The Ottomans - by Marc David Baer (Paperback)

About the Book

"Ever since an Ottoman army led by Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, it has been common to see the Ottoman Empire as the Islamic, Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West. But in reality the Ottoman dynasty ruled a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious empire that stretched across parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Ottomans: Sultans, Khans, and Caesars offers a bold new history of this empire that straddled East and West for nearly five hundred years and negotiated the challenges of religious difference in ways that had a profound influence on the emergence of our modern world. As historian Marc David Baer shows, the Ottomans enjoyed a tripartite inheritance as they rose from a frontier principality to a world empire. The dynasty's origins can be traced to the tribes of Turks and Tatars pushed westward into Anatolia by Mongol expansion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But it was equally indebted to the Islamic scholars and Sufi sheikhs who proselytized Islam across this region and legitimated Ottoman rule. And from the Byzantine empire they supplanted, the Ottomans borrowed bureaucracy, culture, and claims to universal rule as the successors of Rome. Ottoman rulers did not only call themselves khans and sultans, but also caliphs, emperors, and caesars. The Ottomans managed their diverse empire by striking a delicate balance: amid a profoundly hierarchal society, they pioneered the principles and practices of toleration of religious minorities, even as they also freely used religious conversion to integrate conquered peoples into the imperial project. Indeed, the Ottomans were the only world empire to rely on converts to make up its ruling dynasty and to populate its military and administrative leadership. By receiving them as converts to Islam, they brought everyone from Byzantine and Serbian royalty to enslaved captives to common herdsmen into the elite fold as princesses, statesmen, and battlefield commanders. It was only in the final decades of the nineteenth century that the Ottomans began to turn away from this approach, trying to save the empire by making it into an exclusively Ottoman Muslim polity, and then into a Turkish one. The tragic consequence was ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the dynasty's demise in the wake of the First World War. For better and for worse, the Ottoman Empire was as magnificent and as horrible as any of its European contemporaries. The Ottomans reveals its history in full, showing how again and again it remade the world from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the dawn of a brutal century world war"--

Book Synopsis

A "panoramic and thought-provoking" (The Guardian) history of the Ottoman dynasty, revealing a diverse empire that straddled East and West 

The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic, Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans' multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe's heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans' remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage. The Ottomans pioneered religious toleration even as they used religious conversion to integrate conquered peoples. But in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the empire's demise after the First World War. 

The Ottomans vividly reveals the dynasty's full history and its enduring impact on Europe and the world.

Review Quotes

"A wildly ambitious and entertainingly lurid history."--Times

"Baer offers a fuller, fresher view of the dynasty that ruled an empire for 500 years and helped shape the West as much as the Habsburgs or Romanovs... A major achievement. [Baer] is a writer in full command of his subject."--Spectator

"Highly readable... Baer's fine book gives a panoramic and thought-provoking account of over half a millennium of Ottoman and -- it now goes without saying -- European history."--Guardian

"This forceful history takes aim at the notion that the Ottomans represent the antithesis of Western Europe, asking readers 'to conceptualise a Europe that is not merely Christian.'"--New Yorker

"Magnificent... [An] important and hugely readable book -- a model of well-written, accessible scholarship."

--Financial Times

"Sweeping... Baer's elegantly written narrative is full of bloody state building...along with intriguing, counterintuitive takes on Ottoman culture."

--Publishers Weekly

"A book as sweeping, colorful, and rich in extraordinary characters as the empire which it describes."--Tom Holland, author of Dominion

"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

"A superb, gripping, and refreshing new history--finely written and filled with fascinating characters and analysis--that places the dynasty where it belongs: at the center of European history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs

"A winning portrait of seven centuries of empire, teeming with life and colour, human interest and oddity, cruelty and oppression mixed with pleasure, benevolence and great artistic beauty."--Sunday Times

"Marc David Baer's colorful, readable book is informed by all the newest research on his massive subject. In showing how an epic of universal empire, conquest and toleration turned into the drama of nationalism, crisis, and genocide, he gives us not only an expansive history of the Ottomans, but an expanded history of Europe."--James McDougall, University of Oxford

"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."
--Peter Sarris, University of Cambridge

"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

"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

About the Author

Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of six books, including Honored by the Glory of Islam:  Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe, which won the Albert Hourani Prize. He lives in London.