🧲 Books like this
City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire
Roger Crowley · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorVenice: A New History
Thomas F. Madden · 446 pages
Overview: An extraordinary chronicle of Venice, its people, and its grandeur. Thomas Madden's majestic, sprawling history of Venice is the first full portrait of the city in English in almost thirty years. Using long-buried archival material and a wealth of newly translated documents, Madden weaves a spellbinding story of a place and its people, tracing an arc from the city's humble origins as a l
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Laurence Bergreen · 415 pages
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Jack Weatherford · 352 pages
The name Genghis Khan often conjures the image of a relentless, bloodthirsty barbarian on horseback leading a ruthless band of nomadic warriors in the looting of the civilized world. But the surprising truth is that Genghis Khan was a visionary leader whose conquests joined backward Europe with the flourishing cultures of Asia to trigger a global awakening, an unprecedented explosion of technologi
The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe
Michael Pye · 394 pages
Tells the story of how modernity emerged on the shores of the North Sea, uncovering a lost history of a thousand years rife with saints, spies, pirates, philosophers, artists, and intellectuals.
The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
Dan Jones · 392 pages
The crown of England changed hands five times over the course of the fifteenth century, as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. Celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest-reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors. Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in
God's War: A New History of the Crusades
Christopher Tyerman · 1,023 pages
The story of how a group of warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust, carved out new Christian-ruled states in the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary of all epics. The crusaders' stunning initial success started a sequence of great Crusades, each with its own story, that fundamentally shaped the Christian and Muslim worlds for two centuries, until the last Crusader castles were fi
The Fall of Constantinople 1453
Steven Runciman · 256 pages
This classic account shows how the fall of Constantinople in May 1453, after a siege of several weeks, came as a bitter shock to Western Christendom. The city's plight had been neglected, and negligible help was sent in this crisis. To the Turks, victory not only brought a new imperial capital, but guaranteed that their empire would last. To the Greeks, the conquest meant the end of the civilisati
Joan of Arc: A History
Helen Castor · 352 pages
The acclaimed historian Helen Castor -- bestselling author and BBC broadcaster of She-Wolves, the story of England's queens before Elizabeth I -- returns with the incredible story of Joan of Arc, as only a biographer of Castor's enormous talents can tell it. Helen Castor brings us afresh a gripping life of Joan of Arc. Instead of the icon, she gives us a living, breathing young woman, a roaring gi
The Wars of the Roses
Alison Weir · 462 pages
Lancaster and York. For much of the fifteenth century, these two families were locked in battle for control of the British monarchy. Kings were murdered and deposed. Armies marched on London. Old noble names were ruined while rising dynasties seized power and lands. The war between the royal House of Lancaster and York, the longest and most complex in British history, profoundly altered the course
A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain
Marc Morris · 471 pages
God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades
Rodney Stark
Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade
James Reston Jr. · 312 pages
The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople
Jonathan Phillips · 374 pages
Using remarkable letters, chronicles, and speeches of various witnesses to the violent destruction of Constantinople by Christian crusaders in 1202, Phillips traces the way any region steeped in religious fanaticism might succumb to holy war.
Dungeon, Fire And Sword: The Knights Templar In The Crusades
John J. Robinson · 494 pages
History of the Knights Templar, the Christian warrior monks who occuped the scared Temple Mount in Jerusalem after the First Crusade.
The Alexiad
Anna Comnena · 560 pages
"Anna Comnena (1083-1153) wrote The Alexiad as an account of the reign of her father, the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I. It is also an important source of information on the Byzantine war with the Normans, and on the First Crusade, in which Alexius participated. While the Byzantines were allied to the Crusaders, they were none the less critical of their behaviour and Anna's book offers a startlingly
1066: The Year of the Conquest
David Howarth · 207 pages
Examines chronologically the events of the year during which the Normans invaded and conquered England, discusses the leading personalities of that time, and describes the everyday life of the common Englishman.
Venice: Pure City
Peter Ackroyd · 409 pages
"In this sumptuous vision of Venice, Peter Ackroyd turns his unparalleled skill at evoking place from London and the River Thames, to Italy and the city of myth, mystery and beauty, set like a jewel in its glistening lagoon. His account is at once romantic and packed with facts, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the fiestas and the
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
Amin Maalouf · 293 pages
Retraces two critical centuries of Middle Eastern history, presents an intriguing chronicle of the Crusades, and offers insights into the forces that shape Arab and Islamic consciousness today.
The First Crusade: A New History
Thomas Asbridge · 432 pages
Chronicles
Jean Froissart · 496 pages
One of the greatest contemporary records of fourteenth-century England and France Depicting the great age of Anglo-French rivalry from the deposition of Edward II to the downfall of Richard II, Froissart powerfully portrays the deeds of knights in battle at Sluys, Crecy, Calais and Poitiers during the Hundred Years War. Yet they are only part of this vigorous portrait of medieval life, which al
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Peter Frankopan · 382 pages
"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations b
Agincourt: The King, The Campaign, The Battle
Juliet Barker · 480 pages