Peace Be Upon You by Karabell Zachary

Author:Karabell, Zachary. [Karabell, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54114-7
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2009-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

EUROPE AND THE OTTOMANS

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE lasted nearly five hundred years, longer than all but a handful of dynasties the world has known. Byzantium, and Rome before that, each survived more than a thousand years, but only the Ottomans could claim that the same family ruled in succession from the beginning until the end. Though there may have been some convenient rewriting of the family tree, there was an unbroken chain stretching from Osman in the fourteenth century through the last sultan, Mehmed VI, in the first decade of the twentieth. By way of comparison, European dynasties have rarely lasted more than a few hundred years and have usually ruled an area no larger than an Ottoman province. For the better part of five centuries, however, the Ottoman Empire encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean. From the early sixteenth century until the early twentieth, it also ruled North Africa and Egypt; the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas; the Crimean Peninsula and the surrounding regions; all of the Near East from present-day Israel to the borders of Iran; and the Balkans, including Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and parts of modern Hungary.

In the collective memory of the West, the Ottomans loom large. More than the first wave of Arab conquests, more than the Muslims of Spain or Saladin and his armies, the Ottomans were woven into the consciousness of modern Europe. At the very time that the centralized monarchies of Western and Central Europe were emerging, they faced an adversary whose size, organization, wealth, and power dwarfed anything they could muster. The lords of Spain, France, England, the German lands, and the Holy Roman Empire may have thought of themselves as titans, but against the Ottomans, they barely rated as pygmies. Acting in concert, the fleets of the Italians, the knights of Spain and France, and the foot soldiers of Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Prussia were able to stave off total defeat, but until the eighteenth century, the shadow of what they called “the perfidious Turk” clouded even the brightest of their days.

Gradually, the Ottomans lost their comparative advantage, and in the late eighteenth century, the monarchs of Europe and Russia reversed the tide. Even then, the empire shrank but did not collapse. Unlike many other regions of the globe, the core of the Ottoman Empire was never occupied or ruled by the Europeans. The empire contracted, but the central lands of Turkey and large parts of the Middle East, including Iraq and Arabia, remained under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I.

Close in proximity, the Ottomans and the Europeans were separated by a wide cultural gulf. Religion, however, was perhaps the least important dividing line. The Ottomans were ruled by a Turkish family, whose origins were, as many scholars have noted, shrouded in obscurity. There is as little known about Osman, the dynasty’s founder, as there is about Romulus and Remus, the mythic progenitors of Rome. There are almost no written records about the Ottomans for the

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