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Gods Shadow Sultan Selim His Ottoman Empire And The Making Of The Modern World
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Download or read book God's Shadow written by Alan Mikhail and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ottoman Empire was a hub of flourishing intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the helm of its ascent was the omnipotent Sultan Selim I (1470-1520), who, with the aid of his extraordinarily gifted mother, Gülbahar, hugely expanded the empire, propelling it onto the world stage. Aware of centuries of European suppression of Islamic history, Alan Mikhail centers Selim's Ottoman Empire and Islam as the very pivots of global history, redefining such world-changing events as Christopher Columbus's voyages - which originated, in fact, as a Catholic jihad that would come to view Native Americans as somehow "Moorish" - the Protestant Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the dramatic Ottoman seizure of the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on previously unexamined sources and written in gripping detail, Mikhail's groundbreaking account vividly recaptures Selim's life and world. An historical masterwork, God's Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of a world we thought we knew.A leading historian of his generation, Alan Mikhail, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, has reforged our understandings of the past through his previous three prize-winning books on the history of Middle East.
Book Synopsis God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World by : Alan Mikhail
Download or read book God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World written by Alan Mikhail and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “arresting” (New York Times Book Review) revisionist history demonstrating how Islam and the Ottoman Empire made our modern world. The history of the Ottoman Empire—once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power—has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West. With this “original and wide-ranging” (Wall Street Journal) global history, Alan Mikhail vitally recasts the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520). Drawing on previously unexamined sources, and upending prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories, Mikhail’s game-changing account radically transforms our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the annals of the modern world.
Book Synopsis Why the West Rules - For Now by : Ian Morris
Download or read book Why the West Rules - For Now written by Ian Morris and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 years of history, archeology, and the methods of social science, to make sense of when, how, and why the paths of development differed in the East and West — and what this portends for the 21st century. There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of "Long-Term Lock-In" theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can't have been inevitable; and so proponents of "Short-Term Accident" theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn't just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian's focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods to make sense of the past, present, and future — in a way no one has ever done before.
Book Synopsis The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by : Franco Moretti
Download or read book The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature written by Franco Moretti and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who – and what – are the Bourgeois? “The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?” Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature—a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords—“useful” and “earnest,” “efficiency,” “influence,” “comfort,” “roba”—and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the “working master” of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national malformations” of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.
Download or read book God's City written by Nic Fields and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2017-07-30 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantium. Was it Greek or Roman, familiar or hybrid, barbaric or civilized, Oriental or Western? In the late eleventh century Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Christendom, the seat of the Byzantine emperor, Christs vice-regent on earth, and the center of a predominately Christian empire, steeped in Greek cultural and artistic influences, yet founded and maintained by a Roman legal and administrative system. Despite the amalgam of Greek and Roman influences, however, its language and culture was definitely Greek. Constantinople truly was the capital of the Roman empire in the East, and from its founding under the first Constantinus to its fall under the eleventh and last Constantinus the inhabitants always called themselves Romaioi, Romans, not Hellniks, Greeks. Over its millennium long history the empire and its capital experienced many vicissitudes that included several periods of waxing and waning and more than one golden age.Its political will to survive is still eloquently proclaimed in the monumental double land walls of Constantinople, the greatest city fortifications ever built, on which the forces of barbarism dashed themselves for a thousand years. Indeed, Byzantium was one of the longest lasting social organizations in history. Very much part of this success story was the legendary Varangian Guard, the lite body of axe-bearing Northmen sworn to remain loyal to the true Christian emperor of the Romans. There was no hope for an empire that had lost the will to prosecute the grand and awful business of adventure. The Byzantine empire was certainly not of that stamp.
Download or read book Osman's Dream written by Caroline Finkel and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-08-01 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and most influential empires in world history. Its reach extended to three continents and it survived for more than six centuries, but its history is too often colored by the memory of its bloody final throes on the battlefields of World War I. In this magisterial work-the first definitive account written for the general reader-renowned scholar and journalist Caroline Finkel lucidly recounts the epic story of the Ottoman Empire from its origins in the thirteenth century through its destruction in the twentieth.
Book Synopsis The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire by : George H. Junne
Download or read book The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire written by George H. Junne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chief Black Eunuch, appointed personally by the Sultan, had both the ear of the leader of a vast Islamic Empire and held power over a network of spies and informers, including eunuchs and slaves throughout Constantinople and beyond. The story of these remarkable individuals, who rose from difficult beginnings to become amongst the most powerful people in the Ottoman Empire, is rarely told. George Junne places their stories in the context of the wider history of African slavery, and places them at the centre of Ottoman history. The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire marks a new direction in the study of courtly politics and power in Constantinople.
Download or read book IZZ of ZIA written by Tom Icon and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine a book that has you sitting at the edge of your seat, turning each page, from cover to cover with breathless anticipation. Your heart pounds, your hands sweat, your mind wanting to know what happens next. Have you ever read a book that has you mused one moment to the next, and then breaks your heart and leaves you with tears streaming down your cheeks. Are you ready for a read so thought provoking that after reading it you are left changed forever. This is that book. Izz of Zia is the first novel of a three part trilogy that can be interpreted on two separate horizontal stratums: as an exciting, fantasy, action, adventure, or as a deeply spiritual saga. Izz of Zia is set in the First Age of the Noble Kings, in the Middle Era of the First Millennia, in the year one hundred and eleven, in the days of King Ozzdon, in the Empire of Xylenia, on the planet Zia. Betrayal from within threatens to tear a world that has lived in peace for thousands of years apart forever. This work is a multi-faceted writing that intertwines heartbreak with adoration, deceit with truth, betrayal with loyalty, creating a web in which two young heartthrobs that are as different as the east is far from the west learn the fathomless meaning of passion, devotion and true love. This is a book about a faith filled heart that wills to keep going no matter how many time it breaks, no matter how low life beats it down, no matter how close death comes to sweeping it under, hope rises from within. Prepare to be inspired by a love whose story begs to be told, and refuses to be denied no matter how painful, tragic, or tear-jerking.
Download or read book Süleymanname written by Esin Atıl and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Suleymanname is an imperial illuminated manuscript, housed in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. It was commissioned by the Sultan Suleyman I, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, when the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith. This facsimile edition is printed in four colours plus gold, and in tritone.
Book Synopsis Imperial Mecca by : Michael Christopher Low
Download or read book Imperial Mecca written by Michael Christopher Low and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Book Synopsis Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt by : Alan Mikhail
Download or read book Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt written by Alan Mikhail and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of the first ever environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, Alan Mikhail examines relations between the empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Based on both the local records of various towns and villages in rural Egypt and the imperial orders of the Ottoman state, this book charts how changes in the control of natural resources fundamentally altered the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Egypt and throughout the empire. In revealing how Egyptian peasants were able to use their knowledge and experience of local environments to force the hand of the imperial state, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt tells a story of the connections of empire stretching from canals in the Egyptian countryside to the palace in Istanbul, from the forests of Anatolia to the shores of the Red Sea, and from a plague flea's bite to the fortunes of one of the most powerful states of the early modern world.
Book Synopsis The Greek Revolution by : Mark Mazower
Download or read book The Greek Revolution written by Mark Mazower and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize • One of The Economist's top history books of the year From one of our leading historians, an important new history of the Greek War of Independence—the ultimate worldwide liberal cause célèbre of the age of Byron, Europe’s first nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of the Ottoman Empire—published two hundred years after its outbreak As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece to fight and die—along with many more who followed events passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans. Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory for a completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.
Download or read book Tsar and Sultan written by Victor Taki and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tsar and Sultan offers a unique insight into Russian Orientalism as the intellectual force behind Russian-Ottoman encounters. Through war diaries and memoirs, accounts of captivity and diplomatic correspondences, Victor Taki's analysis of military documents demonstrates a crucial aspect of Russia's discovery of the Orient based on its rivalry with the Ottoman Empire. Narratives depicting the brutal realities of Russian-Turkish military conflicts influenced the Orientalisation of the Ottoman Empire. In turn, Russian identity was built as the counter-image to the demonised Turk. This book explains the significance of Russian Orientalism on Russian identity and national policies of westernisation. Students of both European and Middle East studies will appreciate Taki's unique approach to Russian-Turkish relations and their influence on Eurasian history.
Book Synopsis Coping with Defeat by : Jonathan Laurence
Download or read book Coping with Defeat written by Jonathan Laurence and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising similarities in the rise and fall of the Sunni Islamic and Roman Catholic empires in the face of the modern state Coping with Defeat presents a historical panorama of the Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires and exposes striking parallels in their relationship with the modern state. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research in Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe, Jonathan Laurence demonstrates how, over hundreds of years, both Sunni and Catholic authorities experienced three major shocks and displacements—religious reformation, the rise of the nation-state, and mass migration. As a result, Catholic institutions eventually accepted the state’s political jurisdiction and embraced transnational spiritual leadership as their central mission. Laurence reveals an analogous process unfolding across the Sunni Muslim world in the twenty-first century. Identifying institutional patterns before and after political collapse, Laurence shows how centralized religious communities relinquish power at different rates and times. Whereas early Christianity and Islam were characterized by missionary expansion, religious institutions forged in the modern era are primarily defensive in nature. They respond to the simple but overlooked imperative to adapt to political defeat while fighting off ideological challenges to their spiritual authority. Among Laurence’s findings is that the disestablishment of Islam—the doing away with Islamic affairs ministries in the Muslim world—would harm, not help with, reconciliation to the rule of law. Examining upheavals in geography, politics, and demography, Coping with Defeat considers how centralized religions make peace with the loss of prestige.
Book Synopsis The Sultan of Byzantium by : Selcuk Altun
Download or read book The Sultan of Byzantium written by Selcuk Altun and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fighting the Ottoman invaders in Constantinople in 1453, Emperor Constantine XI was killed, his body never found. Legend has it that he escaped in a Genoese ship, cheating certain death at the hands of the Turks and earning himself the title of Immortal Emperor. Five centuries after his disappearance, three mysterious men contact a young professor living in Istanbul. Members of a secret sect, they have guarded the Immortal Emperor's will for generations. They tell him that he is the next Byzantine emperor and that in order to take possession of his fortune he must carry out his ancestor's last wishes. The professor embarks on a dangerous journey, taking him to the heart of a mystery of epic historical significance. The Sultan of Byzantium is a symbiosis of story and history and a homage to Byzantine civilisation.
Book Synopsis Suleiman the Magnificent by : André Clot
Download or read book Suleiman the Magnificent written by André Clot and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suleiman the Magnificent, most glorious of the Ottoman sultans, kept Europe atremble for nearly half a century. In a few years he led his army as far as the gates of Vienna, made himself master of the Mediterranean and established his court in Baghdad. Faced with this redoubtable champion, who regarded it as his duty to extend the boundaries of Islam farther and farther, the Christian world struggled to unite against him. 'The Shadow of God on Earth', but also an expert politician and all-powerful despot, Suleiman ruled the state firmly with the help of his viziers. He extended the borders of the empire beyond what any of the Ottoman sultans had achieved, yet it is primarily as a lawgiver that he is remembered in Turkish history. His empire held dominion over three continents populated by more than thirty million inhabitants, among whom nearly all of the races and religions of mankind were represented. Prospering under a well-directed, authoritarian economy, Suleiman's reign marked the apogee of Ottoman power. City and country alike experienced unprecedented economic and demographic growth. Istanbul was the largest city in the world, enjoying a remarkable renaissance of arts and letters; a mighty capital, it was the seat of the Seraglio and dark intrigue. 'Clot's informed and intelligent study is to be commended ... Brings back to life a man, an empire and an era.' -- Digest of Middle East Studies 'Excellent ... The best book from which to gain an introduction to Suleiman's era.' -- Middle East Journal
Book Synopsis The Battle of Chaldiran by : Charles River Editors
Download or read book The Battle of Chaldiran written by Charles River Editors and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading The town of Caldiran (Chaldiran) in Turkey is home to about 60,000 people. On a plain close to the Iranian border, it it backdropped by the Armenian Ranges and very close to a Faultline, which has ensured it's suffered from seismic activity many times in the past. But in the early 16th century, it was the site of different kinds of faultlines, serving as a battleground between the region's two greatest powers as they clashed over politics and religion. In the wake of taking Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire would spend the next few centuries expanding its size, power, and influence on the way to becoming one of the world's most important geopolitical players. It was a rise that would not truly start to wane until the 19th century, and while its most memorable conflicts were fought against the Europeans, the course of Ottoman history was greatly impacted by events against the other major Muslim power in its region: the Safavid Empire. Naturally, the two powers quickly took up the geopolitical positions of the old Byzantine and Persian Empires in the time before Islam and fought over much of the same territory, including Mesopotamia, the Caucuses, today's eastern Turkey and the Persian Gulf. Their first battle was fought in 1514, their first real war was fought from 1532-1555, and they continued to spar regularly until the early 19th century, when European colonialism forced them both onto the defensive. Echoes of these conflicts can be seen in the recent sparring between Iran and Turkey through proxies in Iraq and Syria. On August 23, 1514 the two sides clashed at Chaldiran in a contest for hegemony over the Middle East, and the results have affected the Middle East ever since. Regrettably, few concrete details of the actual battle survive, a not uncommon obstacle when studying battles from the Middle Ages. However, the course of the conflict can be reconstructed from the politics of the time, knowledge of the characters involved, the contemporary records are available, and what followed the battle. There is no lasting monument to the battle in Chaldiran on site, but there is on the Iranian side of the border, nearly 20 miles to the east near the village of Gala Ashaki. It consists of a domed tomb for a Persian general, Sayyed Sharif-al-Din Ali Shirazi, who fell in the battle. He was the chief religious cleric of Shah Ismail I, the first of the Safavid rulers of Persia and a leader who brought a monumental religious shift to the Middle East. Believing himself the "Shadow of God" and his chosen vessel, he set about transforming Persia and the globe through his fanatical religious militia, the Qizilbash. He meant to lead not only Persia but the entire Islamic world, but this vision was vehemently opposed by Sultan Selim I of the Ottoman Empire. Selim the Grim had fought tenaciously for possession of his throne, and he too believed himself chosen by God to rule all Muslims. The battle is depicted in a magnificent painting in Sayyed Sharif-al-Din Ali Shirazi's tomb. In the foreground of the representation, Shah Ismail I of Persia leads his Qizilbash in a charge against the Ottoman cavalry, riding over the corpses of the slain. In the middle, Sultan Selim (who did not actually participate in the battle, though he was present) leads an almost leisurely advance toward the Persian cavalry, preceded by two Janissaries armed with axes. In the background, the Ottoman artillery delivers a barrage into the Qizilbash, who are falling or fleeing. It seems to be a chronological depiction of the conflict, and though the figure Ismail is clearly the centerpiece, there is no attempt to mask the fact that the battle was a catastrophic defeat for the Persians.
