Likewise, Marc David Baer presents the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Discovery from an Ottoman perspective. Sultan Mehmed II, who had his portrait painted by the Venetian Renaissance master Gentile Bellini in 1480, is presented as a renaissance prince and patron of Italian and Greek scholars. Suleiman I 'the Magnificent' allied with Protestant rebels against their mutual enemy, the Catholic Habsburgs. As the Portuguese and Spanish were colonising the Americas, the Ottoman's were projecting their power and controlling oceangoing trade from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Decline and genocide The Ottoman Empire controlled a large part of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. It crushed the Byzantine Empire and after it won in the Balkans it became a genuine transcontinental empire. It has been perceived in history as being the Islamic foe of Christian Europe, but the reality was utterly different, it was a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious society that accepted people from everywhere. 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. A compellingly readable account of one of the great world empires from its origins in thirteenth century to modern times.Drawing on contemporary Turkish and European sources, Marc David Baer situates the Ottomans squarely at the overlap of European and Middle Eastern history. Blending the sacred and the profane, the social and the political, the sublime and the absurd, Baer brings his subject to life in rich vignettes.An outstanding book.”— Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - Goodreads

A hugely impressive sweeping narrative. Covering seven centuries, this book adds a new perspective to global history by emphasising the role of this longstanding and important dynasty. The lives of the various leaders are told as well as their successes and failures; much is said about the nature of the harem and the institutional bureaucracy. Much is made of the sexuality of the age and how it privileged the love of young boys over that of women, but also how that view was attempted to be fully reformed in the 19th century. The author tries to suggest that the Ottomans were about discovery also, but the evidence for such a view is spotty. He is on much firmer ground regarding how Ottoman influence was profoundly felt throughout Europe, and how European influence profoundly influenced the Ottoman Empire.

Magnificent… [An] important and hugely readable book — a model of well-written, accessible scholarship."— Financial Times This is basically a straight narrative history, pretty Whiggish in approach, but interspersed with occasional comparative asides designed to show how the Ottoman Empire was quite "European" in attitude and approach. Whatever "European" means. The greatest strength of this book is that it does more than just recount the history of the Ottoman Empire. It connects that history to questions of how the Ottomans viewed themselves, how others viewed them, and how those perceptions changed over time. This goes to the core of what the book is about. After travelling regularly to Türkiye for work, I found myself more and more interested in this country and it’s history and so I began reading books on the Ottoman Empire of which this was the first.

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs” by Marc David Baer “The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs” by Marc David Baer

The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic, Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage. The Ottomans pioneered religious toleration even as they used religious conversion to integrate conquered peoples. But in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the empire’s demise after the First World War. Mr. Baer organizes his material according to contemporary concerns…thereby eking out surprisingly fresh insights from this hitherto well-plowed terrain… Highly readable, original and thorough.”— Wall Street Journal 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. 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!Memory matters: in 1918, the French general who entered Istanbul after the Allied victory was riding a white horse in a deliberately humiliating imitation of Mehmed II more than 450 years earlier. Baer’s fine book gives a panoramic and thought-provoking account of over half a millennium of Ottoman and – it now goes without saying – European history. embrace of cultural history supports Baer’s efforts to realize the book’s stated goal of reframing European history such that it can include the Ottomans. Here, he profits from the maturation of the field of Ottoman history over the last two decades, something in which his own impressive body of scholarship has played no small role. A number of factors, including the critique of Orientalism, the opening of the Ottoman archives, and the cultural turn in the discipline of history, ushered in new research agendas that grappled with questions of decline, gender, and the fate of the empire’s non-Muslims. Taken as a whole, this new body of scholarship moves the field away from positivist frameworks that privilege Eurocentric developmentalism and ethnonational narratives and instead towards ones better attuned to the dynamic aspects of imperial history. Baer ably synthesizes much of this new scholarship to develop his own framework, organized primarily around the intersection of gender and religion, to offer critical new perspectives on the ruling elite and the types of coercion they employed to enforce their rule. This framework consequently makes it possible to bring debates, often had in isolation from one another, together. A good corrective to neglect of the Ottoman Empire, even if its arguments are often a bit overstated.

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs | SOAS The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs | SOAS

Baer’s enthusiasm for the empire as a cosmopolitan, European-oriented and tolerant state will surprise some readers. He is right to argue that the Ottomans were more tolerant than the Europeans, who expelled the Muslims from Spain and instituted the Inquisition to persecute the forcibly converted Jews. I would argue this is not a unique feature of Ottoman genius, but a tradition of Muslim statecraft. The Caliphs of Islam, after their first conquests of Syria and Egypt in the 7th century, ruled non-Muslims majorities. Only in the 13th century, did Christians become a minority religion in the Middle East. As the Ottomans expanded into Europe (and the Mughals into India) tolerance, not conversion, was the only option available to them. Baer is insistent that any history of “Europe” needs to include the Ottomans, and he’s convinced me that he’s right about that. Their exclusion from most histories is an unjustified omission based on racism and religious bias.For the author, his book is partly about 'the question is what to do with the memories' of Turkey's Ottoman past. That makes this book thought provoking and important not only for those interested in the history of the Ottomans, but also those interested in modern day Turkey, South-East Europe and the other lands once controlled by the heirs of Osman I. A superb, gripping, and refreshing new history—finely written and filled with fascinating characters and analysis—that places the dynasty where it belongs: at the center of European history.”— Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs That the Armenian Genocide was, substantially, the outgrowth of thirty years of Ottoman policies of stirring up violence and forced conversion (something the empire had theoretically abolished) against the Armenians of eastern Anatolia, because they'd come to think of all Christians in the empire as presumed double-agents for revolution and European imperialism. The Ottomans is not only a comprehensive and authoritative account of Ottoman history, but also a captivating and compelling story of human interactions, conflicts, and achievements. Baer writes with clarity, flair, and passion, drawing on rich sources and vivid anecdotes to bring the Ottoman past to life. He also connects the Ottoman legacy to the present-day issues and debates. Be it the acceptance of Turkey in the EU, the problems in Palestine or the Russia-Ukraine conflict over Crimea.

Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs

The tale begins in the late 13th century with Osman, the eponymous founder of the Ottoman dynasty – a Muslim Turkic nomad who migrated, with herds of horses, oxen, goats and sheep, to Christian-majority Anatolia, then mainly Armenian or Greek. Osman’s son, Orhan, organised the first military units from prisoners captured in Christian-ruled areas. Conversion to Islam became a central feature of Ottoman life, as did the practice of fratricide – sultans killing their brothers to ensure a smooth succession – along with rebellions by “deviant dervishes”: radical Sufi Muslims.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.