Seemingly contradictory ideas of privacy and community dominate Ottoman cities. While houses are internally divided to guard female modesty behind a frontage studded with peep-holes, streets in cities like Amasya are often bridged by first-floor passageways between different houses. This book contains 17 papers by architects and archaeologists looking at how the Ottoman house was structured, how it has varied over time and space, and how surviving examples are faring in a world of breeze-block construction. Although the examples discussed are all Near Eastern, and mostly from Turkey, the revelations this book contains about structuring principles will make it a valuable companion to understanding architectural relics from all over the Ottoman Empire.
A new approach to late Ottoman visual culture and its place in the world With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque—the first English-language book on the topic—Ünver Rüstem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between 1740 and 1800 the Ottomans consciously coopted European forms to craft a new, politically charged, and globally resonant image for their empire’s capital. Rüstem reclaims the label “Ottoman Baroque” as a productive framework for exploring the connectedness of Istanbul’s eighteenth-century buildings to other traditions of the period. Using a wealth of primary sources, he demonstrates that this architecture was in its own day lauded by Ottomans and foreigners alike for its fresh, cosmopolitan effect. Purposefully and creatively assimilated, the style’s cross-cultural borrowings were combined with Byzantine references that asserted the Ottomans’ entitlement to the Classical artistic heritage of Europe. Such aesthetic rebranding was part of a larger endeavor to reaffirm the empire’s power at a time of intensified East-West contact, taking its boldest shape in a series of imperial mosques built across the city as landmarks of a state-sponsored idiom. Copiously illustrated and drawing on previously unpublished documents, Ottoman Baroque breaks new ground in our understanding of Islamic visual culture in the modern era and offers a persuasive counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of global art history.
The Ottoman Empire and its conflicts provide one of the longest continuous narratives in military history. Its rulers were never overthrown by a foreign power and no usurper succeeded in taking the throne. At its height under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Empire became the most powerful state in the world a multi-national, multilingual empire that stretched from Vienna to the upper Arab peninsula. With Suleiman's death began the gradual decline to the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 in which the Ottoman Empire lost much of its European territory. This volume covers the main campaigns and the part played by such elite troops as the Janissaries and the Sipahis, as well as exploring the social and economic impact of the conquests.
Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808 is the first book of the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. It describes how the Ottoman Turks, a small band of nomadic soldiers, managed to expand their dominions from a small principality in northwestern Anatolia on the borders of the Byzantine Empire into one of the great empires of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe and Asia, extending from northern Hungary to southern Arabia and from the Crimea across North Africa almost to the Atlantic Ocean. The volume sweeps away the accumulated prejudices of centuries and describes the empire of the sultans as a living, changing society, dominated by the small multinational Ottoman ruling class led by the sultan, but with a scope of government so narrow that the subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, were left to carry on their own lives, religions, and traditions with little outside interference.
Seemingly contradictory ideas of privacy and community dominate Ottoman cities. While houses are internally divided to guard female modesty behind a frontage studded with peep-holes, streets in cities like Amasya are often bridged by first-floor passageways between different houses. This book contains 17 papers by architects and archaeologists looking at how the Ottoman house was structured, how it has varied over time and space, and how surviving examples are faring in a world of breeze-block construction. Although the examples discussed are all Near Eastern, and mostly from Turkey, the revelations this book contains about structuring principles will make it a valuable companion to understanding architectural relics from all over the Ottoman Empire.
This book tells the astonishing story of a secular building and its inhabitants over six centuries and four successive civilizations. The Bailo House was constructed as a public loggia in the 14th century by Venetian officials in their Aegean colony of Negroponte on the Byzantine island of Euripos. Italian designs were followed and copied in the style of the lagoon's palaces, digging the foundations through the earlier Byzantine layers. It later became seat of an Ottoman official, also housing his apothecary. It subsequently passed into the hands of a local Ottoman dignitary, who completely transformed into a typical Middle Eastern mansion. In the early 19th century it was reshaped once again with a neoclassical facade to conform to the European models promoted by the Modern Greek state. Extensive study, excavations and restorations over a ten-year period revealed remarkable evidence for one of the few remaining examples of secular architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as abundant and rare information about urban planning, material culture, economic and cultural exchanges, art and aesthetics, etc. It is the tale of a harbor town that was always cosmopolitan, a port of call along the Silk Road, the winter base of the Ottoman fleet, a European enclave in the East.
Standing at the crossroads of many cultures, Ottoman style is spiced with influences from Chinese and Indian to French and Italian. In this spectacular volume, Istanbul-born interior designer Serdar Gülgün narrates a tour of his beautiful home, a historic mansion on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Constantly inspired by the atmosphere of his ancient city, Gülgün believes a successful interior design is a place of experience in which authentic elements of culture fuse and achieve alchemy, awakening all the senses and transporting its inhabitants to a place of fantasy.
This book studies the role of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey in providing refuge and prosperity for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Byzantium in medieval times and from Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It studies the religiously-based communities of Ottoman and Turkish Jews as well as their economic, cultural and religious lives and their relations with the Muslims and Christians among whom they lived.
Like England's Charles II, the Ottoman Empire took "an unconscionable time dying." Since the seventeenth century, observers had been predicting the collapse of this so-called Sick Man of Europe, yet it survived all its rivals. As late as 1910, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents. Unlike the Romanovs, Habsburgs, or Hohenzollerns, the House of Osman, which had allied itself with the Kaiser, was still recognized as an imperial dynasty during the peace conference following World War I. "The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire" offers a provocative view of the empire's decline, from the failure to take Vienna in 1683 to the abolition of the Sultanate by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) in 1922 during a revolutionary upsurge in Turkish national pride. The narrative contains instances of violent revolt and bloody reprisals, such as the massacres of Armenians in 1896, and other "ethnic episodes" in Crete and Macedonia. More generally, it emphasizes recurring problems: competition between religious and secular authority; the acceptance or rejection of Western ideas; and the strength or weakness of successive Sultans. The book also highlights the special challenges of the early twentieth century, when railways and oilfields gave new importance to Ottoman lands in the Middle East. Events of the past few years have placed the problems that faced the last Sultans back on the world agenda. The old empire's outposts in the Balkans and in Iraq are still considered trouble spots. Alan Palmer offers considerable insight into the historical roots of many contemporary problems: the Kurdish struggle for survival, the sad continuity of conflict in Lebanon, and the centuries-old Muslim presence in Sarajevo. He also recounts the Ottoman Empire's lingering interests in their oil-rich Libyan provinces. By exploring that legacy over the past three centuries, "The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire" examines a past whose effect on the present may go a long way toward explaining the future. Praise for "The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire" "Alan Palmer writes the sort of history that dons did before 'accessible' became an academic insult. It is cool, rational, scholarly, literate."--John Keegan "A scholarly, readable and balanced history."--"The Independent on Sunday" "A marvellously readable book based on massive research."--Robert Blake
The Ottomans ruled much of the Arab World for four centuries. Bruce Masters's work surveys this period, emphasizing the cultural and social changes that occurred against the backdrop of the political realities that Arabs experienced as subjects of the Ottoman sultans. The persistence of Ottoman rule over a vast area for several centuries required that some Arabs collaborate in the imperial enterprise. Masters highlights the role of two social classes that made the empire successful: the Sunni Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, and the urban notables, the acyan. Both groups identified with the Ottoman sultanate and were its firmest backers, although for different reasons. The ulama legitimated the Ottoman state as a righteous Muslim sultanate, while the acyan emerged as the dominant political and economic class in most Arab cities due to their connections to the regime. Together, the two helped to maintain the empire.
