Both Europeans and Turks have taken away divergent lessons from the collapse of the empire, and both are misleading. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs, Marc David Baer (Basic Books, October 2021) The book is structured really well: Baer divides the historical periods loosely depending on the character of that period in Ottoman history and gives you an introduction to that, explaining the main themes of the period, before delving deeper into every monarch in that particular time. I loved Christophe de Bellaigue’s book on SUleyman the Magnificent, but I wanted more detail on how exactly he Empire was administered, given the diversity of ethnicities, and languages, and this book gave me that, and more. The Ottomans more or less followed the model of the Roman Empire, with provinces governed by Ottoman administrators, and the option of advancing your fortunes if you converted to Islam ( exactly the model followed by Constantine and his successors, that led to the spread of Christianity in Europe). The Ottoman Emperors made success and belonging as a citizen of the Empire contingent on Islam, which that meant that anyone, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, language, could rise through the ranks in the court, diplomacy, business or the military. Analogously, in Europe at the time, it would be much more rare to have several courtiers, or army leaders, or businessmen, whose language and ethnicity were completely different-there was an odd Eugene of Savoy , of course, in the Hapsburg Court, but this was a lot more commonplace in the Ottoman Empire.He also explains the quite unique Janissary guard, formed entirely of children taken from conquered provinces, trained in Istanbul to be the Emperor’s elite fighting force. Apart from the life of the Emperors, Baer shows you how daily life and trade were conducted, and evolved, and rebellions quelled-the story of Sabbatai Zvi was one of the most interesting historical episodes I’ve read. 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. The traditions of the rival Holy Roman Empire were completely different. Since the Roman Emperors embraced Christianity, religion and citizenship had been identical. With few exceptions (the Jews, the Moors of Spain, Sicily) Medieval Christendom had no tradition of ruling over non-Christians. Religious tolerance was simply unnecessary for the Ottomans’ rival for European domination, Emperor Charles V. The West only discovered the virtues of that policy in the political exhaustion following the murderous wars of religion. We can agree that the Ottomans’ practiced tolerance, but see it as no more than realpolitik. 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 Khans Caesars and Caliphs - Academia.edu The Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs - Academia.edu

The Ottoman Empire is often regarded as Islamic-Asian but this book argues it has been a central part of European history. At the height of their power, the Ottomans ruled much of southeastern Europe – nearly one-quarter of its land mass. Tracing the empire’s history from its late 13th-century founding, chapters focusing on successive rulers are interspersed with chapters discussing cultural issues. Ottoman power peaked at the end of the 16th century but gradual decline set in – because of internal and external factors – after the failure to capture Vienna in 1683. Perhaps the author could be accused of adopting an anti-western slant in places and of treating the Ottomans as too enlightened, but this well-written, thought-provoking account argues persuasively for the empire as multiethnic, multilingual and multireligious for much of its history. Brian Maye Both Europeans and Turks have taken away divergent lessons from the collapse of the empire, and both are misleading. As Baer points out, the Ottoman role in European history is understated, and when remembered, viewed as negative. We think of the massacres of Missolonghi, depicted by Delacroix, rather than the Drina Bridge of Sokolović Paşa. The negative view of the Ottomans reflects not just a bias against the Turks, I argue, but ignorance about Eastern Europe in general. This region, deeply linked to Asia through the Byzantines, the Mongols as well as the Ottomans, is poorly understood by European readers who think of Europe stopping at the River Elbe. [1] As did Germany’s Chancellor Adenhauer, who famously sighed, when crossing that river on his way to Berlin, “Ach, Asien”. Richard Antaramian, «Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs», Études arméniennes contemporaines, 14|2022, 221-225. Référence électronique 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. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans.

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As the power shifted to viziers and eunuchs, as well as the harem, the Caliphs went from being warrior princes to nearly deity-like individuals who rarely mixed with ordinary people. From here the various power plays and religious conflicts (Sunni vs Shia, Dervishes vs the Imams, and obviously Christianity vs Islam) all caused the state to become more corrupt, and more religiously intolerant and this leads to the horrific genocides of the Armenians and Kurds in the 19th and 20th centuries. Eventually, the whole corrupt structure would come crashing down during World War I and lead to the rise of the Young Turks (who then promptly started the ethnic genocide to turn Ottoman lands into Turkish lands) in 1900s, which led to the modern state of Turkey. The Ottoman state was, doubtless, dual nature by design. The Muslim, Turkish sultans in still predominantly Christian Anatolia and later completely Christian Thrace could only rule by co-opting, allying and converting local elites, Greeks, Slavs, Italians, Jews and Armenians. The Ottoman court continued to recruit outsiders down to the 19th century, when defeated Polish revolutionaries joined the sultan’s army as pashas (and converted to Islam). In its heyday, the empire forcefully recruited Christian boys into the elite infantry units, the Janissaries, and kidnapped Christian girls for the imperial harem. As a result of this latter practice, Muslim sultans could converse easily in Greek or Italian, the language of their mothers. Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, Baer reminds us, collected scientific and literary works in both those languages. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynasty’s demise after the First World War. Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide.

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs; Collected Works

I have enjoyed several historical books of late, from the Greeks to the Persians and so I looked forward to “The Ottomans” by Marc David Baer. The intention of the book is to reposition the Ottoman Empire in our minds and highlight how they impacted history with a less biased perspective. 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 Following their forced departure from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, as many as one hundred thousand Spanish and Portuguese Jews, as well as a large number of conversos (Iberian Jews compelled to convert to Catholicism) migrated to the Ottoman Empire, where they were relatively free to practise their religion and could rise to important positions at the Ottoman court. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Discovery Europeans like to say the peace of Westphalia in 1648 ushers in European religious tolerance. This ignores Ottoman history (as well as Andalusian where/when Muslims, Jews and Christians created a culture of tolerance, see Menocal). Mehmed II institutionalized religious toleration for practical reasons; to control a diverse population you need a carrot they all want. Ottomans saw Sunni as the way, Christianity and Judaism as meh, and Shi’a, Paganism, and Atheism, were completely banned. Tycho Brahe was a Hapsburg emperor; I’ll bet that’s where the rare and mega expensive Tychobrahe Guitar pedal gets its name from. 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.

Murad III is the last prince to engage in fratricide. One could say he went all out: he had all nineteen of his brothers including infants, strangled with a silken bow string. Seniority then sensibly replaces fratricide. Ahmed I builds the amazing Blue Mosque in Istanbul. After Suleiman, the military achieved nothing and so a slow Ottoman decline happens for 356 years before the empire expires. Ottoman free speech was non-existent; treason or blasphemy got you executed. Most hated sultan? Osman II (who was executed). Only English king to be executed? Charles I in 1649. These two executions acted as European Candygrams to rulers everywhere, announcing the new limits of royal power. Mehmed IV enjoyed “the local oil-wrestling festival”; I’ll spare you the lengthy prurient details. On a Friday in 1680, “hundred of thousands of people crowded into the Hippodrome to stone to death a Muslim woman” who committed adultery with an infidel Jew who was to be beheaded. This proves that even before the NLB, you simply got bigger audiences with a double header. “She was buried in a pit up to her waist.” Get this: her own brother threw the first stone. Such compassion. The Ottomans are routed at Vienna in 1683. Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (1783) is about this time. Also, around this time, Sweden steals the Turkish kofte (meatball) and by merely replacing pork for lamb, then calling it Swedish meatballs. The author correctly recognizes how the Ottoman Empire is generally only tangentially studied and appreciated: it is known for finally capturing Constantinople and eliminating the Byzantine Empire; it was romanticized as the land of sultans and his harem; it represented a continual threat to central Europe; they were part of the Central Powers. Yet the Ottomans are seen as wholly Other, Eastern; not part of the European world. Baer, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, defines the “Ottomans’ tripartite heritage” as “Byzantine-Roman, Turco-Mongol and Muslim” – and a “Eurasian amalgam”. The Ottomans became the biggest trading partner of western Europe in the Renaissance era. King Henry VIII of England enjoyed dressing in their fashionable styles. Suleiman I (who ruled 1520-1566), the first sultan to call himself “caliph”, fought the Persian Safavids in the east and the Habsburgs in the west.

The Ottomans : Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - Google Books The Ottomans : Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - Google Books

Marc David Baer's work on the history of the Ottomans is quite good. It offers up a great picture of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. While his central thesis of the Ottomans being "European" is a bit of a stretch, it might be better to say "They were a large part of European history". Simply because the Ottomans invaded Europe and then established a multi-ethnic,multi-linguistic, and multi-religious state (at least in the beginning) does not make them "European", any more than the Mongol Empire that was similarly an invading force that also established a similar Empire. The Renaissance was not about creating a few beautiful works of art. When Cosmo de Medici commissioned Donatello to create the first free standing male nude sculpture since ancient times what was important was that he put in the courtyard of the Medici Palazzo were it could be seen by everyone coming to see him. Because of it Florence would welcome Michelangelo's gigantic nude David as an image of the city and its freedoms into its most important public space. The importance of the Renaissance was the way it ideas moved out from a few scholars and noblemen to everyone and gradually embarked on opening up and changing the way people, all people thought. I did not know just how integrated the Ottoman Empire was with Europe, with regards to trade and military campaigns ( I didn’t know, for instance, that the Ottoman Army and Navy were one of the allies of the British in Nelson’s Egyptian campaign, the French and Ottomans had a military alliance for nearly two and a half centuries, the Ottoman troops wintering in Marseille during a campaign, the Ottomans were a major part of the Crimean War, though they’re not mentioned at all ). When accounts are written of seafaring nations, the Ottomans aren’t mentioned-though they should have been, and there are excellent chapters on the Ottoman Navy.

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The Ottoman Empire had many faces, but has Europe (i.e. the non-Turkish bit of Europe), and perhaps Turkey itself, chosen to forget the European nature of that empire? In the telling of Marc David Baer, it has, and his book is a conscious effort to rebalance the portrayal of the Ottomans. Religious tolerance 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. As suggested by the sub-title, Baer’s revisionism consists in emphasizing the dual nature of the Ottomans, at the same time European caesars and Asian khans. The secret of their long success, he argues, lies in this duality, and its abandonment resulted in their disappearance. He further claims that we have systematically overlooked the European legacy of the Ottomans, denying them their rightful place in western history. Are these ideas sufficient to justify a new book on the Ottomans? That the Ottoman Empire wasn't actually majority-Muslim until Selim I "The Grim" conquered the Mamelukes and expanded into Safavid-held territories in the late 1400's. If you are wondering why I have devoted time to discussing Brunelleschi's dome in a review of a history of the Ottomans and their empire by an academic historian it is because on reading this paragraph (the only reference given to support the idea that Brunelleschi was influenced by Ottoman architecture to create the dome in Florence is a National Geographic article by a journalist whose latest book was about scandals in the Italian oil oil business, not exactly the reference you expect in a well researched and argued history book) I eventually threw this book across the room because I could not take the extravagant and totally unprofessional propagandising the author indulges in. That I did it only once is purely down to the fact it was not mine but a library book.