The Governing of a Christian Constantinople

My forte is Alternate History. The following is a review by Herbl, copied from Amazon's website. It pertains to a previous book of mine in the genre, The Strange Life of Walenty Karnowski.

"This novel contains so much insight into life in the 19th century part of Poland that was dominated by Prussian rule. ...There are no slow sections in this book. Be prepared to read nonstop because there is no convenient place to stop. There is much detail throughout as the author weaves the disparate lives and the feelings of the various characters together. The prayers in this novel are an excellent way the author leads the reader into the inner thoughts of the characters. This is a book I will treasure and recommend. It should be a hardcover for a keepsake item."

BLURB

On Easter Sunday, 1586 Polish king Casimir V led combined Christian armies thru Constantinople's Cannon Gate, wresting the city from 133 years of Moslem persecution. It took seven years, and is described in the book, The Re-conquest of Constantinople, available on Smashwords and Draft2Digital.

Casimir deposed the 1400-pound voluptuary Sultan Murad III and sent him into exile in the Canary Islands. Loyalists in the Ottoman Empire are still fomenting rebellion, especially a certain Yusuf Pasha. They want to re-gain power and subject all non-Moslems to Allah. Witness the battle in which Casimir finally puts down the rebellion. Be present at the glorious liturgy in which Hagia Sophia is re-consecrated, and at the planning sessions after his victory, in which How to Govern the City is hammered out. Will Islam be outlawed? Will Moslems become the new Dhimmi or will equality be established among the city's disparate citizen groups - traditionally Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and now also Poles, Spaniards, French and Germans? Will Casimir make himself the new Byzantine emperor - Constantine XII? Will Jan Zamoyski - his childhood friend - or prince Wladyslaw, his son, - play a part in the government? Will a democracy, with elections, be set up? Will there be clashes over restoring mosques back into churches? Will Catholic and Orthodox re-unite? Where does Pope Sixtus V fit into all this? What effects do these events have on the countries of Europe?

Download a read to find answers to all these questions.

Gerald was born in 1937 in Chicago. As a child he was an avid reader of How to Draw books. One day at age 11 he wandered over to the Grown-up Books section of the public library and pulled down a picture-book of gothic cathedrals. He fell in love with their beauty. His mother used to give him the white paper in which the butcher had wrapped meat. Finding a large piece of plywood, he became "the only kid on his block" who used to sketch up gothic cathedral façades. He began studying Architecture in 1955 and worked his way thru college, earning a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois in 1966. He is proud to say that he never took a penny of student loans. He received an Illinois license in 1972. Sometime after that he began conducting genealogical research on his ancestors. He speaks Polish, German, and Spanish to some extent. He has a gift for language.
Gerald has undergone three intensifications of faith in his life: one at age fourteen, when, as a child prodigy he became the object of three years of abuse by his classmates. He endured and graduated. The second was at age twenty-two, when it appeared he was about to die. He told himself, "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna go out in a blaze of glory", and joined volunteer groups that kept him active every night of the week. The third was in 1982, when a concurrence of events, including the loss of a job, left him "down and out", and God gave him a new image of Himself as a very loving Father.
After this last intensification in 1982 began to feel the call to do something more directly to promote Jesus' kingdom on earth. He began to explore religious life. It saddened him to see the majority of adult Catholics coasting thru life on a few simplistic ideas that they picked up in early life. In 1992 he sold a condo in Chicago and used the money from the sale for education. He entered Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio in September, 1992. Once there he responded to a call by Fr. Michael Scanlon TOR and entered Holy Apostles Seminary for older men in Cromwell, CT. in fall, 1993. He spent 3 1/2 months doing door-to-door evangelization in Ceres and Modesto, CA in summer, 1994 while on assignment at St. Jude's parish, Ceres. He concluded that religious life was not for him and returned to Franciscan U. and earned a Master of Arts degree in Theology and Christian Ministry in 1996.
Unable to find work with his degree, and running out of money, he found a job as an archit...