John Freely

John Freely (26 June 1926 – 20 April 2017[1]) was an American physicist, teacher, and author of popular travel and history books on Istanbul, Athens, Venice, Turkey, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire.

[3] He dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 17 for the last two years of World War II, serving with a commando unit in Burma and China.

The principal idea he inherited from Crombie was "the continuity of western European science from the Dark Ages through Copernicus, Galileo and Newton".

While sales were initially slow, they picked up as travel to Istanbul increased, and by the early 2000s it was regarded as a classic of the guidebook genre for its blending of the academically rigorous with an accessible, even lively, writing style.

[3] Among the more unusual topics he wrote about were the lives of Cem Sultan, the third son of Sultan Mehmet II who laid claim to the Ottoman throne but was defeated and ended his life in exile in Europe; and Sabbetai Zevi, the so-called Jewish Messiah from Smyrna (now İzmir), who eventually converted, at least on the surface, to Islam and whose followers became known as the Dönme.