Ottoman Centuries

I recently purchased two books about the Ottoman Empire but I have read them out of order. That which deals with the demise of the empire, 'A Peace to End All Peace,' is reviewed elsewhere and I have given it five stars, describing it as a 'brilliant book.' The other, which I should have got into first, is 'The Ottoman Centuries,' reviewed here and also given five stars.

I became more curious about the Ottomans as I learned that their empire was not, as is sometimes portrayed, a totally intolerant and Islamic entity intent on imposing its control on such as down-trodden Christians and Jews. Indeed, there is strong evidence to suggest that those peoples were pretty well off under successive Sultans. There is also strong evidence that such as Winston Churchill wanted an alliance between the British and Ottoman Empires and the continuation of the latter as a neutral influence during the so-called 'Great War.' I believe that Churchill was right then.

But does the earlier Ottoman history, as written by Lord Kinross, lead one to other and different conclusions? Also, is Kinross's work relevant to more recent tragedies and conflicts?

For a start, it is much clearer to me now that the Ottoman Empire was a powerful political organisation and not necessarily a religious one. Kinross's book emphasises the importance of Islam on numerous occasions but his study shows that in the old Ottoman world, Christianity and Judaism were also important elements. Indeed, it is all too apparent that, in the most simplistic terms, the Ottomans took over the ruling role of Byzantium and absorbed it, religion and all.

Moreover, despite Islam being the ruling religion so far as Ottoman governments were concerned, many Sultans were sons of Christian mothers - often favourite slaves in the harems of their predecessors. We may not approve of either slavery or harems, but this is still historic fact.

Lord Kinross provides an extraordinary and extraordinarily well-written history of the Ottoman Empire, from before it was an empire and the time of Osman (1238 - 1326) until its final collapse in the early twentieth century under Sultan Mehmed VI (1861 - 1926). The book is populated by a succession of amazing and often unattractive characters, and includes excellent studies of Selim I, Suleiman the Magnificent and Mahmud II, as well as many influential and important Grand Vezirs. It also explains the significance of the Janissaries, the elite strike force created by the Sultan Murad I and using Christian slaves. I especially enjoyed learning more about Serbian history and why it is that the year 1389 is so important in the context of Kosovo.

This otherwise magnificent history has three weaknesses, in my opinion.

First, whilst I assume that Lord Kinross was thorough in his research, there are very few source notes, merely a 'select bibliography.'

Second, whilst I assume that documentation regarding the Ottoman rulers is likely to have been more readily available, it is a pity that the lives of ordinary people living under successive Sultans are described little.

Third, whilst I also assume that the author nurtured sympathy if not outright admiration for the Ottomans and for early modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), his biography of the latter being generally acclaimed, surely it was mistaken seemingly to gloss over the appalling treatment of the Armenians (page 607) in the following two sentences: "The British failure at Gallipoli gave a breathing space to the Young Turk triumvirate, leaving it free to pursue, without external interference, a premeditated internal policy for the final elimination of the Armenian race. Their proximity to the Russians on the Caucasus front furnished a convenient pretext for their persecution, on a scale far exceeding the atrocities of Abdul Hamid, through the deportation and massacre of one million Armenians, more than half of whom perished." (The last phrase is actually a contradiction in terms - accidental or no - in that in a massacre surely they all 'perished,' but what are half a million Armenians among friends?).

And my conclusions?

First, that, whilst various Ottoman rulers embodied a sort of civilisation recognisable in the fourteenth century West, by and large, the majority of those selfsame rulers were barbaric and uncivilised and ran barbaric and uncivilised regimes.

Second, that, whilst Churchill was right in backing an alliance with the Ottomans before 'The Great War,' such an alliance could not have lasted.

And, third, that this history of 'The Ottoman Centuries' is proof of good reasoning in the minds of many present-day Western statesman that present-day Turkey carries too much historical baggage to qualify for membership of the European Union.

Unless you're an absolute Ottomaniac, this one-volume history of the great Turkish Empire should suffice to fill in the blank space where knowledge of this fascinating and important culture should be. Rivaling, if not surpassing, the Roman Empire in magnificence, domination, accomplishment, corruption, and bizarre characters, the Ottoman Empire is far less known to the average person inasmuch as it was basically an Eastern/Islamic culture. But at a time when Europe was a disunited shambles, the Ottoman Turks were pretty much the pinnacle of human culture and from 1300-1920 were an important factor in world history.

There are no doubt other, more scholarly books written on the Ottoman Empire, filled with more statistics and sociopolitical detail than *The Ottoman Centuries* but for conciseness and readability I'd bet there are few than can match it. The interested reader can use *The Ottoman Centuries* as a springboard for further study if something here catches his fancy; while for those seeking primarily an informative overview of the Ottomans from their rise to their fall, this book should do the truck. To expect Kinross to cover 600 years in 600 pages in any more depth than he has in *The Ottoman Centuries* would be unrealistic. A sultan such as Suleiman, for instance, could--no less than a Julius Caesar--easily be the sole subject of a 600-page book all by himself.

For me, as I suppose for a great many other readers, *The Ottoman Centuries* will serve to satisfactorily answer the great historical "huh?" that an education biased towards European history has left us asking when coming across mention of the Ottoman Empire. No, it's not a kingdom of footrests, although the sultan did have an important council over which he presided while lounging on a kind of low couch. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

This book is a grand survey at the undergraduate level. You get a chronological treatment of the empire's expansion and then its stagnation and decline. Unfortunately, it gets lost in the details of territorial conquests, that is, which odd little principalities are in play at what moment, how the fight went, and what the ramifications were for the Ottoman empire's territorial integrity. While it is essential to understand this for the history of Europe and Asia minor from 1200 to the present day, this makes for a pretty thick slog at times. Unfortunately, there are far too few ideas as to what were the causes for this evolution or what its accomplishments were in the cultural realm. That means there is very little depth or flavor and predominantly facts and more facts.

The story, of course, is remarkable: a small tribe begins to build an empire in Central Asia and expands into Byzantine territory and then into the heart of Europe itself, all while conquering large swaths of territory in N Africa and the Arabian peninsula. It expanded unchecked for 200 years, also as a sea power, then began a long period of decline as "the sick man of EUrope." It then completely fell apart in the 1st world war, when the empire was divided up by the European powers, creating many of the disputes in the middle east that last to the present.

In the beginning, the organization of the empire was innovative: with a sultan at its head as an "enlightened despot", it functioned largely as a military meritocracy, where capable leaders were given huge new areas to govern (and exploit) for a period of time, but did not become a hereditary aristocracy (i.e. it avoided the way that talent was limited from rising in Europe by chivalric privilege). In addition, a superlative elite of soldiers was created in the Janissaries, who were Christian children levied into slavery from East southern Europe and converted to Islam, less as fanatics than as a professional corps with a coherent world view. This too preceded European nationalist armies and was superior to the mercenary forces then under development. The basic technique of the great sultans was to launch an expendable group of amateur soldiers to exhaust their opponents, then pound them by their elite troops and cavalry at the right moment. This made the Ottomans appear to be an unstoppable force that struck fear into adversaries for hundreds of years.

Finally, the Turks were relatively tolerant of the people within the empire: for a tax, subjects could do what they wanted in security. Or, they could enter service to the state, with good career paths if they converted to Islam. Not surprisingly, many preferred this situation to the heavy hand of the Latin and Orthodox churches of Christendom. Astonishingly, this cultural harmony stood until the rise of nationalism in the 19C. I was very disappointed that the cultural achievements of this society received absolute minimal treatment in this book.

Then once Suleiman the Magnificant reached the apogee of his territorial acquisitions, the problems of empire came to the fore. The necessity became to manage and defend vast territories, which was a far more complex task than to enlarge an empire whose only real administration consisted of dividing the spoils among the right potentates and casual warriors. Unfortunately, Suleiman's heirs did not understand for a long time that a fundamental change was underway and made no moves to reform what was essentially a medieval empire that was extremely cruel by today's standards (it was accepted routine that, to avoid civil war, the chosen Sultan murdered all of his brothers). It was no longer so simple as to allow soldiers to sack conquered areas in place of pay and divide new territories between trusted pashas, but the need for a more modern state. This sapped the empire's dynamism and soon led to the first defeats of the Ottoman Turks, which made the empire more of a diplomatic power than a military one, a factor (however major) in the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe over the next 400 years. Even worse, the Sultan's children no longer were given territories to administer while young, which acquainted them with both the issues of governance and the concerns of commoners, but literally remained hostages within the palace, where the pleasures and intrigues of the harem shaped their life view. Courtiers ran the Court, along with mistresses, Vizier ministers, and the top Janissaries by force of arms. It became simple despotism at this point.

Of course, Europe did not stand still, as a revolution in thinking and technology was underway with the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. At this point, the Ottoman Empire began to gradually shrink, which this book describes in seriously excessive detail, i.e. over hundreds of pages. The task of understanding this is made harder by the poor maps in the book, which are of marginal aid in following developments in the Balkans that are complexity itself.

While there were a few reforming Sultans from the late 18C, the weight of history that they had to overcome was too great. What were innovative institutions had long ago become implacable obstacles to reform, such as the Janissaries who periodically revolted with extreme violence and often via coups d'etat, but also the beginning of hereditary privilege and truly legendary corruption. Even the massacre of the entire Janissary force was not enough to lead to the creation of a constitutional monarchy, though several Sultans tried to do so and were ousted. Eventually, this led to the persecution of minorities in the Empire, including the first genocide of the 20C, the Armenians, as nationalism replaced the earlier cultural tolerance.

The book concludes with a long part of the last Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who was a capricious despot who hated people and yet completed the creation of an education system, providing the human infrastructure for the era of Attaturk. The story stops here, leaving the transition of TUrkey into a modern state based on laws and alternance of power holders. Throughout, the author makes the case, which I found convincing, that the Turks achieved a relative success in the creation of a stable and enlightened regime, when compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the Near East. It makes for an admirably balanced view and useful historical perspective.

To be sure, I learned a great deal from this book, but it was neither original nor a great narrative. Indeed, the bibliography is barely one page, and only a few primary sources appear in it. Contrast that to Tuchman's masterful Distant Mirror, which is popular but also a marvel of flavorful original research, and the pedestrian nature of this book is evident. I am glad I read it, but would not want to read it a second time.

The author wrote most of the stuff as a Christian not as a historian. You can see all of his feelings in the book. I just want to give an example; in the book when the Sultan Mehmet was entering the Hagia Sophia: "Entering the church, he walked toward the altar. On the way he noticed a Turkish soldier hacking at a piece of the marble pavement. The sultan then struck him with his sword, saying: For you the treasures and the prisoners are enough. The buildings of the city fall to me. The Turk was dragged away by his feet and flung outside."
Let's criticize these words. First of all can you imagine a soldier is going to be so foolish to try to hack a marble while a Sultan was getting in to Hagia Sophia with his commanders? Second of all, there is no such event recorded by eastern historians. And tell me what the possibility is for a local man being in the church while the sultan was entering the church. If there was no Christian to tell this moment to anybody you can see how Lord Kinross made this up when there was no such record in Turkish and Eastern history databases.

I purchased Lord Kinross's "The Ottoman Centuries" on a whim one cold winter evening, and have thoroughly enjoyed reading it: the book is a very detailed examination of the Ottoman Empire's growth and decline. It is for the most part well written, though Kinross' phrasing is often quaint and some of the passages require re-reading to figure out what the author is trying to say. I found his viewpoints to be objective: not tainted with the Anglo-centric cultural bias that many British authors of his generation have been afflicted-with.

The book focuses-on the political and military history of the Ottoman Empire: centered on the lives of its rulers and their court. Kinross includes a fair amount of information on how the Empire's society and economy were structured and functioned, but this is presented mostly as background information in support of the main narrative.

The book filled in many gaps for me in terms of European history, in particular, and described many historical episodes I was unaware of, as well as being a good analysis of the factors and personalities involved in the Empire's rapid rise to prominence, followed by its centuries-long decline. There are some discussions of the Empire's interactions with the tatars and Persians, but only a few brief mentions of the Empire's history and exploits in Africa (or the region now known as the Middle East).

I was fascinated with Kinross' detailed discussions of the many interactions the Ottomans had with nearly every major and minor European state over the centuries. It was also interesting to see how the nature of these interactions changed as Europe evolved from a collection of Feudal Kingdoms into modern Nation-States, while the Turkish state stagnated and was eclipsed.

His analyses of the military tactics and strategies and innovations employed by the Ottomans are very good, as is his examination of how their social, economic and political systems gave them a competitive advantage early in the empire's history, but became an impediment that contributed to the decline, and also impeded attempts to reverse that decline.

I was impressed with the open-mindedness of most of the Sultans in terms of not only tolerating, but promoting Christians and other religious minorities - to the point where populations of Orthodox Christians often favored being conquered by the Ottomans in preference to being dominated by Christian rulers affiliated with Rome (who were often very intolerant of the Orthodox Christian tradition).

The major concern I have with about this book is not with the text, but with the publisher's presentation of this book. The paperback edition contains what I assume are reproductions of the artwork from the original 1977 publication; but, in this edition, the representations had poor detail and contrast; giving the impression of having been run off on a cheap copier. They do a disservice to the quality of the text itself.

All in all, an excellent book, well worth the read. Anyone seeking to gain a good understanding to the Ottoman Empire and its impact on European and Mediterranean history will find this book a well written starting point with vast amounts of detail.