A review by anti_formalist12
1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West by Roger Crowley

4.0

What Crowley might lack in analysis, he more than makes up for in telling a good story, which is a big part of what being a historian is supposed to be. He tells an absolutely riveting tale, even when you know how it's going to end. In particular, the character of Mehmed the Ottoman sultan, is a stunningly strange character. One of those unique creations of a brutal upbringing, but still managed to be more magnanimous than one might think him to be. Then there is the miserable emperor Constantine, the last emperor of the Byzantines, who seemed to be a decent man fated to oversee the end of an empire that had stood for over a thousand years. But the most compelling character of the story is the city of Constantinople, that had been sacked by both Christians and Muslims, but had managed to survive through many different struggles. It's a historical moment that has been strangely forgotten in the west, probably because we don't like to memorialize our defeats. But more than that, I think that we forget about it because the people who lost, the Byzantines, have largely become a footnote in history. They're remembered, but no one is fighting to bring it back. The Greeks largely have their own national memories, and the Byzantines are almost too strange to be a part of that. So this crowning achievement of the Ottomans, the starting point of an empire that would last almost five hundred years, is mostly forgotten about.