The Ottomans : Khans, Caesars and Caliphs - Marc David Baer

A major new history of the six-hundred-year dynasty that connected East to West as never before. 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 Europes heart. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynastys demise after the First World War. Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide. Radically retelling their remarkable story, The Ottomans is a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power, and the first to truly capture its cross-fertilisation between East and West. Review. 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 ... Blending the sacred and the
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