The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs

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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

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs; Collected Works

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. Reading the history of an empire starts to warp your thinking after a bit – you start thinking about what conduces to the health of the empire and neglect thinking about whether the very concept of empire is a good thing. How indeed did Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith with no formal architectural training, manage to create the most sublime monument of the Renaissance? Perhaps because the Ilkanid Oljeittu's turquoise-blue, double-shell, domed mausoleum, built at the beginning of the fourteenth century at Sultaniye in Iran, anticipated Brunelleschi's double-shell, domed cathedral in Florence by a century. It may in fact have been its inspiration." 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. 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.

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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. In the author's view, Murad I's legacy lay not only in the territorial expansion of the empire, but in the pursuit of two policies which would contribute to later Ottoman success and stability, namely the Collection (devşirme) and the codification in law of fratricide on dynastic succession. The Collection It’s not news that Sufism is interesting, but I couldn’t help observing while reading this history that, though on one level I already felt like I was being punished, like I was punishing myself for wanting more after a previous history, I’d still be really interested in a history of Sufism. I’m sure there’s an encyclopedia somewhere, actually, there must be people with graduate degrees in the history of Sufism. Over and over, throughout the 600-year history of the empire, political events are mixed up with the latest emergence of a new doctrine or particularly charismatic new Sufi leader. The author thus tells the history of the Ottomans to try to refute that view. He speaks of their alliances with the Byzantines at times, the multinational, multiethnic, and multireligious nature of the Empire, its frequent tolerance, and how it saw itself as the next iteration of the Roman Empire, its leaders as Caesars, and the people of southeastern Europe as Rumis, or Romans. 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)

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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.

Khans, Caesars and Caliphs’

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. The author examines key events and themes in supposedly European history from an Ottoman perspective. Did secularism, tolerance and modernity begin in Europe with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648? Or did the Ottomans get there first under Mehmed 'the Conqueror' in the fifteenth century, who rebuilt Constantinople as a 'multireligious metropolis' and who permitted Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians and Jews to live according to their own systems of beliefs and practices?

The Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs review - Academia.edu The Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs review - Academia.edu

A distinctly Ottoman version of orientalism played a role in administration of the shrinking empire, with the elite in Istanbul viewing itself as a civilising force over Arabs, Bedouins and Kurds – what one scholar wittily labelled “the white man’s burden wearing a fez”. Eventually, Turkish nationalism replaced Ottoman Muslim nationalism under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), who inaugurated a new language: modern Turkish, shorn of Arabic and Persian words, and written in Latin rather than in Arabic script. Kurds were viewed as “savages” in the new Turkish republic. 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 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.