The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs

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As the Portuguese and Spanish were colonising the Americas, the Ottoman's were projecting their power and controlling oceangoing trade from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. The author estimates that 'out of a population of one and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1914, 650,000 to 800,000 has been annihilated by 1916'. Or did the Ottomans get there first under Mehmed 'the Conqueror' in the fifteenth century, who rebuilt Constantinople as a 'multireligious metropolis' and who permitted Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians and Jews to live according to their own systems of beliefs and practices? During Sϋleyman's reign the Empire was indeed formally tolerant, in line with the religious views of the Sultan who thought of himself as expander of the Ottoman Islamic realm and emperor of a revived Roman Empire. This is a claim that many historians make and is based on formal and informal characteristics of the Ottoman Empire and the personality of the Sultan.

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs” by Marc David Baer “The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs” by Marc David Baer

However, a number of Arab academics cast claims over the Ottoman role in the Jewish presence in Jerusalem, starting from Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (Kanuni Sultan Süleyman), who, according to these claims, was the “first Muslim Sultan to allow Jews to reside in Jerusalem”. Eventually, Turkish nationalism replaced Ottoman Muslim nationalism under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), who inaugurated a new language: modern Turkish, shorn of Arabic and Persian words, and written in Latin rather than in Arabic script. The Turkish government is in the process of encouraging the use of 'Türkiye' as the name of the country when referred to in English.

But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multi-ethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk' ('Father of the Turks') made a conscious effort to rebrand his new republic in contrast to is past; as he said himself 'The new Turkey has absolutely no relation with the old Turkey. This brought about a series of litigations that lasted over a century, ranging from petitions for the church to be repaired to disputes with Jewish neighbors. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat, ” or “advice.

The Ottomans by Marc David Baer | Waterstones The Ottomans by Marc David Baer | Waterstones

Suleiman I 'the Magnificent' allied with Protestant rebels against their mutual enemy, the Catholic Habsburgs. To meet the needs of envoys, the Republic of Dubrovnik maintained a residence in the city from the mid-16th century on, if not already earlier. Conversion to Islam became a central feature of Ottoman life, as did the practice of fratricide – sultans killing their brothers to ensure a smooth succession – along with rebellions by “deviant dervishes”: radical Sufi Muslims.In the same period, Assyrian Christians were also targeted, with claims that quarter of a million of them, half their original population, were killed by the Ottomans. It’s an immense subject, one that dwarfs even the 500 pages of Baer’s book, and the first note that will likely stop many readers will be the mention of “Caesars” in the title. Broers and Yemelianova argue that various parts of the contemporary Caucasus reflect particular syntheses and synergies between a Caucasian civilisational core and Iranian, Arab, Armenian, Greek, Turkic and Slavic ethno-cultural and religious infusions which occurred over what they term the ‘long millennium’ from the Arab conquest to the emergence of modern geopolitics.