Ottoman Centuries

I have been slogging through this book for weeks now, it was a terrible shock to the system after John Julius Norwich's excellent book on Byzantium. The book lacks any narrative thrust, often stopping and retreading events slightly out of chronological order and frequently bringing all forward motion to a halt by describing the intricacies of some bureaucratic office or another. The one consistent thing throughout this book is the author's obvious agenda to "set the record straight" and prove that the Ottoman empire was far superior to its "barbaric" European contemporaries.

First of all, I should tell that I was surprised with how small the "references" were. This might be understandandable given the fact that the book was written almost 40 years ago, about the time when Turkey was slowly opening the Ottoman archieves.
I read this book right after reading "Lords of the Horizons" and
another Ottoman History book (Zaman Publication, E. Ihsanoglu, Ed.) written in Turkish so I had the chance of fresh comparison a little bit. How the author depicted Mehmed the Conqueror was a little bit unrealistic. Yes, Mehmed was very tolerant against Orthodox Christians, but Kinross goes so far to mean that "he didn't like Muslims, favored Christians over Muslims, killed his Orthodox Muslim Vezirs for zeal", etc. He tries to attribute this to the probability of his mom being a Christian, which is not ture. Although this might have to do nothing with this, Mehmed's mom, Alime Hatice Huma Hatun, who was granddaughter of Isfendiyar Bey, who was the Bey of Candarogullari, who lived in Kastamonu-Sinop area. Every year, around the end of May, near the birthplace of her, people make festivities (Devrekani/Kastamonu) commemorating her. Her grave is in a courtyard near Muradiye Mosque in Bursa, since she died before the siege of Constantinople/Istanbul.
Kinross's depiction Mehmed's sexual orientation is unrealistic, and I would like to track his resources, if any, keeping in mind that he only has 2 pages of references - and he does not refer to them directly. Kinross himself says that Mehmed was a religious man, raised under Aksemseddin who was a great religious figure of his time. Mehmet got a good religious as well as scientific and philosophical education, spoke at least 6 languages, was tolerant to other cultures and religions and was an open-minded innovative man, achieved a lot in his time. At the same time, he was a religious Muslim.
Some important portions of the Empire's history has been overlooked, such as the battle of Gallipoli (Canakkale). That battle changed the course of WWI, and the world history, and has been refered only by quarter of a page in his book.

This was the first book about Ottoman History I ever read. Having now read litterally hundreds of books about the subject, I re-read Kinross and have some comments:

- Kinross has an engaging style, and this book may ignite an interest in Ottoman history in readers, but only for the EARLY history of the empire, which is clearly where Kinross' interests lie. Even then he doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between history and legend, and a rich and dynamic history is reduced to an Oriental soap opera. His account of the decline is depressing, reflective of Victorian bigotry and bias, and innaccurate and condescending to the point of being mildly insulting.

- Kinross uses NO Ottoman or Turkish sources whatsoever, but then he doesn't really use anything written later than the 19th c.

- He brushes over the 19th c, and subscribes to the 19th c British static view of imperial decay - the Ottomans just sat around declining and having things done to it. In reality, the 19th c is one of the most interesting periods of Ottoman history, wherin the empire was forced to respond to th impact of European capitalism and imperialism. Really dynamic and creative reform programs were instituted with the result that the Ottomans at the turn of the 20th c were incalculably stronger than they were at the turn of the 18th. The Tanzimat is given short shrift as an insincere effort to please the powers and is portrayed as the idea of the British Ambassador (!) and the Hamidiyan era is portrayed as a period of retrenchment, fanaticism, and decadence, when in reality Abdul Hamid, albeit with oppressively autocratic means, enormously modernized the empire and created the school system that educated later reformers including Ataturk. Kinross is totally ignorant of intellectual trends in the Ottoman Empire and their interplay with other Muslim lands and the West.

If this is your first Ottoman history book, I would read it up until the death of Suleyman and then drop it. I am not aware of a more modern and accurate general survey of the same type that is not too dry and academic for the casual reader, but I would highly recommend Selim Deringil's "The Well-Protected Domains" to get a feel of the self-perception of the Ottomans in the late 19th c.

This book is exceptionally readable and provides a good background for people who are interested in the Ottoman Empire. The personalities of the major Sultans and Grand Viziers come through via Kinross's vivid descriptions and character analysis. However, there are some major gaps in the work.

Kinross is at his strongest when describing the Ottoman advance into Europe, which ultimately ended with the second siege of Vienna. Even as the Ottoman successes were rolled back by the European powers he is clearly in his element. Much of what he has written regarding the Balkan campaigns and the rise of Balkan nationalism has relevance to the current conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Moreover, Kinross also does an admirable job of describing the major reform movements and internal battles of the Ottoman Empire, particularly after 1700.

However, there are major weaknesses in the work. First, Kinross spends precious little time examining the Asian and African conquests by the Ottomans and the patterns of rule established in places like contemprary Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. These are issues that anyone reading in the post 9/11 world would likely have found particularly interesting and relevant to understanding today's events.

Similarly, Kinross spends little time examining social institutions, especially the Caliphate that resided in Istanbul until its abolition by Ataturk. Again, what happened with regard to Islamic belief in the Ottoman Days is a critical component of the rise of Islamic radicalism in the 21st century.

Kinross's writing regarding the 19th and 20th centuries is largely derived ultimately from European sources, particularly diplomatic traffic from the various European ambassadors posted to the Sublime Porte. These dispatches tend to overexaggerate both the power of the European states as well as the backwardsness of the Turks, to the detriment of his writing on the final days of the Empire. Indeed, the final two chapters regarding the collapse of the Sultanate are the most unfulfilling, reading like a term paper rushed to conclusion to meet a deadline.

Overall, these comments should not distract from the fact that the book is generally well written and for the most part covers the major events of Ottoman history well. It is just a shame that given the obvious aptitude Kinross had for writing that he could not have compiled a more comprehensive work.

Footnotes to give your claims a little credibility? Who needs 'em! Primary sources? Ha! Scholarly research? Nope. Total number of pages devoted to a bibliography in a book that covers more than 700 years? TWO.

This has to be a joke. I am unspeakably frustrated at the bad history, bad research, and wild speculations that Lord Kinross is passing off as a real nonfiction book. An undergraduate should be ashamed of his bibliography for a 10-page research paper, much less a hulking volume like this with pretensions to accuracy.

Within a handful of pages, I found so many errors, misreprentations, and glosses that I couldn't go on. Kinross's primary (and ONLY) source for the last years of the Byzantine Empire appears to be Gibbon, of all people, which is one huge red flag right up front. He clearly has no comprehension of the true struggles, national or international, of the dying Empire, and instead, he parrots things from God-knows-where that simply make no sense and have absolutely no basis on fact. The emperor was strong-armed to recant orthodoxy by Amadeo of Savoy, who rescued him from captivity????? Please! Given the generations of emperors desperate to heal the schism in hopes of getting Latin support and that emperor's continuing efforts in that direction, this claim is beyond ludicrous. John VI introduced the FIRST Turkish troops into Europe???? *rolls eyes* Turkish mercernaries had been hired by the Byzantines almost since the Turks appeared on the scene in the Near East, and, in fact, one Emir had even been required to supply a group of his own troops to the Byzantines after a military defeat.

Kinross also is so completely out of touch with the culture that he's researching that his theories about the methods and motives of the Sultans is simply painful. Why didn't the early Sultans force all the Christians in te Balkans to convert or die? According to Lord Kinross, it's because his army wasn't big enough to inforce such a decree and the population of his Anatolian provinces wasn't enough to replace the Christian population. No hint of Islamic law concerning people of the Book. I doubt he even knows what that is. Another example of blatantly false information: All of the Christians were enslaved instead, though some could ransom themselves and others were essentially made into serfs (minus all the attractive women who, according to Kinross, were always made into the concubines of the conquerors.) I can't even begin to say how wrong this is.

He also presents as absolute fact things that are only speculated by reseachers (often far more convincingly than inhis version of the facts), such as the first origins of the Turks and the social structure of the early Turcoman tribes. In addition, he turns the migrations of the Turcomans into a muddled mess, skipping and jumping around so that a reader with no prior experience gains no clear picture of anything.

The worst of it is that I am NOT a researcher or an expert in this field, yet Lord Kinross's account is so wrong in so very many ways that almost every page caused me to blink in disbelief. I'm sure an expert would be even more appalled. The only reason I did not give this a single star is that it isn't an out-and-out fabrication, merely a perpetuation of other old, bad "research."