The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs

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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. Professor Baer earned his BA degree at Northwestern University and his PhD at the University of Chicago. Before joining LSE in 2013, Baer taught at Tulane University, New Orleans, and the University of California, Irvine.

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs; Collected Works

A thorough history of the Ottoman Empire from its origin in Anatolia in the 13th century until its collapse in the early 20th century.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? 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? In May 1453, Ottoman military forces under Sultan Mehmed II captured the once great Byzantine capital of Constantinople, now Istanbul. It was a landmark moment. What was viewed as one of the greatest cities of Christendom, and described by the sultan as “the second Rome”, had fallen to Muslim conquerors. The sultan even called himself “caesar”.

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

Murad III is th 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 seafring nations, the Ottomans aren’t mentioned-though they should have been, and there are excellent chapters on the Ottoman Navy. generative as the book’s aim and its pursuit of it are in this area, they are something of a mixed bag elsewhere. Efforts to connect the Ottoman experience to European history are sometimes useful and have the potential to do the kind of work the author seems to intend. Drawing parallels between the Ottoman slave trade in Crimea and that of the British in the Atlantic (p. 127), for example, does make powerful commentary on European state-building in the early modern period. More often, however, examples do little to advance the book’s narrative, its arguments, or the goal of reframing European history. Pointing out that the devşirme system (the youth levy used to conscript janissaries) would qualify as an act of genocide (p. 47), for example, needlessly distracts from an otherwise interesting discussion on how an Ottoman politics of difference resolved administrative issues that had plagued Turkic states. Similar such references, for instance, to secularism and the Peace of Westphalia (p. 72), disrupt the book’s narrative and conceptual flow. Baer’s new survey of Ottoman history, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs asks its readers to imagine a Europe of which the Ottomans were an integral part. Such a reconceptualization, Baer argues, can help us arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of European history, not only as it relates to hallmarks such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and the Age of Discovery, but also to forms of political and social domination. By foregrounding his analyses conceptually, Baer is able to bring a whole host of characters typically relegated to the margins of Ottoman history, including women, non-Muslims, converts, and slaves, to the center of his narrative. The result is the most significant synthesis of the empire’s history to date. A thought-provoking and accessible guide to the history of the Ottoman Empire from the 14th to the 20th century , which at its peak spanned three continents, stretching from North Africa to the Caucasus and from Meca to Budapest.The Ottoman dynasty's practice of succession-by-fratricide mostly ended in the 1500's, being replaced by a general weakening of the Sultan and simply keeping princes imprisoned in the royal harem until they were needed to reign.

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

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. 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. This book was quite interesting to me, as someone who knew embarrassingly little about the Ottoman Empire, and I definitely learned a decent amount from it. That said, it did feel like Marc David Baer sometimes had a bit of a pro-Ottoman bias, which was mostly noticeable to me in two ways. First, that he seemed to downplay the horror of the Ottoman practice of enslaving, forcibly converting, and mutilating the genitals of their subjects, often by taking children away from their parents. Second, and more specifically, in his attempt to show that the Ottomans were part of Renaissance Europe—something he did generally succeed at—he tried to argue that the expansion of Ottoman sea power in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, as well as the fact that Ottoman merchants were trading on the well-established Indian Ocean seaways was an "age of discovery" comparable to the simultaneous European expansion of blue-water sailing to build a world-wide trade network and collection of empires. 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'. 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.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. 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 International relations Society Singapore Art Politics Japanese Iran Literary history Philippines Religion Turkey SE Asia Business Photography Colonialism Indonesia Taiwan Crime Chinese Essays Illustrated Islam Recent articles 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. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk' ('Father of the Turks') made a conscious effort to rebrand his new republic in contrast to is past; as he said himself 'The new Turkey has absolutely no relation with the old Turkey. The Ottoman state has gone down in history. Now, a new Turkey is born.'

The Ottomans by Marc David Baer review – when east met west

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. 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." 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 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 Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multi-ethnic, 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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Despite all this, the journey is fascinating, it shows the way the Ottoman empire weaves into so much history and how they contributed hugely to where we are today, in terms of art, literature, language, music and much more. The book runs right up to modern day and clarifies how some of what contributes to the Middle East being where it is now. That being said, this is still a wonderful history that enlightens us about many of the incorrect ideas of the Ottomans. In 1288, the Gazi (a mix of spiritual/military leader) Osman led Turkic steppes peoples into Anatolia and established a kingdom. His son Orhan greatly expanded it. 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 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. Add to this the dry narrative approach - a classic "one damned thing after another" approach to history, with little explanation (and the few explanations that do come tending towards the "it's complicated" line) - and sadly I think most people would be better off turning to Wikipedia. Not least because some things are skipped over so fast - the Battle of Lepanto gets about half a line, for instance - that nothing is really given a chance to sink in beyond the "Ottomans = European" argument.