Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire

by Jason Goodwin

Overview

"A work of dazzling beauty...the rare coming together of historical scholarship and curiosity about distant places with luminous writing." —The New York Times Book Review

Since the Turks first shattered the glory of the French crusaders in 1396, the Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds. For six hundred years, the Empire swelled and declined. Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, in three centuries it advanced from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at the Empire's height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched its aid. For the next three hundred years the Empire seemed ready to collapse, a prodigy of survival and decay. Early in the twentieth century it fell. In this dazzling evocation of its power, Jason Goodwin explores how the Ottomans rose and how, against all odds, they lingered on. In the process he unfolds a sequence of mysteries, triumphs, treasures, and terrors unknown to most American readers.

This was a place where pillows spoke and birds were fed in the snow; where time itself unfolded at a different rate and clocks were banned; where sounds were different, and even the hyacinths too strong to sniff. Dramatic and passionate, comic and gruesome, Lords of the Horizons is a history, a travel book, and a vision of a lost world all in one.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312420666
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/01/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	318,206
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

JASON GOODWIN is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Investigator Yashim series. The first five books—The Janissary Tree, The Snake Stone, The Bellini Card, An Evil Eye, and The Baklava Club—have been published to international acclaim, alongside Yashim Cooks Istanbul, a cookbook of Ottoman Turkish recipes inspired by the series. Goodwin studied Byzantine history at Cambridge and is the author of Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, among other award-winning nonfiction. He lives with his wife and children in England.

Table of Contents

	Map of the Ottoman Empire	viii
	Prologue	xi
Part I	Curves and Arabesques
1.	Origins	3
2.	The Balkans	12
3.	Thunderbolt	22
4.	The Siege	29
5.	The Centre	44
6.	The Palace	50
7.	War	65
8.	Suleyman the Magnificent	79
9.	Order	90
10.	Cities	110
11.	The Sea	121
12.	Rhythms	130
Part II	The Turkish Time
13.	The Turkish Time	149
14.	Stalemate	158
15.	The Cage	164
16.	The Spiral	173
17.	The Empire	185
Part III	Hoards
18.	Hoards	209
19.	Koprulu and Vienna	221
20.	Austria and Russia	237
21.	Ayan	245
22.	Shamming	256
23.	Borderlands	269
24.	The Auspicious Event	289
25.	The Bankrupt	301
	Epilogue	322
	Ottoman Sultans	327
	An Ottoman Chronology	329
	Glossary	333
	Gazetteer	336
	Bibliography	337
	Acknowledgements	342
	Index	343

Editorial Reviews

A work of dazzling beauty...the rare coming together of historical scholarship and curiosity about distant places with luminous writing.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A meditation on a vanished world that hovers like an apparition over today's grim headlines.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Jason Goodwin's deftly written and beguiling history of the Ottoman Empire is particularly pertinent today, when the cauldron of ancient hatred once more boils over, but his prose would be welcome at any time.” —The Boston Globe

“May be read with pleasure and profit by everyone, not least the traveler headed east of Vienna and west of Baghdad.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A delightfully picaresque history, brimming with memorable anecdotes and outrageous personalities.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

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

In this elegant work, British author Goodwin (On Foot to the Golden Horn) combines deft historical summary with the buoyant prose and idiosyncratic focus of the best travel writing. The combination enables him to take the full measure of a realm riddled with paradox. The Ottoman Empire was a Turkish empire most of whose shock troops were Balkan Slavs; a bellicose state that expanded by war, it often governed its conquests with a light hand--a necessary approach given the many cultures and nationalities that fell under Ottoman rule. Ottoman society at its best was civilized and tolerant, observes Goodwin. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were warmly received in Salonika, Constantinople, Belgrade and Sofia. While war and superstition ruled Christian Europe, the Islamic Ottoman Empire thrived and glittered with mathematical, architectural and artistic accomplishment. Goodwin is marvelous at describing how, for three hundred years before its final collapse after WWI, the empire survived even though it was perpetually on the verge of collapse. He attributes the calcified empire's decline not only to corruption and the rise of France and Russia but to the Turks' prideful ignorance of the West, a vanity that eventually deprived the empire of the fruits of modernity. As good as Goodwin is at blending political, cultural and military affairs, his work is distinguished by stylish writing and a sharp eye for just the right anecdote. His epilogue, which is built around the fate of the empire's famous stray dogs, is at once amusing and strangely, beautifully moving.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

British travel writer Goodwin, whose previous books include A Time for Tea and On Foot to the Golden Horn, explores the long and tumultuous history of the Ottoman Empire, examining the political upheavals and military actions that continually engaged the empire. Goodwin also reveals many fascinating details of daily life: e.g., common people would insert waste paper into the cracks of walls, believing the paper would protect their feet on the fiery path to heaven. The most absorbing chapter concerns the defeat of the Ottomans in Vienna in 1683, presenting in lively style the events leading up to that crucial battle. -- Norman Malwitz, Queens Borough P.L., NY

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews