It involves all the peoples who border the Great Sea: Italians, Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, the French and the people of North Africa. It is also a narrative about places: the shores of the Bosphorus, the palaces and shipyards of the Venetian lagoon, the barren rocks of Malta, the islands of Greece, the slave markets of Algiers-and the character of the sea itself with its complex pattern of winds and weather, which provided the conditions and the field of battle. John, last survivors of the medieval crusading spirit the aged visionary Pope Pius V and the meteoric, brilliant Christian general, Don John of Austria. It features a rich cast of characters: Suleiman the Magnificent, greatest of Ottoman sultans Hayrettin Barbarossa, the pirate who terrified Europe the Knights of St.

It was a tipping point in world civilization, a fast-paced struggle of spiraling intensity that led from the siege of Malta and the battle for Cyprus to the pope's last-gasp attempt to rekindle the spirit of the Crusades and the apocalypse at Lepanto. The core of the story is the six years of bitter and bloody conflict between 15 that witnessed a fight to the finish. It traces events from the appearance on the world stage of Suleiman the Magnificent-the legendary ruler of the Ottoman Empire-through 'the years of devastation' when it seemed possible that Islam might master the whole sea to the final brief flourishing of a united Christendom in 1571. Empires of the Sea tells the story of the fifty-year world war between Islam and Christianity for the Mediterranean: one of the fiercest and most influential contests in European history.

Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley