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. As did Germany’s Chancellor Adenhauer, who famously sighed, when crossing that river on his way to Berlin, “Ach, Asien”. 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. 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 IStranbul 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 Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs - Academia.edu The Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs - Academia.edu

The prominence of all these personalities, so busy bustling about killing their fathers, their uncles, their younger brothers, and all their young brothers’ male children, represents a canny narrative choice; it keeps Baer’s book running along in an entirely enjoyable reading experience and gives readers a series of faces to put on all the social and economic eras that unfurl in the course of the story.

Suivez-nous

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

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. 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'. Marc David Baer’s core argument in this highly readable book is that more than 600 years of the Ottoman empire should be seen as an inseparable part of the history of Europe, and not as something detached from it, as with false narratives that paint the east and west, and Christianity and Islam, as antithetical. 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.

Présentation

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. I found the narrative a little disrupted, regularly the author delves off into other histories or shares in more detail on a topic than felt necessary. Those who love historical nuggets about the time, will enjoy them but I found I had to keep clarifying the thread I was following. Perhaps I should have been less surprised by the repetitive nature of history, the regular murder of family members and desire for political powers, it’s brutal. This obviously occurred in other empires and it is the choice of the writer the amount of emphasis and detail to share, and this one had a little too much for me. 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. 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. If the above all sounds relatively flattering to the Ottomans, the author also does not shy away from comparisons with European history that are less complimentary. As the author himself states in the introduction, his 'seeks to neither glorify the house of Osman nor to condemn it, but to present all that makes it both different and surprisingly familiar for the general reader'.

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

Baer’s interests include the intersection of Judaism and the Ottoman Empire- He explains the Ottoman policy of toleration of other religions-different from secularism where religions are equal, the policy of toleration followed meant that everyone could follow their religions, and build their places of worship, but accept that they could only rise to a certain extent, and not beyond that. While this sounds harsh from a 21st Century perspective, for several millennia of human history, there was a State religion-mosques couldn’t be built in Europe in the Middle Ages, for instance, and Jews weren’t even allowed to live in several parts of Europe and Russia, and were exiled from Spain as well, after the Reconquista. Many settled in the Ottoman Empire, and their businesses flourished. 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. 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.Several chapters in the middle of the book do cover topics rather than chronology, and those were great reading. One describes “The Ottoman Way,” including the empire’s recruitment strategies. I think my favorite chapter is on the harem, which Western readers brought up on an “othered” view of their neighbors to the east eroticize, but which is probably better seen as a center of child-rearing, education, and power. There’s also a chapter on the much-neglected history of man-boy love, not just in the Ottoman Empire, but in European history as well, that’s bound to leave any reader with a lot to mull over. A thorough history of the Ottoman Empire from its origin in Anatolia in the 13th century until its collapse in the early 20th century. Murad III is th 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 by Marc David Baer review – when east met west

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”. A good corrective to neglect of the Ottoman Empire, even if its arguments are often a bit overstated. 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. Richard Antaramian, «Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs», Études arméniennes contemporaines, 14|2022, 221-225. Référence électroniqueAfter 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 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. 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. 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.