This book gets a bigger icon in part because I really liked the book, but also in part because I thought the cover was really cool (it has a faux distressed spined cover). 1453 is a recent account of the siege and fall of the Byzantine Empire (by then consisting almost solely of its capital city of Constantinople) by the Ottoman ruler Mehmet (soon to be known as "the Conquerer" for pretty obvious reasons).
I waited to read this until I had finished a book on the 1204-05 siege and sack of Constantinople, and as I had hoped, by comparison this was a kinder, gentler, siege. Although I still can't consider this the ultimate guide to the final siege, primarily because there are very few photos or diagrams, so you're left to guess what the ancient complex of walls that held the key to the success or failure of the siege looked like (don't worry - the book I'm reading now is handling that issue quite nicely) the writing is quite good, and I think Crowley tells the story well. He gives the background of the Byzantine and Ottoman states, setting the stage for the clash between the Greek ruler, Constantine XI (who was neither Greek nor, being improperly crowned, the ruler) and the Ottoman sultan Mehmet who was probably more Greek than Constantine.
Constantine is one of history's few examples, as best we can tell, of the right man at the right time, and he was virtually the only Byzantine ruler I know of who was someone who could be admired. Almost without except the others were, even if good in some sense (statecraft, culture, etc.) horrific in some other way, most notably their recurring tendency to blind and mutilate political opponents, to say nothing of worse behavior, or gross incompetence. Constantine truly did the best that he could to preserve the throne and empire he had been given, and with the exception of a diplomatic faux pas or two, he gave the city its best chance of survival, repeatedly refusing offers to save himself, at the price of turning over the city. He was personally courageous, directing the defense of the cruical part of the walls until it was overrun, and worked tirelessly to overcome the massive blows to the defenders' morale that came throughout the siege. (I wonder if a certain young South Carolinian who followed in his footsteps at the Alamo in 1836 knew of him - their decisions are remarkably similar). Notably, Constantine's predecessors in 1204 either simply refused to fight at all, or did so in so incomptent a fashion that the city - defended by tens of thousands of soldiers (albeit poorly trained, armed, and led) fell to a few hundred Latin crusading knights. Under Constantine, a small cadre of trained Italians leading a military force of probably 7,000 or so at the outset, and a shrunken city populace, fought off a superbly equipped and led army of tens of thousands for over 50 days, and - and I didn't realize this - came within an ace of lifting the siege. According to Crowley what was going to be the final assault by the sultan's final reserves was almost at its finish when the defenses broke down. A moment's failure by the leading Italian defender (who deserves the lion's share of the credit for the successful defense until this key point)and a door left unlocked elsewhere resulted in the city's fall. Constantine probably never knew how close he came to succeeding in allowing his crippled empire to survive.
The book also illustrates well the character of the Ottoman effort who finally - after 800 years of failure by Islamic rulers - took the city. Mehmet's genius for organization and logistics was the key to the success of the siege. Keeping an army in place outside the walls for over a month with the risks of Western attack, disease (the importance of proper sanitation under siege conditions was something they understood) and supply shortages - especially given that he was employing the new weapon of artillery on a grand scale - was a tremendous achievement. Mehmet's army was constantly confounding the Byzantines with technological and engineering advances, from constructing fortresses in weeks instead of years, casting cannons of unprecedented size, to siege techniques, to floating bridges, to the carriage of warships overland into the Golden Horn to outflank the naval defenses of the city. What amazed me was the titanic efforts necessary by Mehmet to give him a chance to take the city, against a tiny number of defenders. I had thought that its fall was inevitable, and took more of an effort of will than of military prowess. I was wrong. Both sides repeatedly outdid their predecessors in besieging and defending the city, and given that the city had endured over a thousand years of attacks by this point, that was no mean achievement. As for Mehmet himself, he was of course not the devil that Westerners portrayed him to be, and if he did impale or massacre the occasional opponent, his tendency towards bloodthirsty behavior was not nearly as bad as his Latin (or Byzantine) contemporaries. In fact a few years later he was himself to be horrified by a Wallachian prince's impalement of tens of thousands of his soldiers - a guy named Vlad Dracula. (yes, that's the one - not a few Turks that survived the siege of Constantinople died at Dracula's hands a few years later). Anyway, Mehmet, for all his bad qualities, was still remarkably tolerant, as his behavior after the siege illustrated, and did restore Constantinople to its glory days as capital of a global empire. Certainly he behaved far, far, better than his predecessors, the Latin crusaders who sacked the city in 1205.
Crowley also explains the many bizarre atmospheric apparitions that troubled the Byzantines in the spring of the siege and especially the days before the city fell, including flames and strange lights dancing on the dome of Hagia Sophia. It turns out that as much as they looked like the Virgin taking away her protection from the city (which was how the Byzantines interpreted it), it was actually the effect of debris in the atmosphere as a result of a volcanic eruption thousands of miles away - very similar to the effects of the Krakatoa eruption in the nineteenth century. The same things happened, for example, in New York after Krakatoa, but New Yorkers simply called the fire brigade, as Crowley wryly observes. The Byzantines were intensely superstitious, and saw omens in everything. But the drama of the ancient city experiencing all this while under siege is enormous. I really, really wish someone would put this on film. But I guess no one would like to see a tragedy like this unfold - I mean it'd be like a film about the sinking of the Titanic. Who'd go to see that?
Finally, the book helps show the difference between the two sacks - by the crusaders in 1205, and the Turks in 1453, and the award for the brutal sack goes to the Latins hands down. They subjected the city to, I think it was, about five days of sack, killing and raping indiscriminately, and on a massive scale, as well as destroying and stealing the city's treasures, both in terms of gold, relics, and culture on a scale never matched in recorded history, and subjecting the religious heritage of their co-religionists to incredible desecration. By contrast, in 1453 the Turks were only permitted one day of sack (the city was so poor by that point it was pretty well cleaned out by then) and there were a relatively small number of residents killed and raped in the sack itself (although the Turks were a little more equal opportunity rapists, if you know what I mean). For the most part the Turks were interested in plunder, and that meant systematically searching for and sequestering the few remaining valuables and - most importantly - slaves. The city's inhabitants were fought over, but were worth something alive as slaves (at least the younger ones), so it appears that they were not overly brutalized at the scene, so to speak (although attractive young women and boys were apparently almost torn apart being fought over at times), but were rather chained up and led away into slavery throughout the Ottoman empire. Some were ransomed later, but the prospects for most were, to put it mildly, not good. The Ottomans also were not nearly as interested in destroying the city's religious sites as the Latins had been, either converting them almost immediately to Islamic houses of worship, or giving them to the surviving Greek inhabitants of the city along with the freedom to continue worshiping as they had done - something that, notably, the Western Christians were adamant that they not be allowed to do. This was one reason why the inhabitants of Constantinople were not quite as reluctant to see the Turks as one might expect. Their experience with Western Christians had been worse. At least after that fall they got their faith back. Their emperors had repeatedly sold their Orthodox faith as the price for Western aid against the Ottomans - aid that, incidentally, never came. The ones that survived the sack had churches, and even a section of the city set aside for them by Mehmet. And, as I mentioned, the city went from a poverty-stricken besieged remnant of an empire to the rich capital of a vibrant young one.
Anyway, obviously I did like the book. As tragic as the end of the Byzantine Empire was, it was still a happier ending (if I can use that phrase for a siege at which tens of thousands died) than the last time the city fell. The Byzantine empire died proudly, and the Ottoman empire achieved greatly. 250 years earlier both the Byzantines and Latins both disgraced themselves.