The meat of Si Sheppard's Crescent Dawn is a somewhat standard, perhaps dry military history, a catalogue of events and state developments. Framing it is the Manichean eschatological struggle of Christianity and Islam, and the apocalyptic self-perception of the Western Europe - which, walled in, pressed to the sea, is forced to seek a way out across.

The 'Modern Age' that is being made in the subtitle is the one of Western European hegemony, of transcontinental colonialism and capitalism. S. Sheppard is a political scientist - and his approaches reflect that, in his focus on the mechanisms of statecraft and ecenomy, but also the framing itself: distinctly ideological, by the light of which intra-religious unity is presumed, and the failures to achieve it are seen as a failure of political actors.

Sheppard takes a kind of spacial approach to his chapter divisions, which has the disadvantage that coterminous events may be spread hundreds of pages apart. If you don't have a decent grasp of the period already, I suspect you may be easily lost. What is gained is the allowance for chapters to be read on their own, based on an interest in a specific region or campaigns, at the expense of the book's cohesiveness as a whole.

P.S. Finally, as a side-benefit, Crescent Dawn, by virtue of its subject straddling ages and continents, provides a broad overview over the military tactics of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and plenty of bemusing anecdotes.

This seemed endless, and I finally gave up. Perhaps the problem is more the Ottoman Empire than the book: I've had the same problem with Great Courses lectures on the same subject. The names are so difficult; the geography so immense; my head just seems to reject it.