The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, And Caliphs, by Marc David Baer

This book is a classic case of a mixed book that both benefits and suffers from the author’s historical interests and perspective. It is also a book that it is capable to appreciate even where one disagrees with some of the major points of the author, such as the author’s unsettling and somewhat contradictory contextualization of the Ottoman reputation for tolerance at the beginning of their empire as well as their pervasive pederasty. The author seeks to prove that the Ottomans deserve to be viewed as a European power because of the efforts in which they copied the Roman and Byzantine inheritance despite their Muslim and Turco-Mongol roots that were also of obvious importance in the establishment of the Ottoman state. It is possible to enjoy this book without agreeing with the author’s position, but it is likely that most readers will have a mixed feeling about the book, in that it is an easy book to respect for its obvious research but also somewhat lacking in narrative. Indeed, despite beginning with a strong narrative of the history of the Ottomans, about 1/3 of the way through the book, the author switches gears and shifts from a narrative history to a thematic one that deliberately goes over some pretty disturbing ground that will not likely make this author welcome in Turkey, it must be admitted, for his detailed discussion of the lack of accountability that the Turks have faced over their behavior in the late 19th and 20th century against the Christians (especially Armenians) and the Kurds.

In terms of material, this book is just over 450 pages long and is divided into 22 chapters. The author begins with a reference to Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle and to themes of memory and identity as they relate to the Ottomans. The first third of the book–the best part of the book, in general–gives a narrative history of the early part of Ottoman history from its beginnings as a Ghazi state filled with Sufi holy warriors not unlike the Qizilbash of the contemporary Safazid realm in Persia to the death of Suleiman I. This includes a discussion of Osman and Orhan’s reigns (1), Murad I and the development of the Janissaries (2), the resurrection of the dynasty from Bayezid I through Murad II (3), the conquest of Constantinople (4), the pious and overwhelmed Bayezid II, and the magnificence of Selim I and Suleiman I (7), the first Ottoman Caliph. After this, the author shifts to a more thematic approach, including a discussion of eschatology in the Ottoman realm (8), the Ottoman age of discovery (9) in the Indian Ocean, the harem as domestic homelife (10), the Ottoman way of dealing with a complex realm and population (11), the Ottoman fondness for pederasty between older men and younger boys (12), the author’s view of the Romanness of Ottomans from Murdad III to Osman II (13), Mehmed IV’s failed attempt to return to the Ghazi state (14), and a discussion of a false Jewish messiah whose conversion to Islam created a new Muslim sect (15). This is followed by chapters on the second siege of Vienna and the Ottoman retreat (16), failed efforts at reform in the face of foreign defeats (17), the repression of Abdulhamid II in the last part of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century (18), the problem of Ottoman Orientalism (19), the troubled rise of the Young Turks (20), the genocide of the Armenians and World War I (21), and the end of the Ottomans (22), which is followed by a conclusion that talks about the endurance of the Ottoman past, after which the book ends with acknowledgements, lists of Ottoman rulers and their reigns, notes, and an index.

Although the author tries to present this work as a definitive effort on the Ottoman dynasty, this is a book that is clearly of its time. With the author’s unseemly interest in sexual deviance and prurient subject matter, he shows himself as a contemporary historian clearly interested in the current social agendas, even as he insults the European writers of the Victorian age for writing as he did in such a way that they made Ottoman life appear to be a hotbed of sexual deviance, which the author himself is guilty of, albeit during an earlier age. If the author is reasonably sound in pointing out that the Ottomans were often subject to the same sorts of influences that the European nations around them were, including technological developments which at first benefitted the Ottomans in their establishment as a powerful gunpowder kingdom in the early modern period and then led to their collapse when they proved themselves unable to provide sufficient appeal for peoples to remain loyal to the Ottomans in the face of rising nationalism and a shift of privileged classes to benefit Turks and Muslims at the expense of the “Roman” peoples of the Balkans. This book is at its best when it tells a narrative of crisis and change and efforts to maintain cultural strength and unity and when it puts the Ottomans in a larger context that includes their neighbors and rivals, and also their subject peoples. Ultimately, though, this book is not as great as it could have been because the author has too many agendas to push and too many axes to grind to make this a satisfying and entirely honest history.