The Ottoman Age of Exploration

Author: Giancarlo Casale
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199798796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
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.

The Ottomans

Author: Marc David Baer
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541673778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 567

Book Description
This major new history of the Ottoman dynasty reveals a diverse empire that straddled East and West. The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic, Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage. The Ottomans pioneered religious toleration even as they used religious conversion to integrate conquered peoples. But in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the empire’s demise after the First World War. The Ottomans vividly reveals the dynasty’s full history and its enduring impact on Europe and the world.

The Portuguese in the Age of Discovery c.1340–1665

Author: David Nicolle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780961227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
From humble beginnings, in the course of three centuries the Portuguese built the world's first truly global empire, stretching from modern Brazil to sub-Saharan Africa and from India to the East Indies (Indonesia). Portugal had established its present-day borders by 1300 and the following century saw extensive warfare that confirmed Portugal's independence and allowed it to aspire to maritime expansion, sponsored by monarchs such as Prince Henry the Navigator. During this nearly 300-year period, the Portuguese fought alongside other Iberian forces against the Moors of Andalusia; with English help successfully repelled a Castilian invasion (1385); fought the Moors in Morocco, and Africans, the Ottoman Turks, and the Spanish in colonial competition. The colourful and exotic Portuguese forces that prevailed in these battles on land and sea are the subject of this book.

Ottoman Explorations of the Nile

Author: Robert Dankoff
Publisher: Gingko Library
ISBN: 1909942170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
Before the time of Napoleon, the most ambitious effort to explore and map the Nile was undertaken by the Ottomans, as attested by two monumental documents: an elaborate map, with 475 rubrics, and a lengthy travel account. Both were achieved at about the same time—c. 1685—and both by the same man. Evliya Çelebi’s account of his Nile journeys, in the tenth volume of his Book of Travels (Seyahatname), has been known to the scholarly world since 1938, when that volume was first published. The map, held in the Vatican Library, has been studied since at least 1949. Numerous new critical editions of both the map and the text have been published over the years, each expounding upon the last in an attempt to reach a definitive version. The Ottoman Explorations of the Nile provides a more accurate translation of the original travel account. Furthermore, the maps themselves are reproduced in greater detail and vivid color, and there are more cross-references to the text than in any previous edition. This volume gives equal weight and attention to the two parts that make up this extraordinary historical document, allowing readers to study the map or the text independently, while also using each to elucidate and accentuate the details of the other.

Ottoman Odyssey

Author: Alev Scott
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
An exploration of the contemporary influence of the Ottoman Empire on the wider world, as the author uncovers the new Ottoman legacy across Europe and the Middle East. Alev Scott’s odyssey began when she looked beyond Turkey’s borders for contemporary traces of the Ottoman Empire. Their 800 years of rule ended a century ago—and yet, travelling through twelve countries from Kosovo to Greece to Palestine, she uncovers a legacy that’s vital and relevant; where medieval ethnic diversity meets twenty-first century nationalism—and displaced people seek new identities. It's a story of surprises. An acolyte of Erdogan in Christian-majority Serbia confirms the wide-reaching appeal of his authoritarian leadership. A Druze warlord explains the secretive religious faction in the heart of the Middle East. The palimpsest-like streets of Jerusalem's Old Town hint at the Ottoman co-existence of Muslims and Jews. And in Turkish Cyprus, Alev Scott rediscovers a childhood home. In every community, history is present as a dynamic force. Faced by questions of exile, diaspora and collective memory, Alev Scott searches for answers from the cafes of Beirut to the refugee camps of Lesbos. She uncovers in Erdogan's nouveau-Ottoman Turkey a version of the nostalgic utopias sold to disillusioned voters in Europe and America. And yet—as she relates with compassion, insight, and humor—diversity is the enduring, endangered heart of this fascinating region.

The Other Side of Empire

Author: Andrew W. Devereux
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501740148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Via rigorous study of the legal arguments Spain developed to justify its acts of war and conquest, The Other Side of Empire illuminates Spain's expansionary ventures in the Mediterranean in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Andrew Devereux proposes and explores an important yet hitherto unstudied connection between the different rationales that Spanish jurists and theologians developed in the Mediterranean and in the Americas. Devereux describes the ways in which Spaniards conceived of these two theatres of imperial ambition as complementary parts of a whole. At precisely the moment that Spain was establishing its first colonies in the Caribbean, the Crown directed a series of Old World conquests that encompassed the Kingdom of Naples, Navarre, and a string of presidios along the coast of North Africa. Projected conquests in the eastern Mediterranean never took place, but the Crown seriously contemplated assaults on Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine. The Other Side of Empire elucidates the relationship between the legal doctrines on which Spain based its expansionary claims in the Old World and the New. The Other Side of Empire vastly expands our understanding of the ways in which Spaniards, at the dawn of the early modern era, thought about religious and ethnic difference, and how this informed political thought on just war and empire. While focusing on imperial projects in the Mediterranean, it simultaneously presents a novel contextual background for understanding the origins of European colonialism in the Americas.

Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire

Author: Yaron Ayalon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107072972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Yaron Ayalon explores the Ottoman Empire's history of natural disasters and its responses on a state, communal, and individual level.

Hungary Between Two Empires 1526–1711

Author: Géza Pálffy
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253054648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
The Hungarian defeat to the Ottoman army at the pivotal Battle of Mohács in 1526 led to the division of the Kingdom of Hungary into three parts, altering both the shape and the ethnic composition of Central Europe for centuries to come. Hungary thus became a battleground between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. In this sweeping historical survey, Géza Pálffy takes readers through a crucial period of upheaval and revolution in Hungary, which had been the site of a flowering of economic, cultural, and intellectual progress—but battles with the Ottomans lead to over a century of war and devastation. Pálffy explores Hungary's role as both a borderland and a theater of war through the turn of the 18th century. In this way, Hungary became a crucially important field on which key debates over religion, government, law, and monarchy played out. Reflecting 25 years of archival research and presented here in English for the first time, Hungary between Two Empires 1526–1711 offers a fresh and thorough exploration of this key moment in Hungarian history and, in turn, the creation of a modern Europe.

Geographical Knowledge and Imperial Culture in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Author: Asst Prof Pinar Emiralioglu
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781472415332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
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.

Prisoner of the Infidels

Author: Osman of Timisoara
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520383397
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
Introduction: on being Osman -- Discovering Osman: a short history of the text -- A note on translation -- A note on transcription from Ottoman Turkish -- Surrender -- Ransom -- Crime and punishment -- Death and resurrection -- Respite -- Bonds of love -- To the capital -- A friend in need -- An unexpected turn of events -- Trouble on the Danube -- Grifters -- Border run -- The end -- Appendix: main characters in Osman's narrative.