Teaser Thursday

ot this one from VR Barkowski, and it links back to Should be Reading, though I'm doing Thursday instead of Tuesday. (Love that Gryffindor-esque drop cap!)

Everyone's welcome to join; the rules are:

Open your current read to a random page.
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page (DO NOT INCLUDE SPOILERS! Make sure not to give too much away!)
Share the title & author so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

Mine's a little different because I'm reading a few books at the moment (list below), so I've elected to post a teaser from a non-fiction one. Also, Im posting one sentence only, cos I happened on a looong one:

"In twenty years the Genoese were swept from the Black Sea, leaving their ship designs and their naval titles fixed in the Ottoman mind, so that an Ottoman admiral was called Kapudan Pasha, and the Ottoman navy constructed galleons with heavy cannon after the Genoese model, and galleys, too, the most effective and terrible of Mediterranean ships, in which men worked the oars in chains, and whose presence could be smelled from a mile away over the water."

from Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin