638
pages, William Morrow and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0688030933
I
acquired The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise
and Fall of the Turkish Empire from the publisher overstock section at
Borders (ah, Borders; how I miss ye…) on a whim and thoroughly enjoyed reading
it. Unless you’re an absolute Turkophile, this one-volume history of the Ottoman
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 secular magnificence, imperial domination, artistic accomplishment,
political corruption, sexual deviancy, 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 an important factor in world history. 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 Anglocentric
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 and,
thus, is 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 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 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).
But Kinross, as with so many scholars of Islamic rulers of the past, never
bothers to mention that it was the condescending toleration of an all-power
majority (the Muslims in general and the Turks in particular) towards a powerless
minority (Christians, Jews, and others).
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 wager
that there are few than can match it. The interested reader can use this book 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 trick.
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