Empires of the Sea Quotes

“On the Doncella, Federico Venusta had his hand mutilated by the explosion of his own grenade. He demanded a galley slave cut it off. When the man refused, he performed the operation himself and then went to the cook’s quarters, ordered them to tie the carcass of a chicken over the bleeding stump, and returned to battle, shouting at his right hand to avenge his left.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“The Venetians briefed shamelessly on both sides according to the set of tested maxims: “It is better to treat all enemy rulers as friends,” one seasoned politician advised, “and all friends as potential enemies.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“The Knights of Saint John held services of thanksgiving and ignited fireworks in the night sky over Malta,”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“To carry out war, three things are necessary,” remarked the Milanese general Marshal Trivulzio presciently in 1499, “money, money and yet more money.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“War was not dependent on personal volition; it was an unceasing imperial project, authorized by Islam.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“Europe was on the receiving end of the slavery it was starting to inflict on West Africa – though the numbers slaved to Islam far exceeded those of black slaves taken in the sixteenth century;”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580

“All the inhabitants of Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians,” wrote the visitor Martin von Baumgarten in 1508, “obliged to pay to the state a third of all their increase or income…and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“All the Turkish prisoners were taken out of the dungeons and slaughtered on the ramparts. He sent a messenger to the commander of the garrison at Mdina with orders to kill all his prisoners, but slowly, one a day, every day. Later that day the guns of Saint Angelo opened up. A volley of human heads bombarded the Ottoman camp across the water. There would be no repeat of the chivalrous truce at Rhodes.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“Mustapha then had some of the bodies of the knights and a Maltese priest—“some mutilated, some without heads, some with their bellies ripped open”—dressed in their distinctive red-and-white surcoats and nailed to wooden crosses in parody of the crucifixion. The bodies were launched into the water off Saint Elmo’s point, where the current washed them across to Birgu.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“Here are two good-humored men, always ready to take coffee and opium, about to take a pleasure trip around the islands together.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

“The plunder of the coasts of Italy, Sicily, the Balearic Islands, and Spain continued almost unchecked. Ruinous economic and demographic decline particularly affected Southern Italy. Sometimes the wholesale evacuation of a patch of coast was ordered by the local governor to save the population from an Ottoman raid, as on the Adriatic coast in 1566. Five hundred square miles of countryside were devastated anyway. Sea trade between Spain and Italy was intermittently on the brink of paralysis; the whole structure of Spain’s Mediterranean empire seemed threatened by this merciless raiding.”
― Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World