The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs

Product Information

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. Highly readable... 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.”— The Guardian 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. I have no problem with Professor Baer's arguments about the way he argues for the way the Ottoman empire differed in many attractive ways from the way things were done in Europe, particularly with regard to religious toleration. But Baer is not the first academic or popular historian to pass on this information. Philip Mansel in his 'Constantinople:City of the World's Desire' published over thirty years ago is rich in praise for many aspects of the Ottoman empire. Mansell's is a popular history so aimed at a broad audience and there are countless others including more academic works who have covered this ground.

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

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.

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 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. History China Translation India Japan Hong Kong Biography Short stories Memoir Current affairs Historical fiction Korea Travel-writing South Asia Immigration Geopolitics Southeast Asia Russia WW2 Middle East Culture Central Asia Economics Society International relations Singapore Art Politics Japanese Iran Literary history Philippines Religion Turkey SE Asia Business Photography Colonialism Indonesia Taiwan Crime Chinese Essays Illustrated Islam Recent articles

The Ottomans - The Wolfson History Prize shortlist 2022 The Ottomans - The Wolfson History Prize shortlist 2022

Of those that escaped, the author states that a 'couple of hundred thousand fled abroad to Russia and elsewhere. An estimated one hundred thousand Armenians, in situations of duress, converted to Islam to save their lives. Tens of thousands of Armenian girls and women were raped and subjected to sexual violence, taken into Muslim families as daughters or brides, and converted to Islam and taught Kurdish or Turkish, thereby escaping deportation.' In the same period, Assyrian Christians were also targeted, with claims that quarter of a million of them, half their original population, were killed by the Ottomans. What is it like to read?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.

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

I’d never understood the Crimean War at all – it’s just this mess that Victorian Britons return from – and I still can’t say it makes sense to me, any more than any war makes sense, but at least Baer’s history puts it in some kind of context. Likewise, the Balkan wars must interest students of military history, early tryouts for the new technologies of mass slaughter more extensively employed in World War I, with the Ottoman Army trained and directed by Germans.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. 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.