The Ottomans is not only a comprehensive and authoritative account of Ottoman history, but also a captivating and compelling story of human interactions, conflicts, and achievements. Baer writes with clarity, flair, and passion, drawing on rich sources and vivid anecdotes to bring the Ottoman past to life. He also connects the Ottoman legacy to the present-day issues and debates. Be it the acceptance of Turkey in the EU, the problems in Palestine or the Russia-Ukraine conflict over Crimea. 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. He devotes time to denouncing those same Greek refugees who didn't cause the Renaissance with inordinate influence in forming the picture of the Ottomans as 'enemies', particularly exiled Orthodox clergy. What makes this argument bizarre is that Baer had previously spent a great deal of time explaining how sultan Mehmed II after conquering Constantinople had created an environment very welcoming to former Greek noblemen, court officials and churchmen. If Ottoman Constantinople was such a marvellous place for Greek Christians and clergy it does beg the question of why there so many exiles. Richard Antaramian, «Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs», Études arméniennes contemporaines, 14|2022, 221-225. Référence électronique

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

The Ottoman Empire controlled a large part of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. It crushed the Byzantine Empire and after it won in the Balkans it became a genuine transcontinental empire. It has been perceived in history as being the Islamic foe of Christian Europe, but the reality was utterly different, it was a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious society that accepted people from everywhere. 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. 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? book’s narrative arc, which develops chronologically over twenty-two chapters, generally follows the history of the Ottoman dynasty, which ruled the empire from the end of the thirteenth century until the Young Turk revolution in 1908. Baer defies the essentialization that plagues earlier generations of Ottomanist scholarship by instead emphasizing the fluidity and contingency of categories such as confession, ethnicity, and gender. The book accordingly employs gender and religion to bring – as much as is possible in a single monograph – a multi-confessional, multilingual, and geographically diverse empire into a single frame. Neither were fixed categories and in fact – as evidenced by the ways in which they changed over time – central facets in how the empire was organized and legitimized. The fluid and hierarchical aspects of Ottoman imperialism therefore come to the fore in the book’s first chapters. The gazis and sultans are there and they are in charge; their rule however is not a given, something they established in large part because they had forged relations with Christians and used converts and slaves to build out the dynasty’s household and fashion an imperial administration. 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.There’s no study more masterful than Baer’s on the lengthy rule of the Ottoman Empire…Baer is especially skilled at presenting extensive information in an engaging and accessible way.”— Library Journal

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - AbeBooks The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - AbeBooks

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. 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 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. Venice and Florence were big beneficiaries from the Fall of Constantinople. The British and French got much of their silks and cottons from the Ottomans. In fact, during the Renaissance, the Ottomans were the largest trading party in Europe. Elizabeth I lost her teeth to Moroccan sugar. “The Ottoman’s only claim to legitimacy was their might.” Selim I conquers Tabriz and gets to work with his soldiers by “raping women, boys and girls.” When he’s done, Tabriz needs Fabreze. Much of Kurdistan comes under Ottoman control and Selim I virtually re-establishes the Ottoman state. Selim I slaughters tens of thousands of shi’ites. The Ottomans conquer the Mamluks, Egypt and Syria and part of Sudan and they will rule the Middle East until 1917. The Ottomans actually noticeably contributed to the Protestant Reformation in Europe because its enemy, the Hapsburgs, were Catholic; Martin Luther called the Ottomans the instrument of divine punishment against the church. In Spain, Hungary and the Netherlands the Ottomans were a bee in the Hapsburg bonnet. Anti-Hapsburg rebels in the Netherlands actually made coins printed with “Rather Turkish than Popish” in the 1570’s. 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.embrace of cultural history supports Baer’s efforts to realize the book’s stated goal of reframing European history such that it can include the Ottomans. Here, he profits from the maturation of the field of Ottoman history over the last two decades, something in which his own impressive body of scholarship has played no small role. A number of factors, including the critique of Orientalism, the opening of the Ottoman archives, and the cultural turn in the discipline of history, ushered in new research agendas that grappled with questions of decline, gender, and the fate of the empire’s non-Muslims. Taken as a whole, this new body of scholarship moves the field away from positivist frameworks that privilege Eurocentric developmentalism and ethnonational narratives and instead towards ones better attuned to the dynamic aspects of imperial history. Baer ably synthesizes much of this new scholarship to develop his own framework, organized primarily around the intersection of gender and religion, to offer critical new perspectives on the ruling elite and the types of coercion they employed to enforce their rule. This framework consequently makes it possible to bring debates, often had in isolation from one another, together. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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

Professor Baer’s research focuses on the connected histories of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in European and Middle Eastern history, from the early modern era to the modern . 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 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. 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. 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

Mr. Baer organizes his material according to contemporary concerns…thereby eking out surprisingly fresh insights from this hitherto well-plowed terrain… Highly readable, original and thorough.”— Wall Street Journal New Book Announcement: “The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China” by Thomas Kelly The Ottoman Empire was surprisingly tolerant and modern, according to this sweeping chronicle. Historian Baer ( Honored by the Glory of Islam) recaps the Empire’s rise—at its 17th-century peak it ruled most of the Middle East and southeastern Europe—and long decline within a larger European context, emphasizing its entwinement with European geopolitics and culture and its seething intellectual and religious currents, which paralleled the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. He also highlights its innovative multiculturalism and social engineering. The Ottomans’ Muslim-dominated society incorporated Christians, Jews, and ethnic minorities respectfully, Baer notes, until a 20th-century turn to Turkish ethno-nationalism precipitated the Armenian genocide, and its early system of converting Christian slave children to Islam and training them for the military and governmental posts produced a meritocratic army and administration. Baer’s elegantly written narrative is full of bloody state building—a new sultan was expected to murder his brothers to keep them from challenging him for the throne—along with intriguing, counterintuitive takes on Ottoman culture. He claims, for instance, that the sultan’s fabled harem was an epicenter of female political empowerment, and that sexual relations between men and boys were de rigueur among elites. This immersive study makes the Ottomans seem less exotic but more fascinating. (Oct.) Publishers Weekly 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 Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs” by Marc David Baer “The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs” by Marc David Baer

Sweeping… Baer’s elegantly written narrative is full of bloody state building…along with intriguing, counterintuitive takes on Ottoman culture.”— Publishers Weekly Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans is a scintillating and brilliantly panoramic account of the history of the Ottoman empire, from its genesis to its dissolution. Baer provides a clear and engaging account of the dynastic and high politics of the empire, whilst also surveying the Ottoman world’s social, cultural, intellectual and economic development. What emerges is an Ottoman Empire that was a direct product of and an active participant in both European and global history. It challenges and transforms how we think of ‘East’ and ‘West,’‘Enlightenment,’ and ‘modernity,’ and directly confronts the horrors as well as the achievements of Ottoman rule.”A compellingly readable account of one of the great world empires from its origins in thirteenth century to modern times.Drawing on contemporary Turkish and European sources, Marc David Baer situates the Ottomans squarely at the overlap of European and Middle Eastern history. Blending the sacred and the profane, the social and the political, the sublime and the absurd, Baer brings his subject to life in rich vignettes.An outstanding book.”— Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans As did Germany’s Chancellor Adenhauer, who famously sighed, when crossing that river on his way to Berlin, “Ach, Asien”.