The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs

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This is a book with a clear point to make: namely, that the Ottoman Empire was a European empire, and it is impossible to properly understand the story of Europe without integrating into that story the Ottomans and their empire. The Ottomans saw themselves as the successors to the Roman Empire: much of its territory encompassed lands formerly under Roman (and then Byzantine) control. Its European territories, in particular in what is now Turkish East Thrace and the Balkans, were early conquests in the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and were core to the Ottomans' conception of themselves and their empire. With the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the capital of the empire was the 'Second Rome', with its conqueror, Sultan Mehmed II, styling himself the new Kayser-i Rum. When he left Spain, Christopher Columbus was first trying to avoid the Mamluk-controlled eastern Mediterranean; this is why he brought a translator with him who spoke Arabic. Wonder where the money came for his voyages? Confiscated Jewish and Muslim wealth. Columbus couldn’t leave from Cadiz because it was filled with fleeing Jews and so he left from Palos. Don Quixote in written in exactly that time of Muslim exodus, although Cide Benegeli’s writings were the true origin of Don Quixote. Ottomans thought that the “Abkhaz were masturbating simpletons.” Istanbul during Suleiman I had 350,000 people and one third of them were Christian. Ottomans welcomed Jews and Muslims fleeing from Spain. England banished their Jews in 1290. Ottoman harems were actually like a convent; they were the private part of any household large enough to have its own private quarters.

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - AbeBooks The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - AbeBooks

Europe’s new-found tolerance never fully extended to Muslims. This laid the ground for tragedy in the later history of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek war of independence set the tone. What started off as localized revolts, metastasized into the first instances of modern ethnic cleansing. The western powers insisted that the Sultan protect the Christians in the Empire, while at the same time the Emperor of Russia expelled the Tatars from the Crimea and the Circassians from the Caucasus. It was a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do.” The Europeans Powers acquiesced in the fiction that killing or displacing Muslims was an unavoidable aspect of the wars of national liberation, while what the Turks did to defend their own territories constituted atrocities. This hypocrisy insidiously facilitated the greatest atrocity of all, the massacre of the Armenians during World War One. As a result, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, it elicited little regret. A good corrective to neglect of the Ottoman Empire, even if its arguments are often a bit overstated. At the time Brunelleschi was messing around with goldsmithing there were no 'architectural courses' to attend so there was no way for him to get 'training' as an architect, I am not even sure that being an 'architect' existed as a profession or singular job description in the 14th century. Is it any more improbable that Brunelleschi was ignorant of Oljeittu's double-shell domed mausoleum 100 years after its completion then it is for me or any one else to be ignorant of it after 700? Is it not possible that the knowledge he gained studying the ruins and buildings of Rome including the dome of the Pantheon, as every other authority on the dome suggests, provided him with the inspiration for his ground breaking work?The Ottoman Empire contained extremes of human experience in piety, ruthlessness, sumptuousness, and beyond. I really wanted to walk away from this book understanding the Ottomans in all their diversity. I think 3 stars reflects how well this book helped me understand them and internalize what I read. Nonetheless, if you already have a decent working knowledge of the Ottomans and are interested in a reexamination of the dynasty’s relationship with Europe, this book is for you! The author characterises the genocide of Armenian Christians during World War I as the first genocide committed by a European empire in Europe. The chapter on this, and related atrocities committed during the First World War, is very powerful, in particular his recounting of the testimony of a rare Armenian female survivor of a death march to the Syrian desert. The author estimates that 'out of a population of one and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1914, 650,000 to 800,000 has been annihilated by 1916'.

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How did an obscure thirteenth century Anatolian beylik emerge as a vast continent-spanning Ottoman empire? How then did it come to wither away in the nineteenth century, with its eventual replacement by Ataturk's new Turkish Republic 1 in 1922? Marc David Baer, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, tells the story in his new history of the Ottoman Empire, also reflecting on how we think about the Ottomans today - and why it matters. Origins History is used for political ends whenever Greek donors endow university chairs in ancient, Byzantine, and modern Hellenic or Greek studies that ignore that the Ottomans ruled what is today Greece for over five hundred years, or when the Turkish Republic endows chairs in Ottoman studies that gloss over the significant inheritance of Byzantine and Greek peoples, institutions, and attitudes. The way we remember the past would look quite different if we instead referred to both the Byzantines and the Ottomans as Romans, which is how they viewed themselves.Quite different, yes, although not necessarily more accurate (how people - or peoples - view themselves being interesting but not at all the final word, after all), but in a book as consistently fascinating as The Ottomans, all perspectives end up being food for thought. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) A more painful legacy, because of its actuality, is the misreading by the Turks of their history. They are not taught to appreciate the cosmopolitan aspect of their ancestors’ empire, when high positions were open to talented Jews and Armenians. Many Turks, especially members of the nationalist MHP party, like to recall the Empire as it never was, a homogenous Turkish and Sunni-Muslim state. Baer’s book, with its emphasis on the role of minorities and deviant Sufi groups, will not be to their liking.