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Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin, Owl Books, 351 pp.; $15, paper
Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey by Nicole and Hugh Pope, Overlook Press, 373 pp.; $16.95, paper
In the horrifying dispatches from the Balkans over the past decade, and the reams of punditry and "news analysis" that followed, one piece of conventional wisdom appeared again and again, virtually unchallenged: the wholly negative role ascribed to the Turks in the history of the region. Every reporter seemed familiar with the Battle of Kosovo (1389)—where, the New York Times insisted in a endlessly repeated subordinate clause, the medieval Serbian nation went to its death. "Premodern state-formation in the Balkans," intoned William W. Hagen in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, "was short-circuited by the Ottoman Turkish conquest of the region during the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries." The 500-year Ottoman period in the Balkans was dismissed as a bad memory, an era of ethnic and religious bastardization, habituated corruption, and vectorless violence from which the Balkan states began to emerge in the nineteenth century only after a protracted struggle of national liberation. The Muslims of the Balkans, both Turks and Slavs, found themselves defined as outsiders, the illegitimate progeny of a long historical violation. The Republic of Turkey alone is left to absorb the blame for the Ottoman legacy.
But what would happen if instead of seeing them as separate and distinct, we were to study the history of the Balkan states and of modern Turkey together? It might be useful to think again of the states surrounding the Black Sea as linked through the legacies and rivalries of their common parents, the great pre-World War I empires of the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and the Romanovs.
Such a book has not yet been written. It is of great interest, however, that after several books about the Balkans were published during the 1990s, a new book about the Ottomans and a new book about modern Turkey appeared in bookstores. Jason Goodwin's Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire is, unfortunately, a grave disappointment; Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey, by Nicole and Hugh Pope, on the other hand, in many ways succeeds in presenting a readable interpretation, particularly of the last three decades of Turkish history.
Characterizing all peoples according to certain essential and unchanging national qualities, Goodwin casts the Turks as shamanistic warrior nomads, at odds both with peasant agricultural societies and with urban, orthodox Islam. For Goodwin, the Ottoman genius was to wed the warrior nomads' (supposed) lifestyle of indiscriminate raiding to the eclectic wizardry of frontier folk religion, raising a roof under which could be sheltered all manner of disaffected medieval adventurer. In time, however, this original, animating spirit of the Ottomans was first tamed, by the guardians of right religion and the counselors of efficient administration, and then cynically subverted by power-hungry dynastic sycophants, until it became a sham of grotesque pomp and opulence and came crashing down around them.
Sometimes this tale can seem highly entertaining, as in Goodwin's description of Sultan Mehmed II at the siege of Constantinople, or of the cosmopolitan multinationalism of the empire, or of the dogs of the capital city's streets. It is the kind of entertainment, however, that leaves a vague sense of emptiness, such as you might experience after seeing Disney's Pocahontas, when you remember it was supposed to have been based on a true story.
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