March 8, 2006 Edition

Knowledge Without A Larger Understanding

Books
BY ADAM KIRSCH
March 8, 2006
URL:

To trace the boundaries of the vanished Ottoman Empire, take a map of
Europe and the Middle East and start shading in every country that,
for the last 15 years, has been in the news thanks to civil war,
ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. From Bosnia in the northwest to
Baghdad in the southeast, the world’s most dangerous zone is made up
of Ottoman successor states, carved out of the corpse of the empire by
rebellious ethnic groups (Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania) or high-handed
European imperialists (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq). Just as the collapse of
the U.S.S.R. made it possible to feel nostalgic for the Cold War as a
time of relative stability, so the aftermath of the fall of the
Ottoman Empire – a consummation devoutly wished by Europe for most of
the 19th century, and finally achieved after World War I – can make
even that corrupt, despotic regime look good.

We may have forgotten about the Ottoman Empire, in other words, but it
hasn’t forgotten about us. That is why “Osman’s Dream” (Basic Books,
660 pages, $35), a comprehensive new history by British scholar
Caroline Finkel, is so timely, and why its limitations are finally so
disappointing. For what Ms. Finkel has written is less a history of
the Ottoman Empire than a chronicle, a numbingly comprehensive catalog
of every sultan and grand vezier, every military campaign and treaty,
every conquest and rebellion. Long before reaching Ms. Finkel’s 75
pages of notes and bibliography, her mastery of the historical
literature is obvious: The sheer amount of information packed between
these two covers makes it a landmark achievement.

The problem for a general reader (and Ms. Finkel claims to be writing
for “general readers who know little of the Ottomans”) is that most of
the information in “Osman’s Dream” is of no real use. Of course, it is
always valuable to ascertain the events of history, to set down what
happened when. But the common reader, who has no professional stake in
the subject, does not read history to memorize a succession of dates
and names. He reads pragmatically, looking for knowledge about the
past that will help him understand the present and anticipate the
future.

Good popular history, without reducing the past to a mere fable, uses
it to answer questions: How did people live, think, and act in
conditions different from our own? What potentialities of human nature
did they achieve, and which did they allow to atrophy? How did their
doing and suffering create the world that we have inherited?
Especially when it comes to a subject like the Ottoman Empire, which
to most Western readers is a blank only partially filled in by myth
and literature, facts become usable only as parts of a larger story.

It is this larger story that Ms. Finkel fails to supply. “Osman’s
Dream” charts the history of the Ottomans primarily in military and
diplomatic terms; culture, economics, politics, daily life, the
personalities of great men and women, appear seldom if at all. We
learn that one sultan succeeds another, but not what a sultan actually
did on an average day. We see that, for an Ottoman courtier, it was
practically guaranteed that a splendid career would end in death – one
grand vezier after another falls from grace and gets strangled or
beheaded – but never understand why, despite this fatality, ambitious
men clamored for the job. We are told that the empire conquers one
city after another – Constantinople, Cairo, Baghdad, Belgrade, very
nearly Vienna – but not how its armies were organized, or how those
cities looked. For all the information packed into this long book, it
is surprising how many questions “Osman’s Dream” leaves unanswered.

Start with the most fundamental: Why did the Ottoman Empire rise so
spectacularly, then stagnate so long, and finally fall to pieces at a
touch, like an old tapestry? The empire that would eventually spread
over three continents started out, in the 14th century, as just one of
many small Turkish emirates, fighting for pre-eminence in
Anatolia. The Ottoman or Osmanli Turks, named for the dynasty’s
founder, Osman, had only one obvious advantage: Their lands bordered
the crumbling hulk of the Byzantine Empire, a vacuum into which the
energetic Turks quickly expanded.

By 1389, with the famous battle of Kosovo Polje (whose memory still
inflames Serb-Muslim tensions in the Balkans today), the Ottomans had
established their dominion over the Balkans. In 1453, they finally
took Constantinople, the old capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and
the sultans started to style themselves as world monarchs, the heirs
of the caesars. In 1517, they conquered the Mamluk Empire, gaining
control of Egypt, Syria, and – most important for this orthodox Sunni
state – the holy places of Mecca and Medina, allowing the sultans to
claim supreme authority in the Muslim world. In 1526, at the Battle of
Mohacs, they conquered most of Hungary, and a few years later
approached the gates of Vienna. No wonder that Sultan Suleyman I, who
reigned from 1520 to 1566, was known in the West as “the Magnificent”:
Under his reign, the Ottoman golden age, the empire seemed
unstoppable.

What never really becomes clear in “Osman’s Dream” is why the Turks
were able to expand so rapidly. Was it the weakness of surrounding
states, the divisions among Christian Europe, Ottoman military tactics
and technology? The question is all the more acute since, on
Ms. Finkel’s showing, the governance of the empire was always unstable
at best. Rebellions were almost the Ottoman version of elections: A
discontented general or provincial governor would take up arms, not to
overthrow the dynasty, but to get some attention for his grievances,
or just to win promotion. Large areas of the empire seem to have been
only nominally under Istanbul’s control.

Throughout its centuries of power, the empire never established a
reasonable system of succession: The death of each sultan opened a
freefor-all among his sons, often resulting in civil war. The
notorious practice whereby each sultan murdered his brothers, which
did so much to create the Western image of Turkish barbarism, was the
closest the empire came to a rule of succession. Remarkably, despite
this thinning of the ranks, the Ottoman dynasty reigned without a
break from Osman to Mehmed VI, the last emperor, who abdicated in 1922
with the creation of modern Turkey.

Likewise, “Osman’s Dream” leaves the reader wondering about the rapid
decline in Ottoman fortunes. Why was it that, starting in the late
17th century, the empire fell rapidly behind its rivals, especially
the rising power of Russia? By the 19th century, European powers were
breaking off pieces of the empire more or less at will; this was the
period when Turkey became known as “the sick man of Europe.” But
efforts at modernizing and reform were constantly thwarted by
entrenched interests, in a vicious circle that seems reminiscent of
the late Roman Empire. Here, again, one longs for more insight into
the Ottomans’ cultural, political, and economic problems than
Ms. Finkel provides – especially since the Ottoman failure has done so
much to shape the world we live in today. When the Ottoman Empire was
founded, America hadn’t yet been discovered; today, it is the United
States that mainly has to deal with the consequences of its
collapse. Given the vital importance of the Ottoman story

akirsch@nysun.com
March 8, 2006 Edition