For no particular reason, I decided recently that it was time to plaster over one of the innumerable lacunae in my historical awareness and learn something more about the Ottoman Turks than I dimly recall from my two mediaeval history courses in 1973. Thus far this month I’ve read Lords of the Horizons (Jason Goodwin), a rather lightweight, heavily anecdotal but withal entertaining account of their rise and fall; 1453 (Roger Crowley), which tells the tale of Mehmet II’s siege and sack of Constantinople—a nearer-run thing than I’d recalled from the last time I visited the subject; presently not quite halfway through The Ottoman Centuries (Brian Kinross, or “Lord Kinross” as he is styled on the cover). I have broken off (the dog will want shortly to be walked) at the top of the roller coaster, with the empire under its tenth sultan, Suleiman I (“the Magnificent”) at the peak of its economic, military, cultural, political power, a society at once more coherent and more diverse, more tolerant, more technologically advanced than its Christian counterparts to the west. I already know from Goodwin’s gloss what comes next: Suleiman the Magnificent is succeeded in 1566 by his surviving and least-gifted son, Selim the Sot, and thereafter the Ottomans, while they capture additional territory, never quite retrieve Suleiman’s mojo, and their empire, which Gibbon among others has argued may be regarded as the logical and final linear successor to the Rome of the Caesars, ultimately expired, as Hemingway once observed of the process of bankruptcy, “gradually, then suddenly,” with geopolitical consequences of which we are daily made aware.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating subject. Goodwin is a travel writer and novelist, and brings these sensibilities to his book, which is chatty and discursive and decidedly short on scholarship, weighing in at a little over three hundred pages. Crowley’s account of the fall of Constantinople is workmanlike and detailed, is the shortest at a svelte 260 pages. Kinross’ book, at 628 pages in my so-called “Folio” edition, is impressive for the depth of its erudition and the fluidity of its style, and is the title I’d recommend, at least to anyone with the kind of time on his hands we generally associate with elderly annuitants.
For those who prefer the tl;dr version, there’s this, from the late John Updike:
Anyway, it’s a fascinating subject. Goodwin is a travel writer and novelist, and brings these sensibilities to his book, which is chatty and discursive and decidedly short on scholarship, weighing in at a little over three hundred pages. Crowley’s account of the fall of Constantinople is workmanlike and detailed, is the shortest at a svelte 260 pages. Kinross’ book, at 628 pages in my so-called “Folio” edition, is impressive for the depth of its erudition and the fluidity of its style, and is the title I’d recommend, at least to anyone with the kind of time on his hands we generally associate with elderly annuitants.
For those who prefer the tl;dr version, there’s this, from the late John Updike:
Ottomancordially,
Lessons in history: the Greeks
Were once more civilized than Swedes.
Iranians were, for several weeks,
Invincible, as Medes.
The mild Mongolians, on a spree,
Beheaded half of Asia; and
The Arabs, in their century,
Subdued a world of sand.
Just so, the cushioned stool we deign
To sit on, called the Ottoman:
We would not dare, were this the reign
Of Sultan Selim Khan.
From India to Hungary
The Ottoman held sway; his scope
Expanded well into the sea
And terrified the Pope.
And Bulgar, Mameluke and Moor
All hastened to kowtow
To tasseled bits of furniture.
It seems fantastic now.