“By the end of the century they had taken Greece and the Ionian Islands, Bosnia, Albania, and much of the rest of the Balkans; and worse was to come in the 1520s”
In the year 1500, the date chosen by numerous scholars to mark the divide between modern and premodern times, it was by no means obvious to the inhabitants of Europe that their continent was poised to dominate much of the rest of the earth. The knowledge which contemporaries possessed about the great civilizations of the Orient was fragmentary and all too often erroneous, based as it was upon travelers’ tales which had lost nothing in their retelling.
History is indeed a mystery, join Paul Kennedy and find your way through this summary of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict 1500 to 2000.
