Roger Crowley

Roger Crowley is a British narrative historian whose work concentrates on the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, maritime warfare, the Ottoman and Byzantine worlds, Venice, Portugal and the history of exploration. He studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, later taught English in Istanbul and travelled extensively around the Mediterranean, experiences that helped shape his interest in the region’s history. Rather than writing conventional academic surveys, Crowley specialises in tightly focused narrative history built around sieges, naval campaigns, explorers and eyewitness testimony. His books frequently examine moments when Christian and Muslim powers, European trading states and expanding empires collided around the Mediterranean and beyond.

His best-known books form a loose Mediterranean sequence. 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West recounts Mehmed II’s capture of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire; Empires of the Sea follows the sixteenth-century struggle between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian Mediterranean powers through events including the Siege of Malta and Battle of Lepanto; and City of Fortune traces Venice’s rise as a maritime and commercial empire. Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire moves into the Atlantic and Indian Ocean world, examining Portuguese expansion into Africa and Asia, while The Accursed Tower reconstructs the fall of Acre in 1291 and the end of the Crusader states in the Holy Land. His more recent Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World follows Portuguese and Spanish competition for the extraordinarily valuable spice trade and the routes to Asia. A new edition/work titled 1291: The Crusaders’ Last Stand, returning to the fall of Acre, is scheduled for publication in September 2026.