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. This is the story that Roger Crowley takes up in Conquerors, the latest in his series of vivid Boys Own-style narrative histories about the great military, naval and religious conflicts of the.
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. 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. Crowley is a British maritime historian, all of whose books are tied to the Mediterranean in the pre-modern portion of the second millen-nium, many centering around the interaction of Christianity and Islam. 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. Utilizamos cookies y herramientas similares que son necesarias para permitirte comprar, mejorar tus experiencias de compra y proporcionar nuestros servicios, según se detalla en nuestro Aviso de cookies.
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