The Grand Turk by John Freely

From The Week of February 06, 2011

For Nearly eleven-hundred years, the Byzantine empire sheltered the flickering flame of Western civilization, preserving the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans long after the fall of those societies. But after many rulers and many victories, the Byzantine empire met its match. In 1453, it faced its existential threat and, deprived of the cunning that had kept it alive for so long, collapsed before the onslaught of its Ottoman enemies. On may 29th, 1453, the world changed forever, when a 21-year-old Mehmed II, the Conquerer and Grand Turk, entered shattered Constantinople, making it, for the next 500 years, the seat of Ottoman power.

Mr. Freely indulges in some unnecessary details, trudging through Mehmed's complicated family tree, but this is, on the whole, a balanced and vivid account of one of the world's most successful conquerers. From the politics which surrounded his early life to his myriad conquests, Mr. Freely valiantly illuminates the life of a man who seized his opportunity to be at the heart of world events. For in conquering the Byzantines, he banished the last remnant of the old world and replaced it with the new, a world still somewhat familiar these 550 years later. Mehmed the Conquerer lengthened the arm of Islam and permanently reconfigured the boundary between the eastern and western worlds, ensuring generations of war and conflict between Asian and European civilizations, each of which laid claim to the one right and true god.

Understandably, Mr. Freely devotes most of his time here to the siege of Constantinople, Mehmed II's crowning achievement. But he does spend some time with the Grand Turk's incursions into Europe, efforts which met with mixed success. For while he would make inroads into Bosnia, he suffered great losses in Hungary, losses which, it could be argued, were all that stood between him and the Islamification of Europe. A giant of history at a nexus point in time... Mr. Freely does justice to an area of history all-too-lightly regarded in the West. (3/5 Stars)