The Ottoman Empire: A History from Beginning to End (Unabridged)
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A startling reality burst Osman's dream of a sole enduring promise land. The pious, Sufi mystics, beys, emirs, and tribes on Anatolia's frontiers chased the Ottoman vision. Sultans would rise and build multicultural millets and stir the soul of caliphs. Drawn to the allure of the Orient Express, coffee, and velvet, the burst didn't happen over night. Merchants, nobility, and guilds of artisans built markets and trade routes. Risking their lives, Ottomans crossed the pirate-riddled Adriatic. Sultans and gazis embraced the crescent's rise.
Inside, you will hear about:
Origins until the Balkan conquests
Institutions and society: millets, guilds, trade, religion, and mysticism
Fifteenth-century imperial style, 16th-century Golden Age, cracks before World War I
The Eastern Question
And much more!
Western industrialization and the Enlightenment gripped hearts and minds as starry-eyed Ottoman astronomers and society embraced a Golden Age. Yet with any rise comes the reality that Sir Lawrence of Arabia and the Berlin-Baghdad Express alliances could only foreshadow. Designs on the lands turned the empire into the Eastern Question during World War I in a prelude to today's Middle East.
Customer Reviews
Awful choice for reader
Although the author has written several historical pieces, this volume is my first taste of his style and will be my last. Rather than tell us history, the book is a collage of excerpts from other books and quotes from European teachers and authors. It feels more like a bibliography than a history book. What compounds this frustration is the choice of reader. Worst reader ever. Reads as if having just learned to read... over enunciating, falling apart on any foreign sounding names or words and pronunciation them differently every time he stumbles through them. The reader for a history of foreign lands should at least be familiar with the language or names.