Reorienting an empire

The Ottomans leaves the reader with much to ponder on how societies viewed each other in an era of emerging uber-nationalism where religion was the key marker of belonging

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs

Author: Marc David Baer

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 543

Price: Rs 799

A visitor to Istanbul would be struck by the blend of European and Asian culture that makes Turkey one of the most attractive countries to visit. Before Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to Islamicise this boisterously multicultural polity, Turkey’s syncretism was attributed to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who salvaged the heartland of a disintegrating empire and dragged it into a modern European-focused era.

Ataturk’s aggressive nationalist Europeanising project was regarded with warm approval as a civilising mission of a backward polity by European powers wallowing in their rising global dominance. This simplistic outlook overlooks a complex and deeply inconvenient truth for a Europe that views the Ottoman Empire (1288-1922) as the “other” in geopolitical and cultural terms. Ataturk’s success was, in fact, predicated on the reality of a deep osmosis between the Ottomans and Europe. This is the notion that Marc David Baer seeks to correct in this lively history titled The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs.

 “Both the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire — whose legacy the Ottoman dynasty inherited and whose capital city it made its own — were long-lasting, centralised empires that to this day stand outside the standard Western narratives about the formation of Europe,” he writes in the introduction.  Yet “both empires saw themselves as heirs to Rome and claimed Europeanness”. The Ottomans, for instance, called their southeastern European lands Rumeli (land of the Romans).

Shared imperial geography apart, the burden of Dr Baer’s argument is that the Ottomans’ story “is the acknowledged part of the story the West tells about itself.” Viewing the Ottoman Empire this way “allows us to understand the origins and meaning of concepts and practices such as religious tolerance, secularism, modernity and even genocide in a different light.”

Dr Baer shows, for instance, how the Empire followed the principle of religious toleration from its 13th century beginnings. The Ottomans were among the myriad Turkish groups that emerged from the Central Asian steppe as offshoots from the eclectic Mongols who followed a variety of religions, from Islam to Buddhism, Christianity and animism.

Their rise began at a time when Europe was drawing back from three centuries of crusades against West Asian Islamic powers. In 1453, after Mehmed II conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, there was much lament in Europe as many of the churches — including the magnificent Hagia Sophia — were converted to mosques.  But this was the standard rubric of conquest of the time.

Less acknowledged is the level of religious accommodation and active endowment. Less than 40 years after the conquest of Constantinople, it was in the Ottoman Empire that large numbers of Jews expelled by the monarchs of Spain settled. The title of Islamic Caliph came only after 1517 when the lands, including Mecca and Medina, were conquered from Egypt. The Ottomans encouraged conversion to be sure. But there was no compulsion to convert — the book bristles with examples of how Christians and Jews served Ottoman emperors in trusted capacities as physicians, ministers or advisors. It is worth noting that “secularism” made a limited debut in Europe only after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 —after a 30-year war laid waste to most of central Europe.

Europe’s negativism was principally the result of the Islamic dynasty’s formidable territorial successes in Christian lands — at its height, the Empire included the Balkans, Romania, Hungary, Moldova and parts of Russia and Austria, though Vienna remained frustratingly out of reach. Yet the Empire expediently figured as enemy and ally whenever the Europeans saw fit —from the Battle of Lepanto (1571) to the Crimean War (1856). It is possible that Islamic dynamism against Christian impotence created a prurient negativism about Ottoman culture.

Dr Baer’s argument is all the more credible because he makes no excuses for the Ottomans — their attitude towards women, though several played a significant role in public life, sanction of pederasty as a social practice or the institution of the Janissaries, captured Christian male infants who were converted and became part of a Praetorian Guard, or the practice of the heir killing all male siblings. He clarifies the role of the harem; rather than being the locus of European pornographic imaginings it was a synonym for home where wives and concubines were sheltered and younger princes were brought up. His analyses of the genocide against the Armenians during the First World War, in horrific detail, suggests that it was a product of a political problem — rivalry with the Russian empire — rather than the gratuitous mobilised hatred that produced the Holocaust.

Where Europeans were prone to ascribe the decline of the Ottomans to decadence, it is more plausible that it suffered the classic problem of imperial overreach, especially in North Africa and Europe. Tolerance and liberalism are markers of dynamic regimes; the Ottomans jettisoned these attributes as their political power diminished from the 18th century. In the 20th century up to World War I (1914-18) it was the Great Powers’ unseemly scramble for the defeated Empire’s lands that has bequeathed the instability that bedevils the region today.

Much of this cause and effect is left to the reader to deduce, however. After a lengthy introduction to make his case, Dr Baer launches into an exhaustive and absorbing account of Ottoman history and culture that leaves little room for parallel analysis. His book teaches the reader a lot about the Ottomans, imperial Islam and its relationship with Europe and leaves much to ponder on how societies viewed each other in an era of emerging uber-nationalism where religion becomes the key marker of belonging.