Ottoman Studies

Sultan Mehmet II, known to his countrymen as 'the Conqueror' and to much of Europe as 'the Terror of the World,' was once Europe's most feared and powerful ruler. Now, Turkey?s most beloved American scholar, John Freely, brings to life this charismatic hero of one of the richest histories in the world. Mehmet was barely twenty-one when he conquered Byzantine Constantinople, which became Istanbul and the capital of his mighty empire. Mehmet reigned for thirty years, during which time his armies extended the borders of his empire halfway across Asia Minor and as far into Europe as Hungary and Italy. Three popes called for crusades against him as Christian Europe came face to face with a new Muslim empire. Revered by the Turks and seen as a brutal tyrant by the West, Mehmet was a brilliant military leader as well as a renaissance prince. His court housed Persian and Turkish poets, Arab and Greek astronomers, and Italian scholars and artists. In the first biography of Mehmet in thirty years, John Freely vividly illuminates the man behind the myths.

This major study is a comprehensive scholarly work on a key moment in the history of Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The result of years of research, it presents all available sources along with critical evaluations of these narratives. The authors have consulted texts in all relevant languages, both those that remain only in manuscript and others that have been printed, often in careless and inferior editions. Attention is also given to 'folk history' as it evolved over centuries, producing prominent myths and folktales in Greek, medieval Russian, Italian, and Turkish folklore. Part I, The Pen, addresses the complex questions introduced by this myriad of original literature and secondary sources.

From the famous siege of Constantinople in 1453 through the numerous other campaigns that securely established the Ottoman Empire, the events in the life of the emperor Mehmed II are the subject of this classic biography. One of the most important figures in Ottoman history, Mehmed was the architect of victories that inspired fear throughout Europe and contributed to an image of the Turk prevalent in Western art and literature for many years. "Fascinating. . . . From the Western viewpoint, Mehmed was seen as the man who gave the death blow to Byzantium, destroying the last vestige of the Eastern Roman Empire. Not surprisingly, the Turks regard him as the greatest of all sultans, a figure unparalleled in the history of the world for military prowess, statecraft, patronage of the arts and sciences."--Robert Kirsch, The Los Angeles Times Book Review "The definitive scholarly biography of the Ottoman emperor who in 1453 conquered Constantinople. . . . Mehmed's career is a study of battle, murder, and sudden death, of brutality, perfidy, and spite, with no moral superiority awardable to either Christians or Muslims."--The New Yorker

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 marked the end of a thousand years of the Christian Roman Empire. Thereafter, world civilisation began a process of radical change. The West came to identify itself as Europe; the Russians were set on the path of autocracy; the Ottomans were transformed into a world power while the Greeks were left exiles in their own land. The loss of Constantinople created a void. How that void was to be filled is the subject of this book. Michael Angold examines the context of late Byzantine civilisation and the cultural negotiation which allowed the city of Constantinople to survive for so long in the face of Ottoman power. He shows how the devastating impact of its fall lay at the centre of a series of interlocking historical patterns which marked this time of decisive change for the late medieval world. This concise and original study will be essential reading for students and scholars of Byzantine and late medieval history, as well as anyone with an interest in this significant turning point in world history.

Kaya Şahin's book offers a revisionist reading of Ottoman history during the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566). By examining the life and works of a bureaucrat, Celalzade Mustafa, Şahin moves beyond traditional, teleological approaches and argues that the empire was built as part of the Eurasian momentum of empire building, and demonstrates the imperial vision of sixteenth-century Ottomans. This unique study shows that, in contrast with many Eurocentric views, the Ottomans were active players in European politics, with an imperial culture in direct competition with that of the Habsburgs and the Safavids. Indeed, this book explains Ottoman empire building with reference to the larger Eurasian context, from Tudor England to Mughal India, contextualizing such issues as state formation, imperial policy, and empire building in the period more generally. Şahin's work also devotes significant attention to the often-ignored religious dimension of the Ottoman-Safavid struggle, showing how the rivalry redefined Sunni and Shiite Islam, laying the foundations for today's religious tensions.

In this seminal study, Jane Hathaway presents a wide-ranging reassessment of the effects of Ottoman rule on the Arab Lands of Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq and Yemen - the first of its kind in over forty years. Challenging outmoded perceptions of this period as a demoralizing prelude to the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hathaway depicts an era of immense social, cultural, economic and political change which helped to shape the foundations of today's modern Middle and Near East. Taking full advantage of a wide range of Arabic and Ottoman primary sources, she examines the changing fortunes of not only the political elite but also the broader population of merchants, shopkeepers, peasants, tribal populations, religious scholars, women, and ethnic and religious minorities who inhabited this diverse and volatile region. With masterly concision and clarity, Hathaway guides the reader through all the key current approaches to and debates surrounding Arab society during this period. This is far more than just another political history; it is a global study which offers an entirely new perspective on the era and region as a whole.

atih devri sonrası taht kavgasında Cem Sultan'ın sığındığı Rodos'taki St. Jean şövalyelerine Osmanlı tarihi kitaplarında sıkça değinilir; ama Doğu Akdeniz'de hassas bir dönemde stratejik bir yeri olan bu Hıristiyan gücü derinlemesine inceleyen kaynak yok gibidir. Nicolas Vatin bu "hacimli" kitapta, "efsanevi" Rodos şövalyelerinin tarihini efsanelerden arındırmaya ve belgesel bir zemine oturtmaya girişiyor. Üstelik bunu çift taraftan, yani hem Osmanlı, hem de Rodos şövalyelerinin kayıtlarına dayanarak yapıyor. Rodos'a egemen oldukları dönemde, Hıristiyan Batı'yla egemenlik alanını devamlı genişleten Osmanlı İmparatorluğu arasındaki çatışma hattında kalan şövalyeler, var olmak için çok kıvrak bir diplomatik yeteneğe, koşullara göre ayarlanan ekonomik faaliyetlere, insan unsurunu etkin kullanmaya ve gerektiğinde korsanlığa başvuran bir deniz gücüne sahip olmak durumundaydılar. Bu kitap, çok yönlü ve çok karakterli bu hikâyenin belgesel analizini yapıyor. Kitapta hem hikâyenin arka planı, hem de karakterler üzerindeki sis bulutu dağılıyor. Vatin ayrıca, konuyla ilgili önemli Osmanlı belgelerini, hem özgün hem de çevrimyazı halinde, Ekler kısmında okura sunuyor.

The father of the legendary Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, Selim I ("The Grim") set the stage for centuries of Ottoman supremacy by doubling the size of the empire. Conquering Eastern Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt, Selim promoted a politicized Sunni Ottoman* identity against the Shiite Safavids of Iran, thus shaping the early modern Middle East. Analyzing a wide array of sources in Ottoman-Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, H. Erdem Cipa offers a fascinating revisionist reading of Selim's rise to power and the subsequent reworking and mythologizing of his persona in 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman historiography. In death, Selim continued to serve the empire, becoming represented in ways that reinforced an idealized image of Muslim sovereignty in the early modern Eurasian world.

Exploring the reasons for a flurry of geographical works in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, this study analyzes how cartographers, travellers, astrologers, historians and naval captains promoted their vision of the world and the centrality of the Ottoman Empire in it. It proposes a new case study for the interconnections among empires in the period, demonstrating how the Ottoman Empire shared political, cultural, economic, and even religious conceptual frameworks with contemporary and previous world empires.

This two-part volume offers a comprehensive account of the conflict between the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires. Part One explores Ottoman-Mamluk relations from their inception in the middle of the 14th century to the laying of the foundations of the conflict in the second half of the 15th century. Part Two offers a detailed description of the actual war of 1485-91, and analyzes it from various angles including military, economic, and diplomatic.Based largely on Ottoman, Mamluk and Italian primary sources documentary and narrative the volume helps to understand the second and final war between the Ottomans and Mamluks in 1516-17, which resulted in the downfall of the Mamluk Empire and the firm establishment of Ottoman power in the Middle East.

This work reframes sixteenth-century history, incorporating the Ottoman empire more thoroughly into European, Asian and world history. It analyzes the Ottoman Empire's expansion eastward in the contexts of claims to universal sovereignty, Levantine power politics, and the struggle for control of the oriental trade. Challenging the notion that the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire was merely a reactive economic entity driven by the impulse to territorial conquest, Brummett portrays it as inheritor of Euro-Asian trading networks and participant in the contest for commercial hegemony from Genoa and Venice to the Indian Ocean. Brummett shows that the development of seapower was crucial to this endeavor, enabling the Ottomans to subordinate both Venice and the Mamluk kingdom to dependency relationships and providing the Ottoman ruling class access to commercial investment and wealth.

Between 1453 and 1526 Muslims founded three major states in the Mediterranean, Iran and South Asia: respectively the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. By the early seventeenth century their descendants controlled territories that encompassed much of the Muslim world, stretching from the Balkans and North Africa to the Bay of Bengal and including a combined population of between 130 and 160 million people. This book is the first comparative study of the politics, religion, and culture of these three empires between 1300 and 1923. At the heart of the analysis is Islam, and how it impacted on the political and military structures, the economy, language, literature and religious traditions of these great empires. This original and sophisticated study provides an antidote to the modern view of Muslim societies by illustrating the complexity, humanity and vitality of these empires, empires that cannot be reduced simply to religious doctrine.

The "fascinating...lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

This text examines the reign of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, who dominated the Mediterranean and Ottoman worlds, in its wider political and diplomatic context. He expanded the Ottoman Empire, capturing Rhodes, Belgrade, Hungary, the Red Sea coast of Arabia, and besieged Vienna.

In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia. The Ottoman Age of Exploration is the first comprehensive historical account of this century-long struggle for global dominance, a struggle that raged from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, and from the interior of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. Based on extensive research in the archives of Turkey and Portugal, as well as materials written on three continents and in a half dozen languages, it presents an unprecedented picture of the global reach of the Ottoman state during the sixteenth century. It does so through a dramatic recounting of the lives of sultans and viziers, spies, corsairs, soldiers-of-fortune, and women from the imperial harem. Challenging traditional narratives of Western dominance, it argues that the Ottomans were not only active participants in the Age of Exploration, but ultimately bested the Portuguese in the game of global politics by using sea power, dynastic prestige, and commercial savoir faire to create their own imperial dominion throughout the Indian Ocean.

Hedda Reindl'in bu araştırması, Türk tarihi hakkında yazılmış eserler arasında her zaman seçkin bir yer tutmuştur. Ancak ARVANA kitaplarının yayınladığı çeviri sayesinde ilk kez Türk okuruyla buluşmaktadır. Hedda Reindl'in araştırması ihmal edilmiş, gölgede kalmış bir hükümdar olan II.Bayezid ve dönemini ele alırken bir başka boşluğu daha tamamlamıştır.
Tarih yazıları genellikle ele aldıkları "birinci" kişiye odaklanır. Tarihin diğer özneleri ise gölge halinde onu izler. Oysa bu çalışma adını şöyle bir duyup geçtiğimiz pek çok ismin yaşam öyküsünü de bize sunmakta, merakımıza seslenmektedir.

Mahmud Pasha Angelovic served as Grand Vezir under Sultan Mehmed II, in the years following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, which were marked by an extensive imperial project, transforming the Ottoman principality into an empire.This book attempts to piece together the available evidence on Mahmud Pashas Byzantine descent and family network, as well as his multi-faceted contribution to the founding of the new empire, through military leadership, diplomatic practices and architectural and literary patronage, considering also his execution and the creation of a posthumous legend presenting him as a martyr.Using Ottoman, Greek and Western sources, as well as archival material, this study focuses on the period of transition from Byzantine to Ottoman Empire and would be of interest to historians and other specialists studying that period.

The period of Ottoman rule in Greek history has undergone a dramatic reassessment in recent years. Long reviled as four hundred years of unrelieved slavery and barbarity under "the Turkish yoke", a new generation of scholars, based mainly but not exclusively in Greece, is rejecting thismonochromatic view in favour of a more nuanced picture of the Greek experience in the Ottoman Empire.This volume considers this new scholarship, most of it in Greek, and makes it accessible for the first time to a wider audience. Molly Greene also discusses the changing views of the Ottoman Empire more generally and assesses what this changing historiography can tell us about this period in Greekhistory.Four main themes provide the foundation for the book and run through the individual chapters: the fate of the 1,000-year Byzantine heritage; the millet system and Ottoman society; the connections between the Greek population and other members of Ottoman society, especially in cultural life; and, theGreeks and Europe. The book begins with the conventional date of 1453, the fall of Constantinople, and includes debates over the extent to which 1453 represented a real break with the past. The volume ends with the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774, which brought to an end the relative peace andstability of the Ottoman eighteenth century and helped to usher in the nationalist movements in the region.

This is a detailed analysis of Byzantine political attitudes towards the Ottomans and western Europeans during the critical last century of Byzantium. The book covers three major regions of the Byzantine Empire - Thessalonike, Constantinople, and the Morea - where the political orientations of aristocrats, merchants, the urban populace, peasants, and members of ecclesiastical and monastic circles are examined against the background of social and economic conditions. Through its particular focus on the political and religious dispositions of individuals, families and social groups, the book offers an original view of late Byzantine politics and society that is not found in conventional narratives. Drawing on a wide range of Byzantine, western and Ottoman sources, it authoritatively illustrates how late Byzantium was drawn into an Ottoman system in spite of the westward-looking orientation of the majority of its ruling elite.

Halil İnalcık’ın, vefatından önce yayınevimize verdiği eserlerinden biri olan İstanbul Tarihi Araştırmaları’nda, altmış yıl boyunca İstanbul tarihine çeşitli araştırmalarıyla katkıda bulunmuş İnalcık’ın konuyla ilgili makaleleri ve daha önce yayımlanmamış çalışmaları bir arada sunuluyor. Eserin birinci bölümünde, İstanbul’un fethinden sonra şehrin yeniden nüfuslandırılması ve inşa faaliyetlerine dair muhtelif çalışmalarını bir araya toplayan İnalcık, Türk-İslâm şehri olarak şehrin bu yeniden kuruluş sürecini, arşiv vesikalarından ve çeşitli dillerdeki kaynak eserlerden yola çıkarak inceliyor. Ayrıca şehrin nüfusu, yerleşim yerleri ve ekonomik hayatı kitabın ciddi katkıları arasında. İkinci bölümde ise İnalcık, Bilâd-i Selâse olarak Galata, Eyüp ve Üsküdar üzerine araştırmalarını sunuyor. Çeşitli İstanbul sayımlarının yanı sıra, 1885 Tarihli İstanbul Sayımı’na büyük bir parantez açarak İstanbul’un demografisinin yapısal özellikleri üzerinde duruyor. 1911 yılına ait İstanbul’daki mevcut mahallelerin bir listesini vererek, 1453’ten 1911 yılına değin geniş bir yelpazede İstanbul’un bir Türk-İslâm şehri olarak gelişim evrelerini gösteriyor. İstanbul Tarihi Araştırmaları’nda, İnalcık’ın 2012 yılında yayımlanan ve fetihten sonra yapılan İstanbul’un ilk tahrîri olan The Survey of Istanbul 1455 adlı eseri ile birlikte, İstanbul tarihi üzerinde uzun yıllardır yaptığı araştırmalar bir bütün halinde sunulmuş oluyor.