Mediterranean Trilogy

by Roger Crowley 3 books in this series

Roger Crowley’s loose Mediterranean trilogy traces the struggle for trade, territory and sea power across the eastern Mediterranean. Constantinople recounts the Ottoman capture of the Byzantine capital in 1453; Empires of the Sea carries the Ottoman-Christian contest into the sixteenth century through Malta and Lepanto; City of Fortune looks back to the rise of Venice’s maritime empire and follows the commercial system that made the republic a great Mediterranean power.

The three books form a thematic rather than continuous narrative sequence. Together they connect crusading, commerce, gunpowder warfare, naval logistics and imperial rivalry, showing how Venice, Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg world competed for the routes and ports that bound the Mediterranean together.

Reading order

Books in this series (3 books)

1. City of Fortune

Roger Crowley

First published 2011

4.2(5,843)

Roger Crowley traces the rise of Venice from a trading city at the head of the Adriatic into a maritime empire whose merchants and fleets connected western Europe with Byzantium and the eastern Mediterranean. The decisive expansion came through shipping, crusading and commercial privilege, above all…

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2. Constantinople

Roger Crowley

First published 2005

4.3(7,993)

In the spring of 1453 Sultan Mehmed II brought the resources of the expanding Ottoman state against Constantinople, the diminished but still formidable capital of the Byzantine Empire. Constantine XI Palaiologos organised a defence built around the Theodosian walls, a small Byzantine force and foreign volunteers…

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3. Empires of the Sea

Roger Crowley

First published 2008

4.4(9,048)

The sixteenth-century Mediterranean became the central arena of a prolonged struggle between the Ottoman Empire and its Christian rivals. Roger Crowley begins with the expansion of Ottoman sea power under Suleiman the Magnificent and Hayreddin Barbarossa, set against the Habsburg interests of Charles V and the…

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