Flow of conscience....I got very blurred memories from the nearly one thousand long history. Obviously you need to make some stresses or spikes in narration at the most focal points.

John Julius Norwich's 3-volume epic on Byzantium perfectly is a striking difference in its part dealing with Ottomans.

And I heard there's a better book on Ottoman Empire out there... ( )

An anecdotal romp through the history of the Ottoman Empire. A swift run through the characters and characteristics. Imaginative, florid writing that brings incidents together. But a bit like a tasty snack. Enjoyable but not filling. ( )

A wild ride - somewhat disjointed but treating a history of such breadth thematically rather than chronologically makes a kind of sense. What an amazing place ( )

This book was extremely interesting for it's excellent descriptions of the history and context of the various Sultans (or Sultan-Caliphs) to rule over the rise and fall of the Ottoman empire. The explanations and descriptions fo the cultures and circumstances of the various peoples who made up or were drawn into the empire, and how that happened, helps tremendously to understand the show Muhtesem Yüzyil, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1848220/ illustrating the life of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and those around him. Now that I've finished this book, I no longer need to see the rest of the series! :-) ( )

This book was extremely interesting for it's excellent descriptions of the history and context of the various Sultans (or Sultan-Caliphs) to rule over the rise and fall of the Ottoman empire. The explanations and descriptions fo the cultures and circumstances of the various peoples who made up or were drawn into the empire, and how that happened, helps tremendously to understand the show Muhtesem Yüzyil, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1848220/ illustrating the life of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and those around him. Now that I've finished this book, I no longer need to see the rest of the series! :-) ( )

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things . Machiavelli

Of course Niccolo also said that conquering the Ottomans would be most difficult, but afterwards rather easy to hold or occupy. It is good being glib. I violated my latest reading plan over the holiday weekend.

Ottomans did not, on the whole, engage in trade; they worked in administration; their minorities, Greeks, Jews and Armenians, seperated from them by a gulf of culture and sympathy, traditionally looked after the money side.

Jason Goodwin has provided us with a sprawling popular history, one surveying an empire which stretched across three continents for around 600 hundred years and conducted its affairs in a likely two dozen languages. The matter is presented in a predictably uneven manner. The text is both compelling and insightful as the reader gauges the expansion and retraction of the House of Osman. The Ottoman core principles contributed almost solely to conquest. The reality of an increasing population and the ravages of time forced and exacerbated its fatal contradictions. Is it me, did anyone else know the origins of the croissant extend from the Siege of Vienna? I did not and remain unsure what I think about all that. I'm a bagel fellow by trade. ( )

This is not a history of the Ottoman Empire as the cover reads. Instead, it is a series of chapters, more or less in chronological order, which cover various themes that apply to the Ottoman Empire (an example: from the chapter entitled "Rhythms" --"The Ottomans felt the geomancer's horror of hard lines, dead spaces and sharp angles"[(p. 133]) . This plus a tendency to repeat incidents, double-back in time, and use extremely florid language, made this book a long slog for me. The Ottoman Empire is one of the black holes in my knowledge of Euro-Asian history, and I was looking for an entertaining but focused introduction before tackling the book sitting on my coffee table, purchased for its excellent reviews, [b:The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East|21535310|The Fall of the Ottomans The Great War in the Middle East|Eugene Rogan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1400962554s/21535310.jpg|40864291].

It is obvious that the author loves this period and has researched it extensively, gathering in great bundles of amusing incidents, arcane details, and miscellaneous tales. The outcome--a great tangled web--is simultaneously entertaining but also, frankly tiring. As other readers have commented, it is best read with a finger on the page showing the chronological order of sultans to help one keep their historical place, and another on a good atlas of Islamic history, such as the [b:Atlas of Islamic History|22481271|Atlas of Islamic History|Peter Sluglett|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1415588341s/22481271.jpg|41923369]. The latter has been an essential companion to me since it first appeared in 2014. I can not praise it and its maps highly enough.

This is a book to read after one has read a fairly straight-forward history of the Ottoman Empire (please feel free to recommend some). If you skip this step, the weight of the peripheral details in this volume are so many, it's like mixing together a dozen or more ingredients in a complicated recipe before each has been weighed or measured out. ( )

Joy's review: The rise, the very long malaise, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. So much in here that I had no idea of since we mostly learn European history in school. Goodwin writes well and organizes the book around themes rather than in strict chronology. His focus is on culture, business, customs, and how the empire was organized. For me, this makes for much more interesting reading than describing which sultan did what. A very worthwhile book. ( )

I found this to be generally entertaining, but poorly organized and only a little useful. The author's main point, if he has one, is that the Ottoman Empire was built on expansion and when that expansion stopped, the empire began to decay, albeit slowly. He puts the turning point at Suleyman the Magnificent, who was a great conquerer and ruled for four decades. But Suleyman also was paranoid and purged anyone who might potentially threaten his authority. He represented the greatest extent of the empire's expansions while also signaling its stagnation. That stagnation took centuries to be felt fully. It's causes were common to many empires: weak leadership leads to alternative centers of power, local leadership chip away at central authority and resources, entrenched interested become increasingly corrupt, new techniques in governance and military passed the empire by as conservative elements resisted change.

There are some interesting points that the author makes. He talks about one problem of decline was that new Sultans didn't kill their brothers but put them in "the Cage", which was part of the harem where they were isolated from threatening the Sultan. Having them in the cage meant that there was an alternative to the Sultan if some powers in the empire wanted to replace him. Those could be the religious establishment, the janissaries or regional governors. The rise of these groups, and their unchecked corruption, undermined the Sultan's power and made him easy to replace. The Cage didn't prepare new Sultans for ruling, which made it even more appealing for those groups that wanted a weak Sultan.

Even with those interesting tidbits, this isn't a good book. The author sounds like an academic who wants to tantalize a group of people at the bar, telling interesting stories with flowery language and discarding any overall coherence. It is more creative than most history books, but if you want to understand the Ottomans, this isn't what you want. The Epilogue sums up the book nicely. It is about dogs and how they are treated in several different eras of the empire. It makes for an interesting story but tells very little of value. I'm sure the author thought he was being brilliant, but it just didn't work. ( )

Some interesting snippets, but very dry reading and lacks thematic unity. You plow through pages and ask " What is the point?" Suffers from a fatal flaw that is a familiar complaint about history writing - it is boring. ( )

A good overview of an overlooked empire. While this is not a long history, the author nevertheless delves into the psyche of the Ottomans, giving the reader a picture into the Ottoman army, their cities, and the imperial family. This book provides a good overview of why the Ottomans rose in power, threatening Europe, and why they slowly declined over the centuries, their empire discriminating until little remained. Fascinating and a good introduction to Ottoman history. ( )

This is a very frustrating book. Maybe it's me, but I couldn't follow him at all. I wanted to learn something about the Ottoman Empire, I'm not sure I did. The best way I can describe it; standing at a party listening to two professors tell interesting stories about the Ottoman Empire, oblivious to the fact that you don't have their background. Or maybe a hyperactive 10 year old (a very knowledgeable one) telling the story as if they just saw Star Wars. I now know various bits of trivia about the subject, but I have no overall sense of it.

The writing is completely scattershot, jumping between people and time periods from line to line with no warning or definition. Names and terms are thrown out without telling who or what they are. You might get a very brief, very vague hint of a explanation of something, and then 50 pages later it's mentioned again in a totally different context with no background. Too much of the time I simply couldn't understand who or what he was talking about, and/or what was happening. Much of the time I just didn't know what the author was trying to say.

I can only guess that the point was to try and not make a dry text book history, but instead we get the ADHD professor version. I only slogged through it because the subject was so fascinating, but I did start to view it as a chore. I can't give it one star because I didn't totally hate the book, but I can't think of much that I liked either.

Now I need to find another book about the Ottoman Empire. ( )

Dícese de un tipo que se gana la vida escribiendo libros de viajes, aunque presume de "periodista e historiador", y que pretende escribir lo que dice el subtítulo como si fuese una guía de visita. Resultado: quizá interese a los que creen que divulgación es hacer cualquier cosa para que quede bonito, pero es un engaño para mi, que esperaba encontrarme con un libro serio. No existe una sola referencia bibliográfica precisa; es más, muchas veces se mencionan sucesos o dichos sin preocuparse de indicár quién lo dijo o cuándo sucedieron. Sólo aparece un mapa, muy general, al principio. Las tres cuartas partes de las páginas se dedican a la parte europea del imperio, y apenas hay una o dos referencias a Alejandría, Bagdag, Damasco o Túnez, que uno creería meros villorrios comparados con Belgrado. Constantinopla es el imperio, y lo demás meros apéndices. Uno no llega a saber bien la distinción entre sultán y califa. Se pueden establecer paralelismos directos y sin contemplaciones entre el siglo XIV y el XIX para sustentar las opiniones sobre el "carácter" turco. Todo ello, sobrevolado por una inmensa cantidad y variedad de tópicos, escenas coloristas, evocaciones falseadas (o al menos no sustentadas en nada). El autor cree poder compensar todo esto con una cronología y una bibliografía final, que aparecen desconectadas del texto. En resumen, tiempo y dinero perdido. ( )

Buon libro di storia. Spesso però l'A. da per scontato il punto di vista dei protagonisti della sua opera trascurando quanto riportato da altre fonti storiche autorevoli. Comunque il libro resta una fonte importante per chi poi intenda approfondire. ( )

If you're looking for a well-ordered and rigorous history of the Ottoman Empire, this isn't it. If you're looking for anecdotal tales that give a sense of the Ottoman Empire from its foundations on the steppes of Asia to its demise in the early 20th century, this might not be a bad choice.

Goodwin weaves together an extended string of vignettes, almost entirely from the Western perspective, about the sultans, grand viziers, pashas and many who opposed or attempted to take advantage of them. They are, by turns, informative, amusing, appalling or all three, and the end result is something that feels almost novel-like, rather than a history tome. Some stories provide some actual understanding of the Empire. For example, we learn that government officials were all slaves and could not bequeath anything to their children (who were born as free citizens), thus preventing political dynasties (other than the sultan, of course). Others were simply historically colorful: "Barbarossa did not have a red beard at all, but lifted the name from his elder brother, who had been a promising pirate himself before his death."

In the end, I felt I came out with some sense of—if not a great deal of analytical insight into—what made the Empire work during its centuries of expansion and what caused it to crumble from within during its long decline.

Three things keep the book from being well-recommended by me. First, it's a bit hard to follow at times. Goodwin certainly doesn't follow a linear chronology, nor is he particularly good about making sure you make the same leap he does when he suddenly changes whom he's referring to in mid-paragraph. This leads to a few moments of confusion requiring the reader to back up and follow along again.

Second, it's a trifle repetitious. I found myself saying, "Didn't I learn that a while ago?" at several places through the book.

Third…maps!! Why a book that has a rather large number of "he moved here, while that guy moved there" in it doesn't have any maps to speak of is absolutely beyond me. There's one poorly-printed map that shows a couple country boundaries and a few capital cities. It really detracted from the reading experience and…alone…cost this a half star.

In conclusion, a book I'd recommend if you go into it with appropriate expectations, but not one I'd recommend as a prime source to anyone looking to study the Ottoman Empire. ( )

A hoot! The author manages to write several hundred pages of Ottoman history, without mentioning a single (well, perhaps a single) Ottoman (or even Islamic) source. Nor does he show much familiarity with Modern Turkish, Ottoman, Persian or Arabic.

What you do get is a multitude of anecdotes by various westerners about the Ottoman Empire, from the earliest days to the Victorian age, mostly taken at face value. In fact, the book should be titled 'Western views on the Ottoman Empire', rather than a history.

Jason Goodwin writes an entertaining story, and it is a very good read, but if you want serious history, go elsewhere.

Not intended as a rigorous, scholarly history, the book is a bit disorganized and repetitive in places. That said, Goodwin does with wit and an appreciation for the weird and exotic detail convey the strange and brutal world of the Ottoman sultans and the rich cultural milieu of the eastern Mediterranean over which the Turks ruled for almost 500 years. I enjoyed it.

One of the worst books I own ( )

an enlightening look, for me, at what was going on in the eastern Mediterranean from 1300 on -- this wasn't a large part of my history education and while I found it somewhat disorganized, the book held my interest.

If you are going to visit Istanbul or Turkey, this is a great book to read first as it puts the culture very much into perspective. ( )

I'd have to give this one-volume history a C+. It cries out for artful editing and more detailed maps; the narrative's more confusing than numinous. Still, it brought home to me that the Ottoman military machine was invincible back in the day, when the major Western military power was, well, Venice. The Battle of Lepanto (1571) remains by far the largest sea battle ever in the Mediterranean, and the last to feature oared-galleys. For centuries most of the world's Muslims undertook the entire hajj under Ottoman administration, and the Ottoman Empire duked it out with the Hapsburg for generations, but by the 17th-century they had lost the western Mediterranean whereas the Europeans had already crossed the Atlantic and were colonizing the Americas. The Ottoman realms, as martial and glorious as they once were, became a backwater. They ossified, fell off the Western map, and stayed off until the Western powers picked up the pieces after the Great War and, among other things, invented the modern Middle East. But once upon a time, Islam was ascendant and Turkic, and this history is still with us in the Balkans, certain former Soviet republics and elsewhere.

If you're interested in a SCA-period Ottoman persona, this is a good book to start with. The best aspect is it's approachability; written by a non-historian, it still manages to capture much of the mystique of the Ottomans without succumbing to stereotyping and hand-waving. The anecdotal information on culture is well worth the cheap price for the paperback, alone. I've heard that the scholarship in the work is shaky, but I did not run into anything that stood out as horribly inaccurate. I do put in a warning that this book is weak documentation for anything A&S-wise, though. Goodwin does do a excellent job of referencing where he picks up various anecdotes, and I've found many of his references to be correct. I'd encourage the reader to use LORDS OF THE HORIZON as a jumping-off point for research, and not for a place to probe for in-depth documentation.

Turkey > History > Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918