CROSS AND CRESCENT IN THE BALKANS: The Ottoman Conquest of Southeastern Europe (14th - 15th centuries)

2-194510

It is the history of a quite extraordinary century, one which began when a tiny of force of Ottoman Turkish warriors was invited by the Christian Byzantine Emperor to cross the Dardanelles from Asia into Europe to assist him in one of the civil wars which were tearing the fast-declining Byzantine Empire apart. It ended with the fall of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople to what was by then a hugely powerful and expanding empire of the Islamic Ottoman Turks, whose rulers came to see themselves as the natural and legitimate heirs of their Byzantine and indeed Roman predecessors. Includes 33 b/w photographs and 4 maps.