Author

Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and educated at Cambridge University. As the child of a naval family, early experiences of life in Malta gave him a deep interest in the history and culture of the Mediterranean world. After finishing school he spent his summers pottering in Greece; after university the Mediterranean bug took a more serious turn with a year spent on and off teaching English in Istanbul, exploring the city and walking across Anatolia with friends and donkeys. In recent years he has made return trips to the Greek-speaking world, including two visits to Mount Athos, spiritual home of the Byzantine tradition. All this resulted in his well-reviewed first book, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege 1453 (2005). His second book, Empires of the Sea (2008), is the continuation of this dramatic passage of history: the great sixteenth-century contest between the Ottomans and Hapsburgs for control of the Mediterranean.

Roger has talked about the empires of the Mediterranean to audiences as diverse as Melvin Bragg’s BBC programme In Our Time, the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington and his local Women’s Institute. Over the years, he has worked as a teacher and publisher, and also has an undeveloped career as a poet to his name - he won a Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award for poetry, before retiring to the safety of prose. His writing interests are now focused on producing page-turning narrative history based on first-hand eyewitness accounts. He is married and lives in the Gloucestershire countryside.

In search of Byzantium