The historian Rui Ramos, who teaches at Lisbon’s New University, said, “All history is revisionist. History is an academic domain where one must emphasize originality, offering unique and diverse interpretations.” This challenge underpins Marc David Baer’s new work, The Ottomans, which joins a long list of recently-published works on this subject.

As suggested by the sub-title, Baer’s revisionism consists in emphasizing the dual nature of the Ottomans, at the same time European caesars and Asian khans. The secret of their long success, he argues, lies in this duality, and its abandonment resulted in their disappearance. He further claims that we have systematically overlooked the European legacy of the Ottomans, denying them their rightful place in western history. Are these ideas sufficient to justify a new book on the Ottomans?

Both Europeans and Turks have taken away divergent lessons from the collapse of the empire, and both are misleading.

The Ottoman state was, doubtless, dual nature by design. The Muslim, Turkish sultans in still predominantly Christian Anatolia and later completely Christian Thrace could only rule by co-opting, allying and converting local elites, Greeks, Slavs, Italians, Jews and Armenians. The Ottoman court continued to recruit outsiders down to the 19th century, when defeated Polish revolutionaries joined the sultan’s army as pashas (and converted to Islam). In its heyday, the empire forcefully recruited Christian boys into the elite infantry units, the Janissaries, and kidnapped Christian girls for the imperial harem. As a result of this latter practice, Muslim sultans could converse easily in Greek or Italian, the language of their mothers. Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, Baer reminds us, collected scientific and literary works in both those languages.

Baer’s enthusiasm for the empire as a cosmopolitan, European-oriented and tolerant state will surprise some readers. He is right to argue that the Ottomans were more tolerant than the Europeans, who expelled the Muslims from Spain and instituted the Inquisition to persecute the forcibly converted Jews. I would argue this is not a unique feature of Ottoman genius, but a tradition of Muslim statecraft. The Caliphs of Islam, after their first conquests of Syria and Egypt in the 7th century, ruled non-Muslims majorities. Only in the 13th century, did Christians become a minority religion in the Middle East. As the Ottomans expanded into Europe (and the Mughals into India) tolerance, not conversion, was the only option available to them.

The traditions of the rival Holy Roman Empire were completely different. Since the Roman Emperors embraced Christianity, religion and citizenship had been identical. With few exceptions (the Jews, the Moors of Spain, Sicily) Medieval Christendom had no tradition of ruling over non-Christians. Religious tolerance was simply unnecessary for the Ottomans’ rival for European domination, Emperor Charles V. The West only discovered the virtues of that policy in the political exhaustion following the murderous wars of religion. We can agree that the Ottomans’ practiced tolerance, but see it as no more than realpolitik.

Europe’s new-found tolerance never fully extended to Muslims. This laid the ground for tragedy in the later history of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek war of independence set the tone. What started off as  localized revolts, metastasized into the first instances of modern ethnic cleansing. The western powers insisted that the Sultan protect the Christians in the Empire, while at the same time the Emperor of Russia expelled the Tatars from the Crimea and the Circassians from the Caucasus. It was a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do.” The Europeans Powers acquiesced in the fiction that killing or displacing Muslims was an unavoidable aspect of the wars of national liberation, while what the Turks did to defend their own territories constituted atrocities. This hypocrisy insidiously facilitated the greatest atrocity of all, the massacre of the Armenians during World War One. As a result, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, it elicited little regret.

A more painful legacy, because of its actuality, is the misreading by the Turks of their history.

Both Europeans and Turks have taken away divergent lessons from the collapse of the empire, and both are misleading. As Baer points out, the Ottoman role in European history is understated, and when remembered, viewed as negative. We think of the massacres of Missolonghi, depicted by Delacroix, rather than the Drina Bridge of Sokolović Paşa. The negative view of the Ottomans reflects not just a bias against the Turks, I argue, but ignorance about Eastern Europe in general. This region, deeply linked to Asia through the Byzantines, the Mongols as well as the Ottomans, is poorly understood by European readers who think of Europe stopping at the River Elbe.^[1]As did Germany’s Chancellor Adenhauer, who famously sighed, when crossing that river on his way to Berlin, “Ach, Asien”. To the extent the Ottomans figure in western European history (ie, Hapsburg, Venetian, Papal), they are the bogey-men who threaten the normal state of things. Yet the 16th-century English and the French viewed the Hapsburgs as the bogey men and prayed for Ottoman victories against them. There is also a philo-Ottoman legacy.

A more painful legacy, because of its actuality, is the misreading by the Turks of their history. They are not taught to appreciate the cosmopolitan aspect of their ancestors’ empire, when high positions were open to talented Jews and Armenians. Many Turks, especially members of the nationalist MHP party, like to recall the Empire as it never was, a homogenous Turkish and Sunni-Muslim state. Baer’s book, with its emphasis on the role of minorities and deviant Sufi groups, will not be to their liking.

It’s unfortunate that a work based on painstaking and original research should contain mistakes that could have been easily caught by a friendly re-reader. The Mongols of Iran did not practice Tibetan Buddhism, Tamerlane did not claim Genghisid descent, the King of Prussia did not call himself Kaiser in 1850 and the British didn’t have a Black Sea Fleet in 1918. This reviewer found that the author’s focus on the use and abuse of people’s private parts is overused as a means of juicing up the narrative. We learn, for example, that antinomian dervishes practiced intimate body piercing. Did I need to know? On the other hand, there is a frank discussion of Ottoman sexuality that will enlighten many readers, without demonstrating, as Baer claims, a greater commonality with Europe. That is, in the end, my biggest caveat about Baer’s thesis. By humanizing the Ottomans, he makes them not more European, but simply more universal.

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David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019) and Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empire (WW Norton, July 2024).