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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “War was not dependent on personal volition; it was an unceasing imperial project, authorized by Islam.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “special”

  Roger Crowley

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• “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

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• “Byzantium was not only the last heir to the Roman Empire, it was also the first Christian nation.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “The Ottomans were probably already casting guns at Edirne by this time; what Orban brought was the skill to construct the molds and control the critical variables on a far greater scale.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “Between them they estimated a fleet of something between 12 and 18 full war galleys composed of a mixture of triremes and biremes, then 70 to 80 smaller fustae, about 25 parandaria – heavy transport barges – and a number of light brigantines and other small message boats, a force of about 140 boats in all. It was an awesome sight to glimpse over the curve of the western horizon.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “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

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• “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

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• “He feared its potential to furnish a cause for endless war with Christian powers in the future. Captured, it would provide the centerpiece of the empire, “without it, or while it is as at present, nothing we have is safe, and we can hope for nothing additional.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “Mehmet had three clear objectives for his new fleet: to blockade the city, to attempt to force a way into the Horn, and to oppose any relieving fleet that might sail up the Marmara.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “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

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• “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

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• “and he prepared his elite professional household regiments: the infantry – the famous Janissaries – the cavalry regiments, and all the other attendant corps of gunners, armorers, bodyguards, and military police. These crack troops, paid regularly every three months and armed at the sultan’s expense, were all Christians largely from the Balkans, taken as children and converted to Islam. They owed their total loyalty to the sultan. Although few in number – probably no more than 5,000 infantry – they comprised the durable core of the Ottoman army.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “So rapid was the Ottoman assimilation of cannon technology that by the 1440s they had evidently acquired the unique ability, widely commented on by eyewitnesses, to cast medium-size barrels on the battlefield in makeshift foundries. Murat transported gunmetal to the Hexamilion and cast many of his long guns on the spot. This allowed extraordinary flexibility during siege warfare:”

  Roger Crowley

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• “It was the emergence of the Turks that reawakened the slumbering spirit of jihad.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “The lure of the Red Apple was dangled before the expectant gaze of the faithful. It was on these dual promises, so attractive to the tribal raider, of taking plunder while fulfilling the will of God, that Mehmet prepared his strike.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “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

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• “By the middle of the eleventh century a Turkish dynasty, the Seljuks, had emerged as sultans in Baghdad, and by its end the Islamic world, from Central Asia to Egypt, was largely ruled by Turks.”

  Roger Crowley

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• “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

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