Unlike many academics who have written about the age of European expansion, Crowley never wastes a syllable on post-colonial gobbledegook, but just cracks on with the action. it reads like an epic, bursting with colour and excitement. Conquerors is a gloriously entertaining read. Magnificently rip-roaring history of Portugal's rise to world empire. The story he has to tell may be a thrilling one but not every historian could tell it so thrillingly. In his previous studies of 15th- and 16th-century struggles between Christians and Ottomans for control of the Mediterranean, Crowley has shown a rare gift for combining compelling narrative with lightly worn academic thoroughness as well as for balancing the human with the geopolitical - qualities on display here.

In an astonishing blitz of thirty years, a handful of visionary and utterly ruthless empire builders, with few resources but breathtaking ambition, attempted to seize the Indian Ocean, destroy Islam and take control of world trade.Told with Roger Crowley's customary skill and verve, this is narrative history at its most vivid - an epic tale of navigation, trade and technology, money and religious zealotry, political diplomacy and espionage, sea battles and shipwrecks, endurance, courage and terrifying brutality., Drawing on extensive first-hand accounts, it brings to life the exploits of an extraordinary band of conquerors - men such as Afonso de Albuquerque, the first European since Alexander the Great to found an Asian empire - who set in motion five hundred years of European colonisation and unleashed the forces of globalisation.ĭie Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.įast-paced and vivid narrative.a fascinating account of the rise of an empire. But Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East - then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire. As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions, the history of Portuguese exploration is now almost forgotten.

Conquerors crowley