Old Turks - Review

National Review, June 28, 1999 by David Pryce-Jones

Mr. Pryce-Jones is the author of, among other books, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.

Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, by Jason Goodwin (Holt, 352 pp., $32.50)

Muslims on the march, the Ottoman Turks built an empire reaching from Asia deep into the Balkans and the Mediterranean. The immense Ottoman archives in today's Istanbul are a tribute to their military and organizational skills. For a long time after the capture of Christian Byzantium in 1453, they appeared unstoppable. Many European rulers and intellectuals feared that Christian civilization could not hold the line against Ottoman Islam. Here was a power struggle as well as an ideological war-an earlier version of the Cold War against Communism.

Unlike the Soviet Union, the Ottoman empire expired slowly. In the famous phrase of Tsar Nicholas I, the empire had become "the sick man of Europe" and its dismemberment would benefit everyone. In the conventional wisdom of the last century, the Turks had become backward, corrupt, outside the rule of law, oppressors of the minorities among them, no longer to be feared but still held in contempt. After the First World War, the Allies took over the remains of the empire, and the last sultan went into exile.

Nobody of stature at the time suggested that the Ottoman empire might have been consigned to the scrap heap a little too lightly. In its unique way, it had been a pluralist society. Ethnic and religious minorities had been allowed their own identity and leaders, their customs and worship, simply in return for taxes and submission to the state. When these minorities rebelled, and in due course acquired independent nation-states of their own, they proved unable to grant to others the rights they had demanded for themselves. Witness the patterns of breakdown in Arab countries, in Yugoslavia and Cyprus and other former Ottoman provinces. In the light of these modern horrors, the Ottoman achievement has come to seem more and more remarkable. Comparison with the Soviet Union ceases at this point, since Communist theory and practice had no redeeming features.

Lords of the Horizons is another step in revising hoary anti-Ottoman prejudice. To be sure, absolute rule generated its usual cruelty, corruption, and lawlessness. An elaborate ritual of murder in the ruling family decided who was to become sultan. The Janissaries formed an elite corps composed of kidnapped Christian boys brought up as Muslims and slaves. Owing loyalty exclusively to the sultan, they threw into the Bosphorus the corpses of anyone he didn't like. More rational than it might seem, the system worked until the Janissaries in the end saw themselves as more powerful than the sultan, and had to be suppressed accordingly.

Jason Goodwin delights in the contrast between the frightful means so often used and the settled order that resulted. Color and diversity bring out a virtuoso prose, which can sometimes overheat. Not a history, Lords of the Horizons is only loosely chronological. Dispensing with narrative, the chapters instead each have a theme: the importance of the annual campaign to capture new territory, for example, and the part played in the Ottoman psyche by the concept of the borderlands, the absence of clock-time, the role of the city or of the sea, with a concluding essay of great charm on dogs. A sketch of Suleyman the Magnificent and the failure of the Ottomans to capture Vienna in 1683 are among set pieces in other self-contained chapters.

Scholars such as Bernard Lewis have brought out how Turks saw their own society. Goodwin relies for his material almost entirely on the literature left down the centuries by foreign observers, either European ambassadors or travelers. Although sometimes prisoners of their own culture, these Westerners provided a fascinating record, with many observations still valid today. Among them were Busbecq, Baron Wratislaw, Paul Rycaut, Pietro della Valle and other Venetians and Genoese, Lady Mary Montagu, Sir Charles Eliot, and many more familiar to the specialist but perhaps not to the general reader. One whom he omits is Stratford Canning, the diplomat who spent most of his life in Istanbul, and who almost single- handedly persuaded the British government to prop up the Turks in their decline. When finally the Janissaries were massacred, he was there, and watched the Bosphorus turn red.

Like a magpie swooping on bright things, Goodwin retrieves the anecdotes and details that reveal the Ottomans in war and peace. The odder the better. The Germans used to call Turks "bag-people," for instance, and one Venetian consul in Smyrna lived to be 115, a fortress in the Danube had 6,531 shovels, and a French doctor cured the last Koprulu pasha of an obsession that he had a fly on his nose. Christians from many countries converted to Islam. Known as "renegades" in the language of the day, these prototype fellow travelers brought a range of special skills to the Ottomans. And so on, nugget upon nugget, piled on with exhaustive energy.