If you are going to read this book, you'd better like slaughter. It features lots of blood. Mostly, this occurs during sieges of fortified towns, but sea battles claim their fair share of victims too. All of it is described with great gusto, skill and narrative flair by the author, who clearly loves a good battle and knows how to recount it. In this, the book is similar to his previous work, 1453, which was largely devoted to the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmet the Conqueror. Fast forward three-quarters of a century to Mehmet's great-grandson Suleiman the Magnificent (known as "the Lawgiver" to the Ottomans), and once again the story and the carnage resume with Empires of the Sea.

Crowley begins his story begins with the taking of Rhodes in 1522. Suleiman had been on the throne for only two years, and the tradition was that a sultan consolidated his authority early in his reign with a series of victories. He had already conquered the fortress of Belgrade, in what is today Serbia. Rhodes was next. Since it lay just off the coast of Turkey, and was a stronghold of the crusading Knights Hospitaller who had kept their toehold in the Eastern Mediterranean ever since being booted out of the Holy Land upon the failure of the Crusades, Rhodes was an obvious target. The Turks were very adept at siegecraft, and along with their massive advantage in manpower, took the Knights' key fortress after a prolonged siege and great loss of life. Suleiman generously allowed the defeated Knights to leave the island, thinking that would be the last of them. He was wrong.

The balance of power in the sixteenth century in Europe and around the shores of the Mediterranean was mainly contested by two great powers: the Ottoman Empire and the Hapsburg Empire. The Ottomans' territories stretched across much of North Africa, and then from the Middle East through Turkey and the Balkans, all the way to Hungary. Their expansion into Central Europe was largely checked by the Hapsburgs, whose territories were a patchwork quilt across Europe, and included parts of Central Europe, Austria, parts of Germany, parts of Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.

Suleiman the Magnificent was to enjoy a long reign of almost half a century, from 1520 to 1566, the longest serving sultan of the Ottoman Empire. His main opponent, the Hapsburg King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, had a similarly long reign from 1516-1556. Both monarchs had other worries than just each other. Suleiman was regularly engaged in wars in the Balkans as well as against the Persians, fighting a war against the Safavid Persian Empire that lasted nearly a quarter century. Charles V had to deal with the very combative Kings of France and with rebellious subjects in the Netherlands. At various times, the French would even go so far as to ally themselves against the Ottomans to counter the power of Charles V.

Complicating matters greatly for the Hapsburgs was the Protestant Reformation, which rapidly picked up energy throughout the century after Martin Luther nailed his famous Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg castle church door in 1517. Protestants, especially those of the Netherlands, did not take kindly to being ruled over by a Catholic king such as Charles -- even through Charles himself was born and raised in the Low Countries, having been born in Ghent.

Through the rest of the 1520's, after the victories of Belgrade and Rhodes, Suleiman's Ottoman armies expanded the empire relentlessly in the Balkans, defeating the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 and reaching as far as the gates of Vienna in 1529 before suffering their first major defeat. With the Hungarian Kingdom removed as a power, the Hapsburgs and Ottomans were directly at one another's throats, a struggle that continued into the 20th century.

In the Mediterranean, the Ottomans expanded across North Africa, absorbing the Barbary States of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers. Autonomous provinces of the Empire, they were still an important part of the Ottoman military presence in the Western Mediterranean because of their fleets of corsairs. The corsairs functioned partly as free-lance pirates and partly as instruments of Ottoman naval power, seizing shipping and mounting coastal raids in Spain, the Balearic Islands and along the coast of Italy.

In 1538, the Ottoman navy under the pirate and admiral Barbarossa defeated the naval forces of the Hapsburgs and their allies at the battle of Preveza, off the coast of Greece. This largely secured the Ottomans' control of the eastern half of the Mediterranean for some years. This battle would be a prelude for the far larger naval battle to come at Lepanto later in the century, with the same naval powers facing each other.

However, strategically situated in the middle of the Mediterranean was the island of Malta, off the coast of Sicily. The Knights Hospitaller, after their defeat in Malta, had roamed homeless for some years, before eventually being given lordship over under the island, under the leadership of the Grand-master La Valette. Here, they became the Knights of Malta, and carried on their war against Islam, mainly through imitating the tactics of the corsairs. The Knights seized shipping wherever they good, roaming throughout the eastern Mediterranean under the noses of the Turks. After they seized one ship too many -- to be precise, the galley of the Sultan's Chief Eunuch -- Suleiman decided to put an end to the Knights once and for all. A massive invasion fleet was dispatched in 1565, and the fortresses of Malta were besieged. Tens of thousands died, but just as the fall of Malta seemed imminent, a Spanish relief force was landed and put the Ottomans to flight. The capital of Malta, Valletta, is named in honor of the commander who successfully defended it against near-impossible odds.

Not long after, Suleiman died on campaign in Hungary -- though his death was kept secret, by using a double to conceal his death, until his retinue could return with his cold body to Istanbul. His successor and sole surviving son, Selim, was determined to follow in his father's conquering footsteps. He immediately set out to take the Venetian possession of Cyprus, with a much larger force than the one which had attempted to take Malta. After a couple of very bloody sieges -- of Nicosia and Famagusta -- the island was taken. These sieges are described in graphic, sometimes gruesome detail by Crowley.

The new and aggressive Sultan was the proximate cause for the Christian powers of the Mediterranean, principally Philip II of Spain, Pope Pius V, and the Venetians to form a new alliance. Assembling a massive fleet, they set out to hunt down the Ottoman fleet. Amazingly, in October of 1571, they did so. What followed was the bloodiest naval battle in history, at Lepanto just off the west coast of Greece, as two massive fleets of oared galleys collided with one another in a spectacular cataclysm. The superior firepower of the Christian fleet prevailed, mainly due to the Venetians whose heavily armed gun platforms, known as "galleasses", destroyed most of the Ottoman fleet and killed 40,000.

The Battle of Lepanto is the last of the major military clashes in Crowley's story. Often painted as a turning point in the history of the Ottoman Empire, he says it's really not clear if this is the case. The Ottomans were primarily a land power rather than a sea power, though they relied on their ships to tie together their far-flung holdings around the Mediterranean. It would not be until 200 years later than the Ottomans would begin to go into serious decline, and not until World War I until they were finished as an imperial power.

Through all of this, Roger Crowley's gift as a story-teller shine through. He focuses mainly on the military events and the personalities of the major military leaders, using his great narrative powers and his eye for interesting detail and anecdote to enliven the story. Yet he sketches in enough of the background grand strategy of the major powers involved to provide wider understanding. Even if you know nothing of this era of history or its war-making techniques, Crowley manages to make the story both clear and compelling.

I look forward to his next book.