I just finished reading The Ottoman Centuries by Lord Kinross. It's a pretty good one-book survey of the Ottoman Empire, although unfortunately lacking in a few respects. More unfortunately, and I say this having spent a good hour on amazon.com and librarything, there simply isn't a good one book - or even three book - survey of the history of the Ottoman Empire available. At least, in English. The Ottoman Centuries is, according to the wisdom of the Internet, as good as it gets. Which makes its flaws - and remember, on the whole it's quite a good book - the more galling.
I came to read the book in a very typical way, for me; I strolled down to Stacey's bookstore on Market Street looking for some new books. I discovered in the new non-fiction section the recently released Osman's Dream: A History of the Ottoman Empire. This seemed quite interesting, but ultimately I chose not to buy it impulsively and went instead to the Internet to discover if it was a good book, and also which books on the topic were the standard by which other books were measured. This is a typical Sun Ra tactic - find out which books (e.g. The Guns of August for World War I) are considered to be the best and read those first.
But of the rather small number of Ottoman history books - only three or four total which were read and well-recieved by more than a handful of people - none of them were, according to the general review consensus, great. Which is a shame, really, considering the vast amount of pages spent writing about topics already done to death, such as Hitler. Would we really be any poorer if no one ever wrote yet another book about the Nazis? Jesus Christ, people, the horse is more maggot than flesh! Stop the beating!
Sorry about that - it's just a pet peeve of mine when I visit any bookstore's German history section and find that it's invariably 99.5% Nazi. Hitler's Generals, Hitler's Psychiatrists, the Practice of Homeopathy in Nazi Germany, the Rise of Nazi Floral Arranging... it's a God-damned waste of shelf space. If you visited someone's house and their bookshelf as was full of irrelevant Nazi bullshit as the German History section of any bookstore, you'd begin to look askance at them and find ways to not be invited to their dinner parties. I am particularly angered by this phenomenon because if you in a bookstore are trying to find a book about, say, Otto von Bismarck, or Frederick Barbarossa, or Goethe, or basically any topic in German history that didn't happen between 1933 and 1945, you are swastika out of luck, pal.
Anyway, back to the Turks. There are, apparently, some good books about the rise of modern Turkey. This is, I suspect, largely because of Ataturk, who had a personality powerful enough to lure in multiple generations of good biographers. But for Turkish history before that, there's Lord Kinross' book, which was published in the 1970s, and two or three other books, including the new one I had spotted, and that's it. And none of them are top drawer, either, not in the sense of Tuchman's books or Norwich's Byzantium trilogy.
The Ottoman Centuries, for example, is full of statements about the personal merits of various sultans, very largely positive, that don't appear to have any real backing in fact. They might have backing in fact, but Kinross certainly never shares any of it with us. In other words, Lord Kinross states that Sultan thus-and-such was earnest and well-meaning and brave and yet the guy rules for four years before being strangled by a bowstring and manages during that time only to lose two critical battles and be ruled over by his vizier. I don't know where Lord Kinross is deriving his opinions - and this happens again and again - but I'd really appreciate it if he'd back them up with some facts or at least some eyewitness testimony. Having only Kinross' word that Abdul II was, in fact, a great sultan and full of courage and forward thinking, when his actual achievements show him to be rather a milksop and utterly ineffectual, really doesn't cut it.
And overall, in fact, The Ottoman Centuries is a bit of a hagiography, as one distinctly gets the sense that Kinross is rooting for the Turks. Obviously, a historian should present their subject matter as interesting. Fascinating, in fact. And I have no problem with the author making value judgements, although as I observed above there really ought to be some evidence to back those judgements up.
But when a book presents, say, the independence of Greece, as a distinctly regrettable event, that detracts from its credibility. Oh, it should definitely state that the Ottomans found Greek independence to be a major setback, but I don't think that the author him- or herself should take the side of their subject in such a fashion. "It was a calamity for the Empire" - great, absolutely. "It was a calamity" - well, no, not for everyone, and I'd thank you not to pretend such.
There's one other thing about the book which I have found greatly disappointing, and that is that it never attempted to explain just why the Ottomans succeeded. Realize that, after the destruction of the Seljuk turks by the Mongols, the Ottomans were only one small tribe of turks living in former Byzantine lands. How did they, and not a different tribe, and not the originally much stronger Byzantines whose lands they conquered one by one, succeed in becoming a world-shaking empire? Osman, the founder, literally had a few hundred guys, and over the course of only a couple of hundred years the Ottoman Empire conquered the Balkans, the Middle East, and ruled over a large fraction of the known world. I would really like to dig into how the Ottomans were able to do this, but Kinross really only gave dates and places and didn't get into answering the really interesting question. (Although he did discuss the Ghazi phenomenon, which was interesting and new to me.)
So there you have it. Good book, worth the time, but ultimately leaving too much wanting. Perhaps I shall have to pick up the book I saw originally, which is getting good-but-not-great reviews, and see if between the two books I can assemble a picture which satisfies.
- Sun Ra