The Barnes & Noble Review
In its heyday, the Ottoman Empire reached from Iran to Turkey, encompassing a multitude of ethnicities and more than three dozen nations. Islamic, though many of its subjects were not Muslim, Turkish, though it was mostly Balkan Slavs who served as shock troops, the Ottoman Empire was Byzantine in ceremony, Persian in dignity, Egyptian in wealth, and Arabic in letters. The long survival of the empire, Jason Goodwin claims in Lords of the Horizons, his beautifully written account of the period, was due to tolerance and flexibility and to practicing meritocracy instead of forcing cultural assimilation.
Yet for all that tolerance, the Ottoman Empire was run by the army. Every road had a military destination. The common language was that of the gert and bow. Horses were revered, sometimes over men themselves. Peace divided men: They lost sight of a common goal, stirring trouble at home. Where there was war, the Ottomans excelled; where there were the trappings of battle, the Ottomans proved superior.
Power came from motion. With an army bivouacked for five months of the year, tents were a significant part of life. At the last siege of Vienna, a canvas city was erected next to the capital that was not only larger than Vienna itself, but better ordered. "Western camps were Babels of disorder, drunkenness and debauchery. The Ottoman camp was a tea party disturbed by nothing louder than the sound of a mallet on a tent peg."
Tea parties aside, battles fought to expand the Empire were anything but demure. Goodwin captures 15th-century battles with a contemporary zest.Hisdescriptions of war evoke the balletic montages of a film director like John Woo. "By mid-afternoon the stricken ships had collected a positive infestation of Turkish vessels, clinging to their sides with grappling irons and hooks, aiming to carry them by assault or fire.... Baltoghlu himself ran his ship into the prow of the big transport and around her the fighting seemed fiercest, wave after wave of boarders steadily repulsed, the Byzantine weapon of Greek fire — the equivalent of napalm — used to deadly effect, the Turkish galleys forever entangling their oars, or losing them to missiles dropped from overhead by the much higher Christian vessels."
The sword united the Ottoman empire; the pen divided it. Though the empire was one still based on meritocracy, the agrarians began losing to a world which was becoming increasingly busy and bossy. The martial strengths of the Empire became useless in the face of burgeoning industrialism in Western Europe. A shamming took place, one impossible to fathom in a martial society. Although thousands came to work in the palace every day, only about 20 people performed significant tasks.
Early in the book, Goodwin describes Sultan Suleyman in his twilight years as "a sort of metaphor of empire, rotting and majestic, fat, made-up, and suffering from an ulcerous leg." The cancer was nationalism. Inflation and a price revolution made for uncertain futures, causing nations to huddle together for security. Tolerance was usurped by factionalism, petty rivalries, and disloyalty. Quarantine systems were soon fixed around the Empire, making a mockery of the policy of acceptance which had enabled it to flourish for so many years.
Lords of the Horisons offers a trove of delightful images as it provides a popular history. Only a scholar with a somewhat odd yet poetic sensibility would conclude a study of the Ottoman Empire with the detailed history of Turkish dogs: how they were accepted, cherished, and protected, how they suffered, and why in the end they left, never to return.
—Deirdre Holland
A delightfully picaresque history, brimming with memorable anecdotes and outrageous personalities. English travel writer Goodwin (A Cup of Tea: Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea) guides us on a highly impressionistic journey. We begin in the foothills of Turkey, where the Ottoman Turks revered the horse and reveled in making war. (They also helped to destroy the Christian crusaders of the 14th century.) The Ottomans were Sunni Muslims, relatively tolerant of religious diversity. In 1453, under Sultan Mehmet, they seized Constantinople, making it their capital. Goodwin writes brilliantly about the siege of that Byzantine city, describing its complex defensive fortifications and how Mehmet breached them with a revolutionary weapon, the cannon. Under Suleyman the Magnificent, Ottoman power reached its zenith. Suleyman's army overran Belgrade in 1521 and later assaulted Vienna. Finally, the European powers united to stop the "infidel" Ottoman onslaught. In 1571, the Ottomans suffered their first major defeat at the Battle of Lepanto. Nevertheless, they consolidated their power in the Balkans, Egypt, Persia, Russia, and all over Central Asia. Goodwin argues convincingly that the key to Ottoman success, besides an obvious skill at war, was their open-mindedness regarding cultures and institutions: The Ottoman umbrella made room for Spanish Jews, Orthodox Greeks, Venetian merchants, Albanian tribesmen, Arab bedouins, and others. With the coming of the industrial revolution in Europe, however, the Ottomans fell behind. Palace intrigues, factional rivalries, military disloyalty, and nationalist rebellions in Greece and Egypt combined to sap the empire of itsstrength. Yet it survived, miraculously, into the 20th century, like some crazy old aunt locked in the attic. Throughout, Goodwin relishes the exotic, the bizarre, the picturesque. In explaining the decline of Ottoman military virtue, he cites Sultan Ibrahim, who overindulged in drink and the harem, where he "rode his girls like horses through rooms lined in fur." An elegantly written, thoroughly entertaining work of popular history.
