The Unbearable Lightness of History

Book Reviewed: The Ottomans by Marc David Baer

Good history books relate past events. Bad history books reinterpret them with an eye on the present context. Charting the story of the Ottoman Empire from its founding by Osman I to the empire’s demise in the early 20th century, Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans would be in the first category if the author could only forget he had a case to make every twenty pages. Beware the historian with a Big Thesis — and Baer’s thesis is not only big but also very marketable. We live at a time of globalization and mass migration, and, inexorable as these processes might be, they are bound to lead to friction, resentment, and support for anti-establishment political forces. The public needs to be sold on the idea of an open world and conditioned not to fear the Other. Should it be the historian’s task to do it? To promote tolerance and understanding between peoples is one thing; to subordinate history to the marketplace of ideas, quite another. I do not know what considerations compelled Baer to advance his thesis, but the insistence with which he does it makes me wonder if they were confined exclusively to dispassionate scholarly interest. When, in the introduction, Baer asks the reader to reimagine the past and “conceptualise a Europe that is not merely Christian,” a Europe that remains European regardless of whether it is ruled by Christians or Muslims, it feels almost as if Baer wants us to reimagine the future. Predictably, as with all such endeavors, it is the history that suffers.

Baer’s thesis is simple: the Ottoman Empire was a European empire like any other. The problem is not with the argument itself, but with Baer’s manipulation of history to present it. He claims that the Ottomans saw themselves as heirs of the Roman Caesars and Byzantine emperors, the new rulers of Rum. But “Rum” was a geographic marker for Byzantium, not Ancient Rome. While it is true that “Roman Caesar” was one of the titles Mehmed the Conqueror used for himself, as Caroline Finkel writes in her scholarly Osman’s Dream, whether he actually had any designs on Rome is questionable. His troops landed on Italian shores but never followed up. In their attempt to secure legitimacy by acquiring a noble lineage, the Ottomans first claimed they descended from the Seljuks, then upgraded to a Central Asian Turkic tribe that counted Noah and his son Japheth as progenitors. When Bayezid I sought independence from Tamerlane, he applied to the Caliph in Cairo for the appropriate title (see Osman’s Dream). Europeans never entered the equation. The Ottomans gave their princesses to Muslim princes, never to Christian ones (although this might have been for religious reasons). It is true that Ottoman sultans often had Christian mothers who came from Byzantine, Serbian, and Armenian families, but that might have been more a function of geographic contiguity and the Ottomans’ extensive use of slavery than cultural or civilizational affinity. To forge their identity, the Ottomans looked east, not west.

But even if they did glance westwards, when it comes to questions of identity and belonging, the decisive factor is not how you see yourself, but how others see you. Unlike Baer, Europeans had reservations about Ottoman Europeanness throughout history. The Ottoman Empire was always seen as the Other. When Murad I was killed at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the French king said his thanks to God at Notre-Dame. For Baer, Suleiman I’s ambitions to unite East and West under one monarch and one religion are illustrative of Ottoman universalism. After all, Baer writes, it never occurred to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, to desire leadership of the Muslim world. But perhaps the Holy Roman Emperor had no such thoughts precisely because he regarded the Ottoman Empire — which, despite its multiethnic and multireligious nature, was first and foremost a Sunni Muslim entity — as a non-European civilization and had no idea what he could ever do with it. The Congress of Vienna that followed Napoleon’s defeat excluded the Ottoman Empire from the new world order — “despite its role in the recent wars,” Baer adds, as if dealings and interactions with a club somehow automatically made you its member. And if we grant history a certain degree of metaphysics, we might allow there was nothing random about the Ottoman failure to take Vienna in the 17th century and the repulsion of the Ottomans to the periphery of Christendom. Turkey’s present candidacy for EU membership, on hold for more than two decades, suggests that Europeans continue to hold complicated views about Turkey’s place in the European family. Baer might bristle at this Eurocentricity — but see the first sentence of this paragraph.

Speculation and jerry-built conclusions abound. Where did Brunelleschi, a goldsmith with “no formal architectural training,” look for inspiration while working on the dome of Florence’s Duomo? A quick Google search says it was the Pantheon in Rome but, in Baer’s conceptualization of the East-West relationship, Brunelleschi might have actually been inspired by a Persian mausoleum built in the early 14th century. A dynastic squabble that forced the Ottomans to engage in diplomacy with European powers to keep a claimant to the Ottoman throne, who was then taking refuge in Europe, away from the empire is, for Baer, sufficient evidence that Ottoman rulers were “part of European Renaissance culture.” This is like saying that Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps means Carthage was part of Ancient Roman culture. According to Baer, the regicide of Osman II in 1622 should be viewed in the same context as the execution of Charles I in 1649; I am still not sure why. Baer’s fussing over Ottoman influence on Europe is inconsequential. Yes, the Ottomans held much of Hungary for a century and a half; yes, traces and vestiges of Ottoman culture are still visible in places like Budapest, Thessaloniki, and Sarajevo. But so what? The Moors controlled the Iberian Peninsula for much longer, and their legacy is still prominently on display in the south of Spain. I have yet to see anyone refer to the Moors as a European power. To bolster his thesis, Baer occasionally jumps to the most astonishing conclusions. Apropos of the culture of pederasty among Ottoman elites, a topic that gets an entire chapter in the book, Baer writes that “the fact that mature men had boy lovers means that the Ottomans were quintessentially Europeans” — surely the most radical definition of Europeanness I have ever come across.

By dint of its location, the Ottoman Empire lay on a civilizational fault line; identity-related questions were bound to be vexing (for modern Turkey, the direct descendant of the Ottoman Empire, they still are). To determine whether the Ottoman Empire was European, you first need to determine whether Europe is a geographic or civilizational concept. For Baer, Europe is both a geography and an idea. But he never says what kind of idea he has in mind. The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, whose novel The White Castle makes a cameo appearance in the introduction and conclusion of The Ottomans, tackles this theme in the short essay “Where is Europe?” The title might be best imagined not as a question about the physical location of Europe (Pamuk is perfectly aware of where Europe is — as he says in the essay, he has spent most of his life living in it, on the European side of Istanbul, and besides, geography only takes us so far; in strictly geographic terms, the extreme west of Kazakhstan is also Europe), but about why Europe is so long in coming. This suggests he does not believe Turkey is quite European: “For people like me, who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has figured always as a dream, a vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared; a goal to achieve or a danger. A future — but never a memory. So too my own memories of things European . . . I have no real memory of Europe. What I have are the European dreams and illusions of a man who has lived out his life in Istanbul” (from the anthology Other Colors). Pamuk writes he feels like a European but only in a geographic sense — a tacit acknowledgement that there is more to Europe than just cartography. Where does that leave Turkey? The essay ends on an ambiguous note. But perhaps the act of having written such an essay is in itself an answer. Would it occur to a French or Norwegian writer to meditate on the topic?

With appropriate modifications here and there, Pamuk’s essay might have been written by a Russian. The ambivalence inherent in Turkish attitudes towards Europe — a mix of admiration and resentment, a schizophrenic state in which the desire for acceptance coexists alongside the desire to show the accepting party up — deftly sketched out by Orhan would be familiar to many a Russian. Like the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Russia is in Europe but not quite of it. It has suffered from an identity crisis ever since Peter the Great opened his “window” to the West. Geographically, Russia is the most populous country in Europe, but for many both inside and outside Russia, it is not Europe, and the question of Russian Europeanness remains an “accursed” one in Russia’s cultural discourse. Nikolai Danilevsky, a hugely influential 19th-century Russian thinker, defined Europe as an offspring of Romano-German civilization of which Russia was obviously not a part, and the title of his magnum opus, Russia and Europe, draws a peremptory line between the two. (In this connection, I can’t help but mention the colorful Konstantin Leontiev, another 19th-century Russian thinker. Leontiev, whose ideas anticipated Spengler’s, served as a Russian diplomat in the Ottoman Empire and preferred what he saw there to European civilization.) Indeed, the idea that Russia is a non-European civilization has been so potent that some historians have interpreted the Russian Revolution as a revolt of the indigenous population (the Russian masses) against the domination of post-Petrine European elites. Europe was grafted onto Russia in a Procrustean way, and when Peter the Great set out to build Saint Petersburg, that most improbable of cities, he was working with a tabula rasa. The Ottomans had no such problems: Istanbul straddles both parts of the Bosporus. But Russia was Christian, even if its Christianity was Byzantine, and Peter’s task was bound to be easier than that of Kemal Atatürk two centuries later. If the civilizational identity of the Russian masses is unclear, the elites of tsarist Russia were either Europeanized or European. Russia’s last tsar was mostly of Germanic stock. Russian art was, and still is, European art.

The question to what degree the Ottomans, even Ottoman elites, were European is more complex. There is a graphic, unforgettable scene in Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina in which a man is impaled by having a spike hammered into his anus — on the express orders of an Ottoman official. The novel is a work of fiction, of course, and I do not propose that we judge the whole empire based on that scene. But the story of the Ottoman Empire is rich in violence. It’s not that Europe lacked it — far from it — but, as Baer shows himself, in the Ottoman Empire cruelty was an instrument of policy in a way that set the Ottomans apart from Europe. It often went hand-in-hand with cultural refinement. As Mehmed II, the sultan who conquered Constantinople, took in the magnificent interior of Hagia Sophia, he contemplated the transience of temporal life, reciting verses by the Persian poet Saadi. This was just after the sultan had given his troops carte blanche to plunder Constantinople and rape its inhabitants, and just before he executed a leading notable of the city and all of his sons because the notable had balked at Mehmed’s request to turn over his “beautiful youngest son” for the sultan’s delectation. Suleiman I, also known as Suleiman the Magnificent, had no qualms about strangling a grand vizier who had been so close to the sultan the two were said to have shared a bed. Devastated by the death of a son from plague, Suleiman turned pious, which did not prevent him from having another son strangled a decade later (and his grandson too, for good measure). From the early years of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the 16th century, fratricide was standard protocol in matters of royal succession; the new sultan simply wiped out all of his male relatives, including his brothers, to make sure there were no rival claimants to the throne.

Baer makes much of Ottoman tolerance and meritocracy. To the Ottomans’ credit, for much of its history the Ottoman empire was not given to the kind of religious sectarianism that drew so much blood in Europe. Ottoman rulers understood that a successful empire could not be run along ethnic or religious lines. While officially Sunni Muslim, it tolerated other religions in the realm as long as they did not disturb social order. The Ottomans welcomed Jews who had been driven out of Spain by the Spanish Inquisition, and it allowed some of them to rise to dizzying social heights. Sultans employed Jews as their personal doctors, and Jews also found employment as tax farmers. Ottoman officials, including top ones, often came from Christian backgrounds. The Ottomans knew how to recognize merit. Still, human nature and the political exigencies of the moment came first. The Ottoman Empire was latitudinarian until it no longer wasn’t. Baer tells of Esperanza Malki, a Spanish-Jewish lady-in-waiting to the sultan’s mother who, at the end of the 16th century, rose too far in the hierarchy for her own good and met a grim end at the hands of a mob. After ripping her apart, the rabble cut out her vulva and nailed its pieces to the doors of her supporters. The sultan, Mehmed III, who had watched the lynching, subsequently introduced anti-Jewish legislation, imposing clothing and employment restrictions on the Jewish population, and forcing Jews to wear a red cap for easy identification.

In the aftermath of a huge fire in Istanbul in 1660, the Jews and Christians saw their property confiscated — the conflagration was thought to be a divine punishment for lenient treatment of religious minorities. In 1680, just as Europe stood on the doorstep of the Enlightenment, a couple accused of interreligious adultery (he, Jewish; she, Muslim) was dragged into the Hippodrome in Istanbul for public execution in front of “hundreds of thousands of people.” As the sultan and his grand vizier looked on, the man was given a chance to convert to Islam before he was decapitated. The woman had no such luck, if that’s the right word. Despite her desperate protestations of innocence, she was buried in a pit up to her waist and then stoned by the crowd, her own brother casting the first stone. A writer who witnessed the grisly scene wrote that what was left of the woman reminded him of keşkek (a stew made of wheat and meat). When the Janissaries were eradicated in the 19th century in a cleaning of the Augean stables, the sultan also had their Jewish quartermasters murdered — the quartermasters had served as the dynasty’s money changers, and the sultan used the opportunity to confiscate their wealth and annul the debts owed to them. As Baer says judiciously, tolerance is an expression of power; those in a position to tolerate are also in a position to dictate the terms and extent of their tolerance — and to withhold it when needed. Ottoman tolerance disappeared at the slightest threat to the Ottoman conception of social order. A hunt for scapegoats ensued, and those who had been tolerated found out they had been merely on sufferance.

Baer writes that the eunuchs used by the Ottomans were a testament to “how far a person of humble African or Christian origins could rise in the Ottoman order of things.” Indeed — until you consider that the eunuchs had to pay with their genitals (Christian eunuchs lost their testicles, while the Africans lost both the testicles and the penis). The Islamic prohibition on the procedure was easily circumvented by the employment of Christian doctors to do the job. By Baer’s own admission, the operation maimed the eunuchs for life (though it apparently didn’t hamper their legendary longevity). A smell of urine accompanied the eunuchs, and they had to carry quilts in their turbans for use as catheters. “Castrated prior to puberty, their bones did not develop properly. They often suffered from osteoporosis . . . Hormonal imbalance conspired to make them unusually thin or very fat.” Such was the price of social mobility in the Ottoman order of things. And while men of humble origins could become the all-powerful grand viziers — a rank that corresponds to that of prime minister — their power was hardly enviable. Being a grand vizier was arguably the most dangerous job in the Ottoman Empire — when political complications arose, the grand vizier was often the first to be sacrificed. Sometimes, his execution was based on nothing more than sultanic caprice.

Nor was Ottoman meritocracy extended to the fairer sex the way it was in Europe. Women occasionally ruled the Ottoman Empire as regents but never as sultana (by comparison, Russia had four empresses in the 18th century, one of whom would go down in history as the Great). Then there was the Collection system, known as devşirme. To supply its administration with new cadres, the Ottomans used a “child levy” recruiting system whereby Christian children were forcibly removed from their families to be trained as devoted servants of the Ottoman state. As mentioned, the Ottoman Empire relied on slavery throughout its history. The slave market in Istanbul had to wait until the middle of the 19th century before it was closed, and even then, slavery was not formally abolished. Ottoman subjects convicted of apostasy were still beheaded as the Industrial Revolution took off in Europe; the last official beheading took place as late as 1843. There was an enlightenment period of sorts in the early 17th century during the reign of Ahmed III but, as Baer admits, it was short-lived. If Europe as an idea represents humanist values, Baer’s argument for the inclusion of the Ottoman Empire among European empires is not a successful one.

There are other areas where greater impartiality would have been welcome. For example, Baer’s description of the outbreak of hostilities between the Ottomans and Russia is tendentious; without explicitly saying it, he makes Russia look like the primary instigator of the Russo-Turkish War in 1768. In fact, it was the Ottoman Empire that declared war on Russia after the empire’s ultimatum demanding that Russia leave Poland went unheeded. Here and elsewhere, such treatment of history compromises the text. This is unfortunate — The Ottomans is highly readable and quite enjoyable as long as Baer sticks to the story at hand. But the author’s thesis is a bit like cheerleaders at a sports game — pointless and distracting. In the end, what made the Ottoman Empire similar to its European cohorts was not its Europeanness, such as it was, but that it too was governed by the laws of history. From its unlikely beginnings as an obscure Turkic tribe, it rose to become a great empire — until the same laws of history turned it into an anachronism. I am convinced that it was not the First World War itself that wiped the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, and the Ottoman dynasty off the map. The war was just the catalyst that hastened their demise. The Industrial Revolution and the modern age had made royal absolutism redundant and inefficient, and the Ottoman Empire ended like the rest of them, losing much of its territory and mutating into an ethnic state. The Ottomans became a memory. But it is a memory that continues to fascinate. Trying to peg the Ottoman Empire to Europe to make it more legible does it a disservice. A sui generis phenomenon, it is historically autonomous and should be approached on its own terms. If only Baer had done it in The Ottomans.