little fishing village on a bay. After just two days of Portuguese bombardment, the Moroccan garrison offered to surrender on the condition that the troops and the inhabitants of the town were assured of free passage to depart along with their possessions. King Alfonso V agreed to these terms and honored them: the Moroccan garrison and the population of the town peacefully evacuated with their possessions before the end of the third day.
Rogerson's images of heroic citizen-soldiers being mowed down in the surf (which would, after all, have been an odd place for a besieged to take up defense) and persistently defending "the town and its walls" to the last until they were "cleared" by Portuguese forces are the stuff of pure fiction.
Afterwards, the Portuguese expanded and strengthened the port's existing fortifications, which had proven to be quite inadequate as a defense against contemporary firepower. Rogerson's assertions that the Portuguese transformed "the old Moorish town" into a fortress, and that the "ruined castle that still sits in the bay is entirely the creation of the Portuguese" are fictional. His insinuation that the Portuguese demolished the town's "ancient old mosque" and "carefully" built a new church on its foundations is also fiction. The Portuguese re-consecrated the Moroccan mosque as their church of St. Mary of Mercy.
It's appalling to fabricate history, but the second element of Rogerson's modus operandi is as appalling: his striking lack of objectivity. This emerges in his discussion of the Portuguese siege of Alcácer-Ceguer most clearly when set against his later accounts of Ottoman sieges of Christian towns and fortifications.
To start, consider his judgment that the Portuguese siege was an "instance of massive overkill." Perhaps, Rogerson means that the resources that Portugal applied to the siege massively exceeded those that would have been required to militarily prevail over this "little settlement." If that is his meaning, then this remark would merely be stupid. In discussing the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople, Rogerson correctly observes that "in terms of numbers there was no question as to where the advantage lay, for there were at least ten Ottoman soldiers to every active defender. This sort of proportion was vital for the successful prosecution of any siege" (page 81).
The objective of this siege, as in most any siege, was to overawe the besieged, and thereby compel them to peacefully surrender the town or fortifications. That is precisely the outcome that the Portuguese obtained. All of the sources (other than Barnaby Rogerson) agree that it was over within one or two days, and involved no notable casualties among the besieged - either during or afterwards.
Rogerson can only be using the term "massive overkill" to foster the impression that the Portuguese engaged in a gratuitous level of violence and destruction; note that his judgment is followed immediately in the text by his fabricated image of Moroccan soldiers being "devastated...amid the surf" by Portuguese gunfire. This frames a narrative that is as viciously bigoted as it is false.
Let's return to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople. This siege and its aftermath was an epic of violence and destruction, followed by an orgy of death, destruction, and rapine visited by Islamic forces upon a largely unarmed Christian population in one of Christianity's greatest and most important cities. Whereas Rogerson disdains the Portuguese for (fictitiously) building their "new" church over the foundation of the "old ancient" mosque in the "little settlement" of Alcácer-Ceguer, he dispassionately recounts the Islamic desecration of the greatest and most important church in Orthodox Christianity, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and - after "the blood of the Christians who had been slaughtered in this last sanctuary had been cleaned from the marble floors and walls" (page 87) - the conversion of it to a mosque. Further, unlike the Portuguese and the Alcácer-Ceguer mosque, the Ottomans did, in fact, demolish an "old ancient" church in Constantinople: the Church of Holy Apostles, Constantinople's second most important church, which was not only older than the comparatively tiny Moroccan mosque but was older than Islam itself. Rogerson omits to mention that the Ottomans demolished it, and renders his judgment that "[Mehmet] rounded off this central government block by laying out a vast mosque over the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles....to the great benefit of Istanbul's skyline" (page 92). It was good of Mehmet to get rid of that old eyesore
Yet, for Rogerson, Alcácer-Ceguer was "massive overkill"; Constantinople was not.
In recounting the 1522 surrender of the remnants of the 7,000-strong garrison of the Knights of St. John on Rhodes to the 100,000-strong Ottoman besieging force, Rogerson gushes over the magnanimity of Suleyman the Great in allowing remaining Knights and Christians to leave their island in safety and in promising that "no church would be desecrated." Rogerson declares that the "terms given by Suleyman were astonishingly mild....[and it] was an incredibly peaceful culmination." He sings the praises of the "Sultan who kept his word and offered generous peace terms..." (page 265).
Rogerson has no such praise for the generous and peaceful terms offered by King Alfonso V at Alcácer-Ceguer; in fact, he doesn't mention them. Nor does the Christian Alfonso warrant Rogerson's notice, let alone praise, for actually keeping his word; the Ottomans still looted Rhodes after the Knights had surrendered. Not to be bothered by this detail, Rogerson faithfully rushes to defend the Sultan's honor: "...but [Rhodes] was not given over to the full appalling horrors of a sack." How magnanimous.
Rogerson has more in store for Alfonso. Barnaby's deep penetration of Alfonso's psyche detects in prosaic contemporary accounts of the King that he suffered "a hint of instability" (page 49) and "was losing his grip on reality" (page 50). He mocks Alfonso as "that model of Christian chivalry" for allegedly sacking the Muslim port of Arzila after "he refused to countenance an offer of surrender from the Governor" (page 48). There is some reason to doubt the veracity of Rogerson's account, starting with, as always, his neglect in providing source references, but also the absence of this pertinent detail in every other account of the conquest that I could uncover, and, of course, Rogerson's demonstrated capacity to fabricate history. The evidence that shrouds Rogerson's account in the most doubt, however, is that Tangier then surrendered to the Portuguese, without resistance, to avoid the fate of Arzila. It is hard to follow how the massacre at Arzila if it followed the town's offer to surrender would terrorize Tangier to offer to surrender.
Speaking of terrifying massacres: At the end of the 1570 siege of Nicosia in Cyprus by at least 60,000 Ottoman besiegers, Rogerson recounts that "the slaughter would continue as the city of Nicosia was given over to the sack: that orgy of licensed plunder, murder, extortion, rape, and revenge that lay behind the zeal of all the besieging armies" (page 381). Unlike "all the besieging armies", however, the Ottomans massacred at least 20,000 Greek Christians and looted every church, public building and palace. With the same gory imagery he used for the desecration of the Hagia Sophia, Rogerson dispassionately recounts: "the Gothic cathedral at the centre of the city was washed clean of the last of its bloodstains. The stone floor was covered with carpets and the army assembled to sanctify the new mosque with prayer." Needless to say, the Ottoman massacre that avenged Nicosia's resistance terrorized nearby Kyrenia to surrender without resistance.
There is no similar lack of passion when Rogerson's recounts the sack by Christian Portuguese forces of the Muslim town of Brava in Somalia in 1506. Rogerson bewails that "the resulting sack of the city, the rape and murder of the women and children who were trapped in the streets, exceeded anything that had yet been witnessed" (page 192) - including, one must assume, what the Ottomans did in Constantinople just fifty years earlier. Unlike the atrocities committed by the Ottomans in Nicosia, Rogerson doesn't chalk up the Portuguese behavior as just another example of "the zeal of all the besieging armies" -- far from it. He agrees with an unnamed chronicler that it was "a judgement of God" to avenge the Portuguese when one of their departing boats was "rolled on to the rocks by the surf." Not surprisingly, Rogerson never sees the need for such a judgment to avenge countless Muslim atrocities against Christians.
The Muslim pirate, and Rogerson hero, Barbarossa's 1535 sack of tiny port of Mahon in Minorca - in which he burned down the city and enslaved 6,000 innocent Christians - was also not "massive overkill"; it was "a fabulous piece of defiance" (page 301). I am sure that the enslaved Christians understood that.
On page 47, Rogerson quotes the chronicle of a soldier in Portugal's wars against the Moors: "We had therefore to storm the majority of towns and castles, and we slew all the infidels. The rank and file had orders to kill the women and children, which was done." Rogerson emotionally asks us to wonder with him "What ghastly scenes of mass murder lie behind such crisp, taciturn sentences?"
Rogerson's emotions suddenly go missing as he crafts crisp, taciturn sentences to recount ghastly scenes of mass murder visited upon the terrorized and innocent Christian populations all over the Western Mediterranean by his heroic Muslim corsairs, or pirates. During the "golden decade for the Algerine corsairs...innocent Christians along the southern Italian shore, and the islands of Majorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were hit time and again by the hungry corsairs" (page 283). Barbarossa "scorched the Italian coast of Apulia, then proceeded to methodically wreck all the remaining Venetian-held islands" (page 302). Barbarossa "struck southern Italy with precision, encircling the town of Reggio and deporting its entire population as slaves to Istanbul. Avoiding the well-defended cities of the Neapolitan coast...he fell upon little Sperlonga" (page 294). Dragut "concentrated on the Sicilian and Italian coasts before assisting the French in once more despoiling the Genoese Riviera....Dragut's squadron once again joined up with the Ottoman fleet to raid southern Italy (Reggio, opposite Sicilian Messina, was hit yet again)....When Dragut raided the countryside around Bastia, taking some six thousands captives, he was weakening Corsica for the next French invasion" (page 319). "The Italian city of Nice...was bombarded, besieged, stormed, and sacked" by the Ottoman fleet (page 313). And so on and so on. What ghastly scenes of mass murder lie behind such crisp, taciturn sentences?
You get the picture.
After all of this, one is astonished to read Rogerson claim that it is a "false image of Islam being spread by invading armies, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other" (page 97). This is a book that documents little else than the expansion of dar-al-Islam by invading armies. This is a book that documents some of the greatest Christian churches being converted into some of the greatest Muslim mosques - after, of course, being cleaned of the blood of the massacred Christians. Evidence of the absurdity of Rogerson's claim -- and his deeply, profound personal confusion -- is that just nine pages earlier, he writes that "when the Arabs occupied the capital city of Ctesiphon they were on their way to destroy the ancient Persian Empire but spread the gift of Islamic faith" (page 88).
On page 69 and 70, Rogerson writes: "The curious phenomenon of a slave army owed its existence to an old Muslim tradition, dating back to the first years of the Arab conquests....as part of the contract of surrender [non-Muslims] were thereafter to be defended by Arab Muslim armies." (He also characterizes the enslavement and conversion of a fifth of each subjugated Christian community's teenage boys to form the Ottoman jannisary corps to be a "brilliant response" to the conquering Muslim power's military manpower shortage. Yet, Rogerson doesn't see much brilliance in the Spanish Kingdom's forced conversions of its Muslims and Jewish populations - and these people weren't even enslaved and forced to fight the Kingdom's wars.)
Rogerson's profound confusion returns by page 171. He lavishes praise on Sultan Bayezid II: "Considering peace to be at the heart of the Islamic message as revealed to the world in the Koran, the Sultan worked hard and consistently to fulfill this obligation....It may be that Sultan Bayezid II was the most genuine Muslim ever to have sat on the throne of the Ottomans." One page earlier (I am not kidding):
"In 1499 Bayezid's preparations were complete. He struck against Venice by land and sea in a brilliantly conceived campaign which isolated her Aegean and Adriatic fortresses at the same time as Ottoman cavalry armies carried out raids within a few days ride of the fabled city itself."
The most genuine Muslim revealed something quite unlike peace to the Venetians. A little farther along on page 171, Rogerson is back to saying, "The Ottoman Empire had been created as an instrument of war, fine-tuned by annual campaigns of conquest...."
How instruments of war and military conquest fit into the teachings of Islam, and whether the Ottomans, and their conquering brethren such as the Mongols, Seljuk Turks, and the Abbasid and Umayyad Arabs were acting as true Muslims I leave to Islamic scholars and theologians (among whom, it seems, Barnaby Rogerson qualifies himself when he bizarrely opines that the Ottomans "had no God-ordained right to rule [as did those] descended from the Prophet [and] the Arab dynasties of Caliphs that succeeded him.").
On the other hand, whether the practice of Islam actually spread as a consequence of the military conquests of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Seljuks, and Ottomans is an historical question. And it is beyond debate: all of the territory outside of the Arabian peninsula that Muslims came to "occupy" and that the Islamic faith came to dominate in the Middle East and the west - which is to say, Persia and Iraq, Syria and the Levant, modern Turkey, the Balkans, Greece, Sicily, Spain, North Africa, and Egypt - were occupied and dominated as a direct result of the great Muslim Arab conquests and those of their successors, the Turks. To deny that these conquests "spread the gift of Islamic faith" is a display of colossal ignorance.
Rogerson's book has an undercurrent - which it shares with much of the current literature - in which history commences only after Muslim conquests. The underlying premise of this is that whatever extent of territory has been conquered by an Islamic power represented the natural order of things, and, by contrast, attempts by a Christian power to reclaim such lands were acts of illegitimate aggression and bigoted religious zealotry.
Rogerson strikes an indignant tone in writing about the alien Christian Portuguese campaigning where they don't naturally belong in Morocco or Algeria (and, for that matter, alien Christian Spanish who have no business "occupying" Ceuta today). Rogerson's exultant finale is the glorious destruction of the Christian Portuguese and their final expulsion from Morocco at the Battle of Three Kings.
Oddly, he doesn't strike this same tone when it comes to Muslim Turks campaigning in Byzantium, or Constantinople, or Greece, or Italy, or Hungary, or Austria. He doesn't seem to question how the Turks came to rule over the great cities of ancient Greece in Anatolia. He doesn't seem to wonder how Muslims came to rule over four of the five Apostolic sees of Christianity (Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Alexandria) or the home of St. Augustine (the same Algeria in which Rogerson sees Portuguese or Spanish Christians as unnatural interlopers). He doesn't seem to wonder how Muslim tribes from the Arabian peninsula came to rule over the Christian Iberian peninsula and Maghreb; to Rogerson, all of this was just the natural state of things. But the "conquest" of Granada by the Spanish was an unnatural act of aggression, a historical crime."
August 28, 2019
Here I stand up to my ankles in the Med
Last week I spent my holiday on Rhodes, the smallish Greek island with a grand history, just off the Turkish coast. Cities sprang up here around 3,000 years ago, providing legendary Olympic boxing champions and some great classical philosophers. Later, its rethorical schools provided crucial stages in the education of the Roman elite, among whom Caesar. However, the civil war that ended the republic of Rome also led to the destruction of Rhodes.
The island never returned to those glory days, but slowly recovered under the Byzantines and the Genoese. A third golden (or rather silver) age occurred under the rule of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem between 1309 and 1522. The Knights ended up on Rhodes after choosing the better part of valour by leaving the Holy Land in 1291. Although they first found shelter on Cyprus, the destruction of their fellow crusading order, the Templars, by the French king in 1305 suggested that they'd better get a place for themselves and prove themselves still relevant as a crusading force.
In 1306 a small expeditionary force took two strongholds on Rhodes and in 1309 the Hospitallers agreed a deal to take over the whole island, including its strategic port in the capital. From then on they preyed on Muslim ships (and a lot of Christian ones as well), expanding their outposts to surrounding islands and the Turkish mainland. The Mameluke rulers of Egypt tried to retaliate by besieging Rhodes unsuccessfully in 1440 and again four years later.
But the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the position of the island so close to the Ottoman mainland and across its commercial arteries effectively doomed the Knights' presence . And this is where my choice for holiday reading nicely intersected. I brought along Barnaby Rogerson's The Last Crusaders, which covers the struggle for control of the Mediterranean between 1450 and 1590. What better excuse than to put the great sieges of Rhodes in 1480 and 1522 in the bigger picture? Also, I had just received my copy of the reprinted Here I Stand, which just begged for some background knowledge to the game.
For players of Here I Stand, the Mediterranean may appear like a minor theatre compared to the epic struggle of the Reformation. And true, the climax of the struggle between Spain and the Ottomans lies beyond the scope of the game. But the southern conflicts already drew much of the attention of the Habsburgs before the big climax of the 1560s and 70s. Francis I, king of France, entered into an alliance with the Turkish Sultan to keep Charles V off balance. The great advance of Suleyman through the Balkans occurred at the same time as the battle of Pavia and the sack of Rome. Later, Charles himself chose to organise his own crusades to Tunis and Algiers rather than take on the Protestants in Germany. Therefore, The Last Crusaders is an excellent companion for putting the game in perspective.
The book is a well written narrative of the developments in the major powers in this conflict: Portugal, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the Moroccan dynasties and the Barbary corsairs. It first describes their rise in the late 15th century and then the clashes in the 16th century, culminating in the epic sieges and battles of the 1560s and 1570s, such as Malta, Cyprus and Lepanto. After that, Rogerson contends, all parties involved decided that the cost of control of the Mediterranean were too high and diverted limited means from other crucial conflicts. They either disinvested their overseas commitments or accepted a de facto truce that would never be broken.
Not only is the book fully within the narrative tradition, it also is heavily dependent on biography. All the main players' life and character are sketched in detail, while even the relatively minor cast gets ample attention. In this book, their ideas, childhood trauma's and anxieties determine policies, rather than geopolitical considerations. This provides for a much better read than more analytical studies, but tends to obscure a few larger developments that Rogerson has skilfully woven into the book. Rather than summarise it all, I'm going to pick out those from the book that drew my attention and are relevant to Here I Stand, but I think there is a lot more in the books than what I touch upon here. For example, there's great stuff on the famous corsair captains such as the Barbarossa brothers, Dragut and Uluj Ali and the role of Jewish merchants in the markets for military goods.
Rogerson is a travel writer and historian with long experience in Africa and the Middle East. I only realised while reading the book that I'd already consumed another book by Rogerson, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, which covers the history of the first Caliphs and the schism between the Sunni and Shia in the years immediately following the death of Muhammad. A very engaging and interesting book in itself, the main point for my story here is that Rogerson has a pretty good understanding of the Muslim world and the political implications of religion.
This is especially relevant when it comes to the initial weak legitimacy of the Ottoman dynasty, having no direct hereditary links to the Prophet. On the one hand it influenced their plans for conquest to the point that they strove to control religiously important centres like Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina and to appear as defenders of the faith. On the other hand it also increased the intensity of the conflict following the Shia revival of Persia under sha Ismail, which posed a powerful millenarian alternative to Ottoman rule.
Considerations of religiously founded legitimacy also played its part in the rise of the dynasty in Morocco in response to Portuguese expansion. The Sufi brotherhood traditionally organised communal charity and education and mediated between warring tribes. The authority they derived from these religiously valued activities gave them greater legitimacy when taking up the struggle against the foreign invaders, be they Portuguese, Spanish or Ottoman. It allowed them to first usurp the role of the traditional rulers of southern Morocco, and later to unify the country under their rule.
Religion of course also played a role for the Christians. On the one hand in the crusading tradition of the knightly orders, but also in the sanction of royal rule. After the conquest of Granada in 1492 the pope elevated the Spanish monarch to 'Catholic Kings', which was a major boost to the weak claims of Isabella of Castile to her throne. The crusading tradition strongly supported the position of the Portuguese kings against their Braganza rivals. This could also have negative effects when viewed from a geopolitical perspective, as attempts to strengthen control over Morocco for a long time came at the expense of expansion into Asia and the New World.
But apart from legitimising new and older ruling dynasties, the holy war also became politicised and part of the process of state formation. Both in Portugal and Spain the knightly orders were put under royal control, and even mere promises of crusade could garner Papal and noble support for extra taxation. The pope granted the 'Catholic Kings' unprecedented control of the clergy and the Inquisition, which became an important tool in keeping the nobility and commercial classes in order.
And strengthening the state was crucial to participate in the game of power and conquest . Access to the new technology and the ability to use it on a grand scale now determined the outcome of military conflict (showing the influence of Rogerson's former tutor Geoffrey Parker). The period covered in this book is that of the military revolution, which was driven by the increasingly destructive power of siege guns which in turn necessitated improved fortifications.
Also, the power struggle required larger armies for longer campaigns, including more specialised troops like gunners and engineers. This necessitated the use of mercenaries rather than noble contingents. Major campaigns now took years of preparation including fleet building programmes and the establishment of vast arsenals.
The Ottomans build up most powerful siege park which allowed them to blast through the walls of Byzantium, Cairo, Rhodes and Belgrade but also field artillery that won them battles like Mohacs. Use of ships as gun platforms gave the Spanish, Venetians and their allies victory in the climactic battle of Lepanto in 1571. But the large scale use of state of the art machinery drove up the bill and made states seek sources of revenue and intensify the pressure on traditional sources.
By the end of the period all players in the book had mastered the new rules of the military revolution. The Portuguese were driven from Morocco by improved gunnery which made the cost of maintaining their trading posts on the coast prohibitive. Spain was driven from Tunis and Tripoli. The Ottomans were stuck at the end of their logistic lines and economic ability to support expenses.
All this conflict was accompanied by large scale destruction of human lives and property. Sieges with horrendous casualties were followed by brutal sacks which left cities depopulated. Religious minorities were force to convert or cast out with similar results, although the refugees from Spain and Portugal repopulated cities abroad such as Tetouan in Morocco and Thessaloniki in Ottoman Greece (as well as Antwerp and later Amsterdam). Ironically, this greatly damaged the Portuguese and Spanish economies in the long run.
Rogerson is keen to point out that at this time the Muslim world was more civilised and sophisticated than the Christian. Standards of personal hygiene and personal modesty were higher, but also tolerance for other religions. To me this kind of discussion of moral high ground is always touchy, especially because Christianity and Islam have gone through different developments since then which tend to cloud our interpretation. The picture is mixed at best and bleak in any case by today's western standards.
The added taxation of the Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire and especially the forced release and conversion of part of the youth if Christian communities surely didn't mean life under the Turk was hunky dory, but for Jews it was certainly better than forced conversion or expulsion as in large parts of Europe. In some cases, as on Cyprus in 1571, the Ottomans were greeted as liberators by Christians. As far as slavery was concerned there was little difference in attitude between Muslims and Christians, and the Ottomans would persecute the heretical Kizilbas movement as bitterly as the Habsburgs would go after the Protestants.
According to Rogerson, the Hospitallers came out on the worse side of the spectrum, contrary to what present day tourist guides of Rhodes would like to you to believe. Some Byzantine possessions refused their offer of protection and rather faced the Ottomans unaided. They raided Muslim and Christian shipping indiscriminately and used the captives to row their galleys. Jewish refugees from Spain were sold by them into slavery. To their merit, however, they provided some of the best medical care to everyone.
All in all the behaviour of the order and the strategic position of the island made Ottoman attack inevitable. The knights withstood the first Ottoman siege in 1480 by a whisker, and were only saved by the struggle for the succession of Mehmet the Conqueror a year later. A rebuilding programme significantly strengthened the defenses but the next attempt in 1522 ended with the honourable retreat of the Knights of St John to Malta, where they withstood yet another Ottoman siege in 1565 and continued their activities until Napoleon conquered the island.
Rhodes spent several mostly quiet centuries under Ottoman rule until the Italians conquered it in 1912. Apart from a sprinkling of nice old mosques in the capital and a colonial extension of the town the impact of these two peoples seems limited. Rhodes is now a Greek holiday island much like the others in atmosphere, but with that historical bonus of a few largely intact fortresses. I heartily recommend a visit.
Full disclosure: I have no connections whatsoever to the Greek Bureau of Tourism.
Last week I spent my holiday on Rhodes, the smallish Greek island with a grand history, just off the Turkish coast. Cities sprang up here around 3,000 years ago, providing legendary Olympic boxing champions and some great classical philosophers. Later, its rethorical schools provided crucial stages in the education of the Roman elite, among whom Caesar. However, the civil war that ended the republic of Rome also led to the destruction of Rhodes.
The island never returned to those glory days, but slowly recovered under the Byzantines and the Genoese. A third golden (or rather silver) age occurred under the rule of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem between 1309 and 1522. The Knights ended up on Rhodes after choosing the better part of valour by leaving the Holy Land in 1291. Although they first found shelter on Cyprus, the destruction of their fellow crusading order, the Templars, by the French king in 1305 suggested that they'd better get a place for themselves and prove themselves still relevant as a crusading force.
In 1306 a small expeditionary force took two strongholds on Rhodes and in 1309 the Hospitallers agreed a deal to take over the whole island, including its strategic port in the capital. From then on they preyed on Muslim ships (and a lot of Christian ones as well), expanding their outposts to surrounding islands and the Turkish mainland. The Mameluke rulers of Egypt tried to retaliate by besieging Rhodes unsuccessfully in 1440 and again four years later.
But the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the position of the island so close to the Ottoman mainland and across its commercial arteries effectively doomed the Knights' presence . And this is where my choice for holiday reading nicely intersected. I brought along Barnaby Rogerson's The Last Crusaders, which covers the struggle for control of the Mediterranean between 1450 and 1590. What better excuse than to put the great sieges of Rhodes in 1480 and 1522 in the bigger picture? Also, I had just received my copy of the reprinted Here I Stand, which just begged for some background knowledge to the game.
For players of Here I Stand, the Mediterranean may appear like a minor theatre compared to the epic struggle of the Reformation. And true, the climax of the struggle between Spain and the Ottomans lies beyond the scope of the game. But the southern conflicts already drew much of the attention of the Habsburgs before the big climax of the 1560s and 70s. Francis I, king of France, entered into an alliance with the Turkish Sultan to keep Charles V off balance. The great advance of Suleyman through the Balkans occurred at the same time as the battle of Pavia and the sack of Rome. Later, Charles himself chose to organise his own crusades to Tunis and Algiers rather than take on the Protestants in Germany. Therefore, The Last Crusaders is an excellent companion for putting the game in perspective.
The book is a well written narrative of the developments in the major powers in this conflict: Portugal, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the Moroccan dynasties and the Barbary corsairs. It first describes their rise in the late 15th century and then the clashes in the 16th century, culminating in the epic sieges and battles of the 1560s and 1570s, such as Malta, Cyprus and Lepanto. After that, Rogerson contends, all parties involved decided that the cost of control of the Mediterranean were too high and diverted limited means from other crucial conflicts. They either disinvested their overseas commitments or accepted a de facto truce that would never be broken.
Not only is the book fully within the narrative tradition, it also is heavily dependent on biography. All the main players' life and character are sketched in detail, while even the relatively minor cast gets ample attention. In this book, their ideas, childhood trauma's and anxieties determine policies, rather than geopolitical considerations. This provides for a much better read than more analytical studies, but tends to obscure a few larger developments that Rogerson has skilfully woven into the book. Rather than summarise it all, I'm going to pick out those from the book that drew my attention and are relevant to Here I Stand, but I think there is a lot more in the books than what I touch upon here. For example, there's great stuff on the famous corsair captains such as the Barbarossa brothers, Dragut and Uluj Ali and the role of Jewish merchants in the markets for military goods.
Rogerson is a travel writer and historian with long experience in Africa and the Middle East. I only realised while reading the book that I'd already consumed another book by Rogerson, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, which covers the history of the first Caliphs and the schism between the Sunni and Shia in the years immediately following the death of Muhammad. A very engaging and interesting book in itself, the main point for my story here is that Rogerson has a pretty good understanding of the Muslim world and the political implications of religion.
This is especially relevant when it comes to the initial weak legitimacy of the Ottoman dynasty, having no direct hereditary links to the Prophet. On the one hand it influenced their plans for conquest to the point that they strove to control religiously important centres like Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina and to appear as defenders of the faith. On the other hand it also increased the intensity of the conflict following the Shia revival of Persia under sha Ismail, which posed a powerful millenarian alternative to Ottoman rule.
Considerations of religiously founded legitimacy also played its part in the rise of the dynasty in Morocco in response to Portuguese expansion. The Sufi brotherhood traditionally organised communal charity and education and mediated between warring tribes. The authority they derived from these religiously valued activities gave them greater legitimacy when taking up the struggle against the foreign invaders, be they Portuguese, Spanish or Ottoman. It allowed them to first usurp the role of the traditional rulers of southern Morocco, and later to unify the country under their rule.
Religion of course also played a role for the Christians. On the one hand in the crusading tradition of the knightly orders, but also in the sanction of royal rule. After the conquest of Granada in 1492 the pope elevated the Spanish monarch to 'Catholic Kings', which was a major boost to the weak claims of Isabella of Castile to her throne. The crusading tradition strongly supported the position of the Portuguese kings against their Braganza rivals. This could also have negative effects when viewed from a geopolitical perspective, as attempts to strengthen control over Morocco for a long time came at the expense of expansion into Asia and the New World.
But apart from legitimising new and older ruling dynasties, the holy war also became politicised and part of the process of state formation. Both in Portugal and Spain the knightly orders were put under royal control, and even mere promises of crusade could garner Papal and noble support for extra taxation. The pope granted the 'Catholic Kings' unprecedented control of the clergy and the Inquisition, which became an important tool in keeping the nobility and commercial classes in order.
And strengthening the state was crucial to participate in the game of power and conquest . Access to the new technology and the ability to use it on a grand scale now determined the outcome of military conflict (showing the influence of Rogerson's former tutor Geoffrey Parker). The period covered in this book is that of the military revolution, which was driven by the increasingly destructive power of siege guns which in turn necessitated improved fortifications.
Also, the power struggle required larger armies for longer campaigns, including more specialised troops like gunners and engineers. This necessitated the use of mercenaries rather than noble contingents. Major campaigns now took years of preparation including fleet building programmes and the establishment of vast arsenals.
The Ottomans build up most powerful siege park which allowed them to blast through the walls of Byzantium, Cairo, Rhodes and Belgrade but also field artillery that won them battles like Mohacs. Use of ships as gun platforms gave the Spanish, Venetians and their allies victory in the climactic battle of Lepanto in 1571. But the large scale use of state of the art machinery drove up the bill and made states seek sources of revenue and intensify the pressure on traditional sources.
By the end of the period all players in the book had mastered the new rules of the military revolution. The Portuguese were driven from Morocco by improved gunnery which made the cost of maintaining their trading posts on the coast prohibitive. Spain was driven from Tunis and Tripoli. The Ottomans were stuck at the end of their logistic lines and economic ability to support expenses.
All this conflict was accompanied by large scale destruction of human lives and property. Sieges with horrendous casualties were followed by brutal sacks which left cities depopulated. Religious minorities were force to convert or cast out with similar results, although the refugees from Spain and Portugal repopulated cities abroad such as Tetouan in Morocco and Thessaloniki in Ottoman Greece (as well as Antwerp and later Amsterdam). Ironically, this greatly damaged the Portuguese and Spanish economies in the long run.
Rogerson is keen to point out that at this time the Muslim world was more civilised and sophisticated than the Christian. Standards of personal hygiene and personal modesty were higher, but also tolerance for other religions. To me this kind of discussion of moral high ground is always touchy, especially because Christianity and Islam have gone through different developments since then which tend to cloud our interpretation. The picture is mixed at best and bleak in any case by today's western standards.
The added taxation of the Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire and especially the forced release and conversion of part of the youth if Christian communities surely didn't mean life under the Turk was hunky dory, but for Jews it was certainly better than forced conversion or expulsion as in large parts of Europe. In some cases, as on Cyprus in 1571, the Ottomans were greeted as liberators by Christians. As far as slavery was concerned there was little difference in attitude between Muslims and Christians, and the Ottomans would persecute the heretical Kizilbas movement as bitterly as the Habsburgs would go after the Protestants.
According to Rogerson, the Hospitallers came out on the worse side of the spectrum, contrary to what present day tourist guides of Rhodes would like to you to believe. Some Byzantine possessions refused their offer of protection and rather faced the Ottomans unaided. They raided Muslim and Christian shipping indiscriminately and used the captives to row their galleys. Jewish refugees from Spain were sold by them into slavery. To their merit, however, they provided some of the best medical care to everyone.
All in all the behaviour of the order and the strategic position of the island made Ottoman attack inevitable. The knights withstood the first Ottoman siege in 1480 by a whisker, and were only saved by the struggle for the succession of Mehmet the Conqueror a year later. A rebuilding programme significantly strengthened the defenses but the next attempt in 1522 ended with the honourable retreat of the Knights of St John to Malta, where they withstood yet another Ottoman siege in 1565 and continued their activities until Napoleon conquered the island.
Rhodes spent several mostly quiet centuries under Ottoman rule until the Italians conquered it in 1912. Apart from a sprinkling of nice old mosques in the capital and a colonial extension of the town the impact of these two peoples seems limited. Rhodes is now a Greek holiday island much like the others in atmosphere, but with that historical bonus of a few largely intact fortresses. I heartily recommend a visit.
Full disclosure: I have no connections whatsoever to the Greek Bureau of Tourism.
November 8, 2018
A ridiculous work of apologetic, “fake news” history, mere propaganda. Fascinating subject matter almost makes me want to read the whole book. But Rogerson’s only real goal is to cheer on the Muslims, which is not to say Islam is bad, but that biased history is bad history.
December 25, 2018
This book is fiction at best, and revision of history at worst.
It should not be classified as a history book. It has a one-sided book, and it seems to have a very biased agenda.
It should not be classified as a history book. It has a one-sided book, and it seems to have a very biased agenda.
October 30, 2023
With "The Last Crusaders", Barnaby Rogerson takes a look at the period between 1450-1590 running from Henry the Navigator through a period known as the Battle of the Three Kings. This fascinating and at times tedious novel goes through this particular period of world history as the world itself changed from the powers of the Mediterranean to global powers across the world. Rogerson's story though is of intrigue as these characters from the various empires of the world come together & fight each other over territory repeatedly with the ultimate goal of conquest and expansion. There is also the introduction of the exploration of the Far East as well as the Americas which adds to this period in world history. The era itself Rogerson deems a crusade loosely since the wars of that era weren't entirely focused on the Holy Land, but still were crusades per se in the fact that the world was essentially fighting global wars over & over again over the same thing.
February 10, 2024
Thoughts after reading the introduction:
Oh no, another Orientalist Brit pretending to write about us from our point of view. The narrative and the region are presented -as they always are in orientalist stories- as an exotic adventure that stems from the authors fascination and some sort of long forgotten familial connection to the region.
This is the first step in our dehumanisation.
The end result.. Gaza
Oh no, another Orientalist Brit pretending to write about us from our point of view. The narrative and the region are presented -as they always are in orientalist stories- as an exotic adventure that stems from the authors fascination and some sort of long forgotten familial connection to the region.
This is the first step in our dehumanisation.
The end result.. Gaza
September 5, 2017
Very well written, popular history. Although it's a history of wars and battles he doesn't get bogged down in right flank/left flank blow-by-blows (who the flank cares is my attitude). Lots of great backgrounding for the conflicts with the occasional "too good to be true" historical legend thrown in as fact.
May 22, 2021
I thoroughly enjoyed this tour-de-force through the skirmishes, raids, wars and trades that shaped the Mediterranean and the Europe we inhabit today. Vivid writing brought these events and long dead people to life. And I liked that it told the story from both the Christian and Ottoman perspective. Couldn't put it down.
April 5, 2024
An epic tale of the battle to control the Mediterranean
Brilliantly entertain and well written book that covers the fight to control the Mediterranean between the Ottoman Empire and its allies versus Spain and Portugal. Exceptionally well researched, the narrative rattles along at breakneck speed.
Brilliantly entertain and well written book that covers the fight to control the Mediterranean between the Ottoman Empire and its allies versus Spain and Portugal. Exceptionally well researched, the narrative rattles along at breakneck speed.
March 22, 2022
A very dry, but informative overview of the end of the Crusades. Without a lot of knowledge of this time period, it was challenging for me to follow along at times. The book already assumes you are familiar with a lot going into the time period, it’s not as general or engaging as I hoped for.
April 27, 2024
Interesting, but hard to keep up with. The author jumps around in time and so many people have the same name.
September 28, 2025
Utter trash.
January 29, 2018
Although the author does not make any claims to be a scholar, I have found him to be a very worthwhile guide to history that is often very obscure to English-language readers. There is no doubt, for example, that the concerns of population transfers between continents and the religious divide between Christendom and Islam still has a powerful effect on the Mediterranean world and this was no less true in the period discussed in this book between the early 1400's and the late 1500's. Of particular interest is the way that the author covers exciting people, dramatic battle scenes, and also the more mundane business of trade, piracy, and logistics and the garrisons that secure a territory in the face of hostility [1]. One of the consistent patterns noted in this book is that the seizure of coastal territories in North Africa by European powers was met by the transfer of trade from the Muslim interior to other areas that were not (yet) under the rule of the Spanish or the Portuguese. What looked like wealthy jewels of an empire ended up being costly and beleaguered garrison fortresses instead, showing that the economics of empire just did not always add up.
The book itself is more than four hundred pages and is composed of fifteen chapters in three parts. The first part of the book looks at the birth of several new powers in the Mediterranean, beginning with the unexpected rise of Portugal and their early efforts at controlling the coast of Morocco and dominating the trade of the Indian Ocean. After this the author looks at the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire under Mehmet II, the conquest of Grenada by the Spanish, the emergence of the Muslim corsairs under the Barbarossa brothers, and the transformation of the Ottoman Empire up to 1510. The second part of the book looks at the struggle between these powers over control of the Mediterranean, looking at Portugal's dominance in East Africa and the Indian Ocean over the pepper trade, the Moroccan struggle against the Portuguese, the rivalry between Charles V and Francis I, the Ottoman golden age under Suleiman the Magnificent, the workings of various corsair kingdoms, and the the darker side of conquests, crusades, and family killings among the Mediterranean powers. The last three chapters look at the destructive wars that ended the crusading instincts of Muslims and Christians alike in the slaughters at Djerba and Malta, Cyprus and Lepanto, and the battle of the three kings at Alcazarquivir, ending with a melancholy look at death and bravery and folly.
One of the more interesting aspects of this book is the way that the author makes a complicated time sensible and points to the way that internal divides were often key in the way that the last crusades were fought. As is the case at present, there were sharp divides within each side of the religious wars that were fought with just as much, if not more, determination than the culture wars themselves. Witness, for example, the rivalry between the Valois and the Hapsburg dynasties or between the Ottoman Empire and their Safavid enemies in Iran and the Sharifs of Morocco. In this book one sees that rulers with a high sense of moral virtue tended not to be rewarded, while success in these evil times required a certain amount of ruthlessness that tended to make successful rulers into rather grim and unhappy ones, their hands covered in the blood of innocents. How much relevant that is to the present day is something that the author mercifully leaves to the reader, for this is a book that provides compelling stories as well as serious material to reflect on.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...
The book itself is more than four hundred pages and is composed of fifteen chapters in three parts. The first part of the book looks at the birth of several new powers in the Mediterranean, beginning with the unexpected rise of Portugal and their early efforts at controlling the coast of Morocco and dominating the trade of the Indian Ocean. After this the author looks at the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire under Mehmet II, the conquest of Grenada by the Spanish, the emergence of the Muslim corsairs under the Barbarossa brothers, and the transformation of the Ottoman Empire up to 1510. The second part of the book looks at the struggle between these powers over control of the Mediterranean, looking at Portugal's dominance in East Africa and the Indian Ocean over the pepper trade, the Moroccan struggle against the Portuguese, the rivalry between Charles V and Francis I, the Ottoman golden age under Suleiman the Magnificent, the workings of various corsair kingdoms, and the the darker side of conquests, crusades, and family killings among the Mediterranean powers. The last three chapters look at the destructive wars that ended the crusading instincts of Muslims and Christians alike in the slaughters at Djerba and Malta, Cyprus and Lepanto, and the battle of the three kings at Alcazarquivir, ending with a melancholy look at death and bravery and folly.
One of the more interesting aspects of this book is the way that the author makes a complicated time sensible and points to the way that internal divides were often key in the way that the last crusades were fought. As is the case at present, there were sharp divides within each side of the religious wars that were fought with just as much, if not more, determination than the culture wars themselves. Witness, for example, the rivalry between the Valois and the Hapsburg dynasties or between the Ottoman Empire and their Safavid enemies in Iran and the Sharifs of Morocco. In this book one sees that rulers with a high sense of moral virtue tended not to be rewarded, while success in these evil times required a certain amount of ruthlessness that tended to make successful rulers into rather grim and unhappy ones, their hands covered in the blood of innocents. How much relevant that is to the present day is something that the author mercifully leaves to the reader, for this is a book that provides compelling stories as well as serious material to reflect on.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...
March 6, 2017
Phenomenal book with so much information that at times my brain stopped absorbing all the info. Rogerson gives the perspective of Christian and Muslim leaders and generals. He doesn't suppose information he can't definitively source, this made the parts filled with questions especially exciting for me. To have read about a new king killing all his male kin then pondering about why this or that person was allowed to live was an added bonus to reading this book.
For all that, Barnaby Rogerson is a master storyteller of a 150 year period of near constant war that centered on the Mediterranean. This was no simple feat as he had to talk of the various duchies, kingdoms, and empires of Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia.
For all that, Barnaby Rogerson is a master storyteller of a 150 year period of near constant war that centered on the Mediterranean. This was no simple feat as he had to talk of the various duchies, kingdoms, and empires of Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia.
March 10, 2013
The world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was shaped by two powerful forces: religion and gunpowder—a devastating combination. In The Last Crusaders Barnaby Rogerson paints a vivid canvas, sweeping in scope and full of memorable detail, of the hundred and fifty year struggle between the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires for control of the Mediterranean.
The period from 1450 to 1590 changed the face of world history. It saw the creation of the first great nation states—Spain, Portugal, Austria, Turkey, and the countries of North Africa. The boundaries drawn then remain the national, cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries today. The author’s purpose is to explain the “last great tectonic shift” in the balance of power in the Old World. “We should all hear these stories at least once,” he writes, “if we are to have any understanding of our modern age.”
Readers will indeed be struck by the similarities to our own day. Like the atom bombing of Hiroshima, the destruction of Constantinople by Turkish artillery in 1453 sent a shock wave around the world (the Turks’ biggest gun could throw a 1200 lb. granite ball over a mile) and launched a ruinously expensive arms race. Cannons were the ICBMs of their day and there ensued a race among the great nations to forge as many as they could. Skilled weapons makers (many of them Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) were in high demand and often willing to work for the highest bidder. And, like uranium today, sources of saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder, were bitterly fought over. Terror, too, became a legitimate weapon of war. No captive city escaped savage pillaging and rape. Both sides routinely practiced impaling, dismemberment, flaying alive, enslavement or forced conversion of whole populations.
Against this background, we meet the great figures of the age: the intellectual Prince Henry the Navigator, the cunning and ruthless Ferdinand of Spain, the chivalrous Charles V, and the legendary sultans, Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleyman the Magnificent. But the minor actors are equally compelling--secret agents, pirate captains, and turncoats and traitors of every stripe. In colorful vignettes, we rub shoulders with Turkish Janissaries, Genoese mercenaries, Portuguese explorers, Moroccan corsairs, and galley slaves of every nation. The author is especially good at narrating in gripping, and often grisly, detail the great sieges and battles that punctuated this struggle.
The book is furnished with excellent maps, a useful chronological chart, numerous illustrations, and a very full bibliography. The writing is engaging and vivid, never pedantic. Any history buff will find this book a pleasure.
The period from 1450 to 1590 changed the face of world history. It saw the creation of the first great nation states—Spain, Portugal, Austria, Turkey, and the countries of North Africa. The boundaries drawn then remain the national, cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries today. The author’s purpose is to explain the “last great tectonic shift” in the balance of power in the Old World. “We should all hear these stories at least once,” he writes, “if we are to have any understanding of our modern age.”
Readers will indeed be struck by the similarities to our own day. Like the atom bombing of Hiroshima, the destruction of Constantinople by Turkish artillery in 1453 sent a shock wave around the world (the Turks’ biggest gun could throw a 1200 lb. granite ball over a mile) and launched a ruinously expensive arms race. Cannons were the ICBMs of their day and there ensued a race among the great nations to forge as many as they could. Skilled weapons makers (many of them Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) were in high demand and often willing to work for the highest bidder. And, like uranium today, sources of saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder, were bitterly fought over. Terror, too, became a legitimate weapon of war. No captive city escaped savage pillaging and rape. Both sides routinely practiced impaling, dismemberment, flaying alive, enslavement or forced conversion of whole populations.
Against this background, we meet the great figures of the age: the intellectual Prince Henry the Navigator, the cunning and ruthless Ferdinand of Spain, the chivalrous Charles V, and the legendary sultans, Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleyman the Magnificent. But the minor actors are equally compelling--secret agents, pirate captains, and turncoats and traitors of every stripe. In colorful vignettes, we rub shoulders with Turkish Janissaries, Genoese mercenaries, Portuguese explorers, Moroccan corsairs, and galley slaves of every nation. The author is especially good at narrating in gripping, and often grisly, detail the great sieges and battles that punctuated this struggle.
The book is furnished with excellent maps, a useful chronological chart, numerous illustrations, and a very full bibliography. The writing is engaging and vivid, never pedantic. Any history buff will find this book a pleasure.
April 13, 2014
The author puts together a package of stories most Americans know nothing about--the final Crusade(s) against the Muslims. It necessarily jumps forward and back as the warfare is waged from one end of the Mediterranean and back, over to the Indian Ocean and across the Atlantic to the Americas. Whew! He manages to keep it fairly organized but reading takes lots of flipping back and forth to maps and timelines, which are conveniently attached to the book on the front and back. Then there's the various royal family trees to help you keep all the Selims, Murads, Suleymans, Manuels, Johns, Charles, straight.
I found it very informative though the writing was not always clear. Just getting all these events, battles and treat negotiations makes today's Middle East chatter and fighting seem like a minor chapter in a very old, very long and bitter history. And, unfortunately, we appear to be doomed to repeat history.
Fascinating.
I found it very informative though the writing was not always clear. Just getting all these events, battles and treat negotiations makes today's Middle East chatter and fighting seem like a minor chapter in a very old, very long and bitter history. And, unfortunately, we appear to be doomed to repeat history.
Fascinating.
October 10, 2012
This is an extremely interesting and well-researched book, as were his earlier ones on the Prophet Muhammed and his Successors.
As is standard for narrative histories at present, it is crammed full of genuinely interesting and little-cited anecdotes and information.
It is this, however, that stops me from giving it five stars. Unless one is already familiar with the history of the struggle between Islam and Christendom (including Byzantium) from its inception up to the point where this story begins, it is difficult to place it in its appropriate context. I would recommend Tom Holland's Millenium and his more recent In the Shadow of the Sword for a good grounding.
Once done, this is a splendid book giving a welcome "Mediterranean" perspective to the story.
As is standard for narrative histories at present, it is crammed full of genuinely interesting and little-cited anecdotes and information.
It is this, however, that stops me from giving it five stars. Unless one is already familiar with the history of the struggle between Islam and Christendom (including Byzantium) from its inception up to the point where this story begins, it is difficult to place it in its appropriate context. I would recommend Tom Holland's Millenium and his more recent In the Shadow of the Sword for a good grounding.
Once done, this is a splendid book giving a welcome "Mediterranean" perspective to the story.
September 16, 2011
The fall of Constantinople, the Reconquista and the battle of Lepanto are probably the only events that the average person would name when asked about the contest between Islam and Christianity after the crusades.
This book provides a glimpse of the interesting details that are hardly ever mentioned. The interactions between Portugal, Spain and the various emirates in North Africa was very well told. That Elizabethan England had an informal alliance with one of the emirates against their common enemy of Catholic Spain was a revelation.
My only complaint is that the book was too short and too brief.
This book provides a glimpse of the interesting details that are hardly ever mentioned. The interactions between Portugal, Spain and the various emirates in North Africa was very well told. That Elizabethan England had an informal alliance with one of the emirates against their common enemy of Catholic Spain was a revelation.
My only complaint is that the book was too short and too brief.
January 26, 2017
Magnificent weaving of historical personalities and battles into a readable, engaging and horrifying history of what the superpowers of the 15th and 16th centuries were willing to do for the cause of religion, greed and power. Top notch narrative flow and biographical flourishes. Highly recommended.
April 8, 2010
History the way it should be written - engrossing, informative and absorbing that makes you want to read more about the period and people covered; in this case Ferdinand and Isabella, Mehmet the Conqueror, Carol Quintus, Suleiman the Magnificent, the famous Ottoman pirates and more
September 29, 2012
Livro histórico bastante interessante. Para quem procura conhecer um pouco mais do passado e se interessa por história militar é um livro que recomendo. Muito fácil de ler e sem ser muito complexo faz com que seja complicado largar quando se começa a leitura.
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