The Last Crusaders: The Duel For The Inner Sea

Barnaby Rogerson

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Review

This ambitious book has nothing to do with the Crusaders as they are oridinarily conceived but, if the title at first seems misleading, by the end it makes good sense.  For it describes, roughly, the period from 1450-1550 when the West harked back to the Crusades as justification for their wars until a point where religion, politics and economics made the idea of the Crusades seem redundant and old-fashioned, the Knights of St John an embarrassment.

The scope is very broad.  The rise of Portugal and its overseas empire in Africa and Goa; the expulsion of the Moors from Spain; constant wars Africa between Christians and Muslims, neighbouring Muslims, and corsairs; the triumph of the Ottomans.  But it is above all the corsairs and freebooters who hold the book together, with their shifting allegiances, surprising power and flexibility.  Like the Genoese and Venetians, they were at home in all corners of the Mediterranean, uniting its differences even as they fought them.  Although the Christians and the Muslims, Spanish/Portuguese and Turks were radically different in name and identity, and needed to maintain this impression, the traffic between them was actually far greater than their rhetoric suggested.  Not only through capture and slavery but also behaviour and trade.  Alum, for example, vital in gunpowder for Christians and Muslims alike, came from Morocco.  Venice, while maintaining its power through the formidable capability of its Arsenale, preferred to sustain itself on trade rather than military prowess, and the great Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, was more of a hired gun for the Spanish than a man fighting for Christendom or Genoa, not much different from a successful corsair like Barbarossa.  Although the complex and geographically disparate, the narrative is lively.  Rogerson writes very well and, though he goes into considerable detail, he does not get bogged down: he always comes back to the bigger picture which is often rather surprising.  Not least of the surprises is to find that the Ottomans were generally much more organised and humane than their European counterparts.  Until, that is, they were angry or wished to make a point, when they could act with sudden, terrible savagery.

This is a fascinating book which, for me, filled a gap between the Crusades and the post-Renaissance world.  It is also the background to the Renaissance itself, a historical theatre that was still fresh for Shakespeare. - review by John de Falbe