The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire

By John Freely

Sultan Mehmet II, known to his countrymen as the "the Conqueror" and to much of Europe as "the Terror of the World," was once Europe's most feared and powerful ruler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Oct 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781590204498

John Freely

John Freely (1926-2017) was born in New York and joined the US Navy at the age of seventeen, serving with a commando unit in Burma and China during the last years of World War II. He has lived in New York, Boston, London, Athens and Istanbul and has written over thirty travel books and guides, most of them about Greece and Turkey.

Reviews for The Grand Turk

[shanetierney_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book contains all the who, what, where, and when--and yet it felt inadequate. The skeleton of a good history is there, but not the flesh. Perhaps we are doomed to repeat the names and dates of history, and not the details... Mehmet himself is just barely the exception to Freely's apparent rule that all the characters be forgettable: in a quick succession of pashas and beys and viziers and popes, describing someone as a relative of so and so, or the defender of such and such castle in this or that year, seems to be assumed as sufficient. Also, annoyingly, in his march to get done with Mehmet before page 175, Freely begins a whole lot of paragraphs with "Meanwhile..." (on almost every page, and when I came across two meanwhile paragraphs in a row, I almost lost my mind).