This might be interesting to some here.
Empires of the Sea - Roger Crowley
The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580
Read By: John Lee
Copyright: 2008
Total Duration: 11:12:07
Crowley picks up where he left off in 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople
and the Clash of Islam and the West (2005). After the fall of Constantinople
to Mehmet the Conqueror and his army of Turks, the author writes, it
was only a matter of time before Mehmet's great-grandson Suleiman set
out to achieve his own ambition to become Padishah of the White Sea,
the Mediterranean. From the 1520s on, Suleiman and later his son Selim
II clashed repeatedly with Charles V and then Philip II of Spain in
a battle for holy ascendancy that stretched from Rhodes to Tunis, Cyprus
to Lepanto. Suleiman unleashed his murderous corsairs, led by the Barbarossa
brothers, to wreak havoc on the Barbary Coast (North Africa), while
Charles employed the astute services of the valiant Genoese sea commander
Andrea Doria. Radiating from Madrid and Istanbul across Europe, the
engines of imperial power collided catastrophically in 1565 on the rugged
island of Malta, a launch pad for the crusading Knights of Saint John
headed by the zealous Jean Parisot de La Valette. Here Crowley lingers
with chillingly detailed precision, depicting the armada of Turkish
galleys bearing down on the island. Seventy-year-old La Valette and
his 6,000 or so fighting men hastily prepared for defense against an
Ottoman force exceeding 20,000. The Knights and the rest of Europe were
convinced that this was the final redoubt, "the glorious last-ditch
stand against impossible odds, massacre, martyrdom, and death." What
ensued was a four-month bloodbath, with the Christians routing the Turks
and checking their advance into the White Sea.
A masterly narrative that captures the religious fervor, brutality and
mayhem of this intensive contest for the center of the world.