Drawing on extensive first-hand accounts, it brings to life the exploits of an extraordinary band of conquerors – men such as Afonso de Albuquerque, the first European since Alexander the Great to found an Asian empire – who set in motion five hundred years of European colonisation and unleashed the forces of globalisation. Told with Roger Crowley’s customary skill and verve, this is narrative history at its most vivid – an epic tale of navigation, trade and technology, money and religious zealotry, political diplomacy and espionage, sea battles and shipwrecks, endurance, courage and terrifying brutality. Crowley relies on letters and eyewitness testimony to tell the story of tiny Portugals rapid and breathtaking rise to power. In an astonishing blitz of thirty years, a handful of visionary and utterly ruthless empire builders, with few resources but breathtaking ambition, attempted to seize the Indian Ocean, destroy Islam and take control of world trade. But Portugal’s navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East – then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire. Portugal's discovery of a sea route to India, campaign of imperial conquest over Muslim rulers, and.
As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions, the history of Portuguese exploration is now almost forgotten. In Conquerors, New York Times bestselling author Roger Crowley gives us the epic story of the emergence of Portugal, a small, poor nation that enjoyed a century of maritime supremacy thanks to the daring and navigational skill of its explorers-a tactical advantage no other country could match. What the Portuguese did was outrageous by any modern yardstick, but Crowley allows the story to tell itself and for the reader to understand the actions of those conquerors, and of their enemies, with reference to the morality of that distant time.
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