City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas

The rise and fall of the Venetianempire stands unrivaled for drama, intrigue, and sheer opulent majesty. InCity of Fortune, Roger Crowley, acclaimed historian and New York Timesbestselling author of Empires of the Sea, applies his narrative skill tochronicling the astounding five-hundred-year voyage of Venice to the pinnacleof power.

Tracing the full arc of the Venetian imperial saga for the first time, Cityof Fortune is framed around two of the great collisions of world history: theill-fated Fourth Crusade, which culminated in the sacking of Constantinople andthe carve-up of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, and the Ottoman-Venetian War of1499-1503, which saw the Ottoman Turks supplant the Venetians as the preeminentnaval power in the Mediterranean. In between were three centuries of Venetianmaritime dominance-years of plunder and plague, conquest and piracy-duringwhich a tiny city of "lagoon dwellers" grew into the richest place on earth.

Drawing on firsthand accounts of pitched sea battles, skillful negotiations,and diplomatic maneuvers, Crowley paints a vivid picture of this avaricious,enterprising people and the bountiful lands that came under their dominion.Defiant of emperors, indifferent to popes, the Venetians saw themselves asreluctant freebooters, compelled to take to the open seas "because we cannotlive otherwise and know not how except by trade." From the opening of the spiceroutes to the clash between Christianity and Islam, Venice played a leadingrole in the defining conflicts of its time-the reverberations of which arestill being felt today. Only an author with Roger Crowley's deep knowledge ofpost-Crusade history could put these iconic events into their proper context.

Epic in scope, magisterial in its understanding of the period, City ofFortune is narrative history at its most engrossing.

Roger Crowley was born in 1951 andspent part of his childhood in Malta. He read English at Cambridge Universityand taught English in Istanbul, where he developed a strong interest in thehistory of Turkey. He has traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean basinover many years and has a wide-ranging knowledge of its history and culture. Helives in Gloucestershire, England. He is also the author of 1453: The HolyWar for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West.