Download or read book The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 written by Marios Philippides and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 919 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major study is a comprehensive scholarly work on a key moment in the history of Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The result of years of research, it presents all available sources along with critical evaluations of these narratives. The authors have consulted texts in all relevant languages, both those that remain only in manuscript and others that have been printed, often in careless and inferior editions. Attention is also given to 'folk history' as it evolved over centuries, producing prominent myths and folktales in Greek, medieval Russian, Italian, and Turkish folklore. Part I, The Pen, addresses the complex questions introduced by this myriad of original literature and secondary sources.

Download or read book The End of Everything written by Victor Davis Hanson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “gripping account of catastrophic defeat” (Barry Strauss), a New York Times–bestselling historian charts how and why some societies chose to utterly destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time “In The End of Everything, Hanson tells compelling and harrowing stories of how civilizations perished. He helps us consider contemporary affairs in light of that history, think about the unthinkable, and recognize the urgency of trying to prevent our own demise.” — H. R. McMaster, author of Battlegrounds War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization—sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and epochs. Though much has changed over the millennia, human nature remains the same. Modern societies are not immune from the horror of a war of extinction. In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.

Download or read book The Fall of Constantinople written by Ruth Tenzer Feldman and published by Twenty-First Century Books. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the loss of one city change the history of Europe? In the Middle Ages, Constantinople’s perfect geographic location—positioned along a land trade route between Europe and Asia as well as on a strategic seaway from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean— made the city extremely desirous, and as a result, prone to attack. Under the control of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, Constantinople became known as "the Eye of the World," a center of government, trade, art, religion, and learning, and was even more desirous. Rulers built three sets of walls to protect Constantinople from attacks by Asiatic tribes. But the city’s fall to the Turkish Ottomans in 1453 marked the official end of the Byzantine Empire—and the end of the Middle Ages. Learn how the fall of Constantinople became one of history’s most pivotal moments.

Download or read book The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis written by Nikos Kazantzakis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of Nikos Kazantzakis—the author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ—was as colorful and eventful as his fiction. And nowhere is his life revealed more fully or surprisingly than in his letters. Edited and translated by Kazantzakis scholar Peter Bien, this is the most comprehensive selection of Kazantzakis's letters in any language. One of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century, Kazantzakis (1883–1957) participated in or witnessed some of the most extraordinary events of his times, including both world wars and the Spanish and Greek civil wars. As a foreign correspondent, an official in several Greek governments, and a political and artistic exile, he led a relentlessly nomadic existence, living in France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Soviet Union, and England. He visited the Versailles Peace Conference, attended the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, interviewed Mussolini and Franco, and briefly served as a Greek cabinet minister—all the while producing a stream of novels, poems, plays, travel writing, autobiography, and translations. The letters collected here touch on almost every aspect of Kazantzakis's rich and tumultuous life, and show the genius of a man who was deeply attuned to the artistic, intellectual, and political events of his times.

Download or read book The Gunpowder Age written by Tonio Andrade and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global history The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind? Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, as Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s—much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars, having enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, since 1760. Indeed, he demonstrates that China—like Europe—was a powerful military innovator, particularly during times of great warfare, such as the violent century starting after the Opium War, when the Chinese once again quickly modernized their forces. Today, China is simply returning to its old position as one of the world's great military powers. By showing that China’s military dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than previously understood, The Gunpowder Age challenges long-standing explanations of the so-called Great Divergence between the West and Asia.

Download or read book Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs written by Rawdon Lubbock Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A seven-volume collection, published in nine parts (1864-90), comprising translated Venetian state papers relating to English affairs between 1202 and 1580.

Download or read book Ghost Empire written by Richard Fidler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A brilliant reconstruction of the saga of power, glory, and invasion that is the one-thousand year story of Constantinople. A truly marvelous book." —Simon Winchester Ghost Empire is a rare treasure—an utterly captivating blend of the historical and the contemporary, narrated by a master storyteller. The story is a revelation: a beautifully written ode to a lost civilization combined with a warmly observed father-son adventure far from home. In 2014, Richard Fidler and his son Joe made a journey to Istanbul. Fired by Richard's passion for the rich history of the dazzling Byzantine Empire—centered around the legendary Constantinople—we are swept into some of the most extraordinary tales in history. The clash of civilizations, the fall of empires, the rise of Christianity, revenge, lust, murder. Turbulent stories from the past are brought vividly to life at the same time as a father navigates the unfolding changes in his relationship with his son.

Download or read book The Shade of Swords written by M.J Akbar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-05-03 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shade of Swords is the first cohesive history of Jihad, written by one of India's leading journalists and writers. In this paperback edition, updated to show how and why Saddam Hussein repositioned himself as a Jihadi against America, M.J. Akbar explains the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Placing recent events in a historical context, he tackles the tricky question of what now for Jihad following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. With British and American troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and once again in Iraq, the potential for Jihadi recruitment is ever increasing. Explaining how Jihad thrives on complex and shifting notions of persecution, victory and sacrifice, and illustrating how Muslims themselves have historically tried both to direct and control the phenomenon of Jihad, Akbar shows how Jihad pervades the mind and soul of Islam, revealing its strength and significance. To know the future, one needs to understand the past. M.J. Akbar's The Shade of Swords holds the key.

Download or read book Children of Achilles written by John Freely and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the days of Troy historic lands of Asia Minor have been home to Greeks. They are steeped in a rich fusion of Greek and Turkish culture and the histories of both are irrevocably entwined, fatefully connected. "Children of Achilles" tells the epic and ultimately tragic story of the Greek presence in Anatolia, beginning with the Trojan War and culminating in 1923 with the devastating population exchange that followed the Turkish War of Independence. The once magnificent, now ruined, cities that cluster along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Turkey are reminders of a civilization that produced the first Hellenic enlightenment, giving birth to Homer, Herodotus and the first philosophers of nature. For more three millennia the Anatolian Greeks preserved their identity and culture as the tides of history washed over them, enduring conflicts that historians since Herodotus have seen as an unending clash of civilizations between East and West. Today, the memory of the Greek diaspora from Asia Minor lives on in the music of rebetika, the threnodies known as amanadas, and the poetry of Seferis, and even now the descendants of those exiles speak with nostalgia of 'i kath'imas Anatoli' - our own Anatolia, their lost homeland. This, told for the first time, is their story, from glorious beginnings to a bitter end, a story that continues to echo through the ages and across continents.

Download or read book Islamic Empires written by Justin Marozzi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamic civilization was once the envy of the world. From a succession of glittering, cosmopolitan capitals, Islamic empires lorded it over the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and swathes of the Indian subcontinent, while Europe cowered feebly at the margins. For centuries the caliphate was both ascendant on the battlefield and triumphant in the battle of ideas, its cities unrivaled powerhouses of artistic grandeur, commercial power, spiritual sanctity, and forward-looking thinking, in which nothing was off limits.Islamic Empires is a history of this rich and diverse civilization told through its greatest cities over the fifteen centuries of Islam, from its earliest beginnings in Mecca in the seventh century to the astonishing rise of Doha in the twenty-first.Marozzi brilliantly connects the defining moments in Islamic history: from the Prophet Mohammed receiving his divine revelations in Mecca and the First Crusade of 1099 to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the phenomenal creation of the merchant republic of Beirut in the nineteenth century, and how this world is continuing to change today.

Download or read book Mysteries in History written by Paul D. Aron and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-11-07 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is an engaging exploration of the process of historical research, following historians as they search for solutions to the greatest mysteries of all time. Award-winning author Paul Aron takes readers on a journey through great historical mysteries through the ages. Entertaining in themselves, the stories also show that history is not merely living, but lively. The reader who comes to the book thinking history is boring will leave with a changed outlook with regard to both the subject matter and the process of writing history. Each chapter is a carefully and thoroughly researched presentation not of popularized accounts but of valid historical scholarship. Chronologically arranged, the essays show the historical process in action. For each disputed historical point, theories arise, become standard wisdom, and then are revised as additional information becomes available. This book reveals the mechanics of that process, including spirited debate, swashbuckling archaeology, and the application of modern science to ancient questions.

Download or read book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire written by Edward Gibbon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. B. Bury's authoritative seven-volume edition (1896-1900) of Edward Gibbon's magisterial account of the relationship between Roman imperialism and Christianity.

Download or read book The Book of War written by John Keegan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-11-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed military historian John Keegan’s anthology of war writing from 25 centuries of battle In The Book of War, John Keegan marshals a formidable host of war writings to chronicle the evolution of Western warfare through the voice of the most eloquent participants—from Thucydides’ classic account of ancient Greek phalanx warfare to a blow-by-blow description of ground fighting against the Iraqi troops in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Keegan gathers more than eighty selections, including Caesar’s Commentaries on the Roman invasion of Britain; the French Knight Jehan de Wavrin at the battle of Agincourt; Davy Crockett in the war against the Creek; Wellington’s dispatch on Waterloo; Hemingway after Caporetto; and Ernie Pyle at Normandy. “The best military historian of our generation.” –Tom Clancy “A monumental piece of literary military history.” –Chicago Tribune A brilliantly edited and comprehensive anthology."—The New York Times Book Review.

Download or read book The End of Byzantium written by Jonathan Harris and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 1400, the once-mighty Byzantine Empire stood on the verge of destruction. Most of its territories had been lost to the Ottoman Turks, and Constantinople was under close blockade. Against all odds, Byzantium lingered on for another fifty years until 1453, when the Ottomans dramatically toppled the capital's walls. During this bleak and uncertain time, ordinary Byzantines faced difficult decisions to protect their livelihoods and families against the death throes of their homeland. In this evocative and moving book, Jonathan Harris explores individual stories of diplomatic maneuverings, covert defiance, and sheer luck against a backdrop of major historical currents and offers a new perspective on the real reasons behind the fall of this extraordinarily fascinating empire.

Download or read book The Sultan s Fleet written by Christine Isom-Verhaaren and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the Ottoman Empire is most often recognized today as a land power, for four centuries the seas of the Eastern Mediterranean were dominated by the Ottoman Navy. Yet to date, little is known about the seafarers who made up the sultans' fleet, the men whose naval mastery ensured that an empire from North Africa to Black Sea expanded and was protected, allowing global trading networks to flourish in the face of piracy and the Sublime Porte's wars with the Italian city states and continental European powers. In this book, Christine Isom-Verhaaren provides a history of the major events and engagements of the navy, from its origins as the fleets of Anatolian Turkish beyliks to major turning points such as the Battle of Lepanto. But the book also puts together a picture of the structure of the Ottoman navy as an institution, revealing the personal stories of the North African corsairs and Greek sailors recruited as admirals. Rich in detail drawn from a variety of sources, the book provides a comprehensive account of the Ottoman Navy, the forgotten contingent in the empire's period of supremacy from the 14th century to the 18th century.

Download or read book Cross Crescent in the Balkans written by David Nicolle and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is NOT just another retelling of the Fall of Constantinople, though it does include a very fine account of that momentous event. It is the history of a quite extraordinary century, one which began when a tiny of force of Ottoman Turkish warriors was invited by the Christian Byzantine Emperor to cross the Dardanelles from Asia into Europe to assist him in one of the civil wars which were tearing the fast-declining Byzantine Empire apart.One hundred and eight years later the Byzantine capital of Constantinople fell to what was by then a hugely powerful and expanding empire of the Islamic Ottoman Turks, whose rulers came to see themselves as the natural and legitimate heirs of their Byzantine and indeed Roman predecessors. The book sets the scene, explains the background and tells the story, both military, political, cultural and personal, of the winners and the losers, plus those 'outsiders' who were increasingly being drawn into the dramatic story of the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

Download or read book Constantinople and its Hinterland written by Cyril Mango and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its foundation, the city of Constantinople dominated the Byzantine world. It was the seat of the emperor, the centre of government and church, the focus of commerce and culture, by far the greatest urban centre; its needs in terms of supplies and defense imposed their own logic on the development of the empire. Byzantine Constantinople has traditionally been treated in terms of the walled city and its immediate suburbs. In this volume, containing 25 papers delivered at the 27th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held at Oxford in 1993, the perspective has been enlarged to encompass a wider geographical setting, that of the city’s European and Asiatic hinterland. Within this framework a variety of interconnected topics have been addressed, ranging from the bare necessities of life and defence to manufacture and export, communications between the capital and its hinterland, culture and artistic manifestations and the role of the sacred.