Lucille Turner's Blog - Posts Tagged "ottoman-empire"
Turkey's Ottoman Dream
We are living in turbulent times. Regime change is happening around us in many countries for reasons that are unclear to the common of mortals. Where is it leading? As Turkish President Recep Erdogan voices his desire to take Turkey back to the glory days of the Ottoman Empire, you have to wonder what kind of empire he is talking about, a kingdom of prosperity, or a Caliphate of cruelty?
I have been living in a fictionalised version of the Ottoman Empire for the past two years, writing my second historical novel, The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer. What I have discovered about the Ottoman, or the Osman dynasty, as it was known, has both terrified and fascinated me. It clearly fascinates a good number of modern Turks too, as is evident from recent films by Turkish directors, such as Fetih 1453 and numerous others that glorify the seizing of Constantinople, the ancient Byzantine capital, by Mehmet the Conqueror.
Undeniably the Ottoman Empire was highly successful. It was Muslim expansionism in action; the Ottoman Sultanate had a strong religious hierarchy behind it called the Ulema. Religion aside, and on a more optimistic note, trade and the arts flourished under the Ottomans, and some ethnic minorities, such as the Jews, were mostly welcomed. The millet system gave a good deal of administrative autonomy to ethnic minorities; they were permitted to rule themselves as long as they remained loyal to the Ottoman Empire. Individuals could rise through the ranks of the social and military system on the basis of merit, but again, as long as no dissent was heard. On the surface of things, it seemed reasonable enough.
So, let’s take a closer look at the Ottoman success story:
The Ottomans converted a large number of Christians to Islam in the Balkan countries they occupied.
Because remaining a non-Muslim meant giving up your sons to slavery and paying high taxes.
The Ottoman dynasty lasted 600 years
But cruelty became an almost Darwinian factor, since the practice of fratricide (killing male relatives who had a claim to the throne) meant that only the most ruthless members of the dynasty ever became Sultan.
The loyalty of the Viziers, the governing body, meant that there was little real dissent
But the execution of Viziers was commonplace, so much so that a Grand Vizier was said to tuck his will in his robe every morning on leaving his chambers, just in case today was not his day.
The Sultans of the Ottoman Empire wielded great power
But many Ottoman heirs were badly prepared for that power by a practice of virtual imprisonment within the harem, which would have done little more then increase their sex drive.
The Ottoman Empire gained significant territories during its 600-year rule
But it did so at the point of a sword; the Ottoman armies were so feared by Western Christendom that even the mention of them was enough to strike terror into the minds of its citizens, a terror that reverberates even today for that matter, at the thought of any Islamic army.
To be fair to the Ottoman Turks, Western Europe was not behaving much better than they were, at the time. The Italian city-states had spawned a series of condottiere warlords, like Cesare Borgia, for instance, who probably also knocked his brother off for the sake of power. Even in Florence, Renaissance jewel of beauty and art, noblemen were being stabbed in cathedrals by cardinals without so much as an Ave Maria Amen. And fifteenth century England was hardly a beacon of principle. Henry VIII was limbering up to a serious amount of familicide, and his henchman Thomas Cromwell had at his disposal a torture rack worthy of the Spanish Inquisition — whose imaginative range of equipment was sufficient to provoke a gritting of teeth and a crossing of legs in all but the unfeeling.
Violence, then, was fairly commonplace in much of the world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is the standards of our present time that make it unacceptable to us. But yet more worrying is the desire to return to those fifteenth century standards. For Turkey to dream of a renewal of old Ottoman ways would be a little like Queen Elisabeth wishing she could send her spouse to the Tower. It simply isn’t done any more. Without a doubt, many countries do look back at their golden age of empire and dream of repeating it, but that, I venture to say, would be a grave error. There is rot at the core of Empire. Holding a large number of conquered countries together requires either great flexibility (which leads to the dissolution of the empire in any case) or great ruthlessness (which may work but only for a while), because at the end of the day it is about one people imposing their will on another and that can never truly be right.
Sign up on the homepage at www.lucilleturner.com to find out what my new book, "The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer" is all about!
I have been living in a fictionalised version of the Ottoman Empire for the past two years, writing my second historical novel, The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer. What I have discovered about the Ottoman, or the Osman dynasty, as it was known, has both terrified and fascinated me. It clearly fascinates a good number of modern Turks too, as is evident from recent films by Turkish directors, such as Fetih 1453 and numerous others that glorify the seizing of Constantinople, the ancient Byzantine capital, by Mehmet the Conqueror.
Undeniably the Ottoman Empire was highly successful. It was Muslim expansionism in action; the Ottoman Sultanate had a strong religious hierarchy behind it called the Ulema. Religion aside, and on a more optimistic note, trade and the arts flourished under the Ottomans, and some ethnic minorities, such as the Jews, were mostly welcomed. The millet system gave a good deal of administrative autonomy to ethnic minorities; they were permitted to rule themselves as long as they remained loyal to the Ottoman Empire. Individuals could rise through the ranks of the social and military system on the basis of merit, but again, as long as no dissent was heard. On the surface of things, it seemed reasonable enough.
So, let’s take a closer look at the Ottoman success story:
The Ottomans converted a large number of Christians to Islam in the Balkan countries they occupied.
Because remaining a non-Muslim meant giving up your sons to slavery and paying high taxes.
The Ottoman dynasty lasted 600 years
But cruelty became an almost Darwinian factor, since the practice of fratricide (killing male relatives who had a claim to the throne) meant that only the most ruthless members of the dynasty ever became Sultan.
The loyalty of the Viziers, the governing body, meant that there was little real dissent
But the execution of Viziers was commonplace, so much so that a Grand Vizier was said to tuck his will in his robe every morning on leaving his chambers, just in case today was not his day.
The Sultans of the Ottoman Empire wielded great power
But many Ottoman heirs were badly prepared for that power by a practice of virtual imprisonment within the harem, which would have done little more then increase their sex drive.
The Ottoman Empire gained significant territories during its 600-year rule
But it did so at the point of a sword; the Ottoman armies were so feared by Western Christendom that even the mention of them was enough to strike terror into the minds of its citizens, a terror that reverberates even today for that matter, at the thought of any Islamic army.
To be fair to the Ottoman Turks, Western Europe was not behaving much better than they were, at the time. The Italian city-states had spawned a series of condottiere warlords, like Cesare Borgia, for instance, who probably also knocked his brother off for the sake of power. Even in Florence, Renaissance jewel of beauty and art, noblemen were being stabbed in cathedrals by cardinals without so much as an Ave Maria Amen. And fifteenth century England was hardly a beacon of principle. Henry VIII was limbering up to a serious amount of familicide, and his henchman Thomas Cromwell had at his disposal a torture rack worthy of the Spanish Inquisition — whose imaginative range of equipment was sufficient to provoke a gritting of teeth and a crossing of legs in all but the unfeeling.
Violence, then, was fairly commonplace in much of the world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is the standards of our present time that make it unacceptable to us. But yet more worrying is the desire to return to those fifteenth century standards. For Turkey to dream of a renewal of old Ottoman ways would be a little like Queen Elisabeth wishing she could send her spouse to the Tower. It simply isn’t done any more. Without a doubt, many countries do look back at their golden age of empire and dream of repeating it, but that, I venture to say, would be a grave error. There is rot at the core of Empire. Holding a large number of conquered countries together requires either great flexibility (which leads to the dissolution of the empire in any case) or great ruthlessness (which may work but only for a while), because at the end of the day it is about one people imposing their will on another and that can never truly be right.
Sign up on the homepage at www.lucilleturner.com to find out what my new book, "The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer" is all about!
Nationalist - Monster or Hero?
Given the slightly Gothic flavour of The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer, my account of the inspiration behind the book should really begin in a castle of thick walls, suits of armour and cobwebs on a snowy night in winter. But it doesn’t – quite the opposite in fact, which is only right, since the real story of Vlad Dracula’s life contains a mix of the exotic and the gothic, the Ottoman summer and the Carpathian winter: heat and frozen chill.
The historical Dracula, Prince of Wallachia (present-day Romania), and also known as Vlad the Impaler because he was said to have impaled his enemies on stakes, spent many years in the palace of the Ottoman Turks. Between 1442 and 1448 he was present at the Ottoman court, where he met the man who would later become his great adversary: Mehmet II, later known as the Conqueror.
Vlad Dracula, who was born sometime between 1428 and 1431 and is believed to have died in 1477 (his body was never found), acquired a reputation as a bit of a 'badass'; he was also closely connected to the most infamous figure of popular legend, the vampire. As far as reputations go, it was one to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, which considering the quarrelsome state of Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century (not to mention the rest) was perhaps not such a bad thing. The man who would confront such an adversary as Vlad Dracula would have to be made of stern stuff, and he was.
Murad II, the ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire between 1421 and 1451, foresaw that his son and heir, Mehmet, would one day conquer Constantinople, the Greek metropolis, but he may not have been quite so delighted if he had glimpsed the rest of Mehmet’s future, which was more the stuff of nightmares than a dream of conquest. Because besides being a born leader, Mehmet was also responsible for the introduction of the law permitting fratricide, the murder of a sibling.
Mehmet called his new law the Law of Governance, and claimed that it would strengthen the empire because it would prevent rivalry for the throne. He introduced it because he had already murdered his own brothers in order to become the heir, and once you do that, the safest thing to do is to make it all legal, which he did, shortly after he became Sultan. The new law meant that a ruling Sultan would no longer have to smother his brother by dead of night with a pillow, or strangle him with a swatch of silk while nobody was watching. He could make it an official event.
Of course, and perhaps most astonishingly, the law meant that Mehmet was effectively giving his own sons permission to kill their brothers one day as a precautionary measure ‘for the common benefit of the people’, as he stated. In a way he was sanctioning the murder of his own children.
However, nobody is all bad. When he proposed the passing of the law, Mehmet had no children of his own. And when he did have them, his own children did not engage in fratricide themselves. They chose instead, in the first instance at least, to come to an agreement. In that sense the law could have been seen as a deterrent. It was a Machiavellian way of seeing things, but it certainly allowed the empire to prosper for a good many years without fear of rebellion.
By the time Mehmet crossed paths with Vlad Dracula at the court of his father, besides being somewhat ruthless, Mehmet was a highly ambitious young man, with the makings of a formidable leader. His father found him hard to contain, and his efforts to bring his son into line practically cost him his life. When Mehmet became Sultan, at the tender age of 19, he was ready to take on most of Eastern Europe. And he would have taken on the rest of it too, were it not for Vlad Dracula.
Dracula has had a bad press. In the Hall of Fame he is The Impaler, and by most accounts a monster. Not because of his association with the vampire myth, so much as his reputation for inflicting cruelty on his victims – the kind of cruelty you don’t want to think about, and particularly during mealtimes. But how bad was he, really?
History is always constructed from the reports of others, and like many leaders before him and after, Dracula had his enemies. Some of them were Saxon merchants from the north, others were Hungarians and still more were Turks. All had in common the desire to get rid of him. And on that basis, you have to ask yourself to what extent these reports about the character of Dracula were true, and to what extent they were exaggerated in order to turn his friends against him.
But why did they want to get rid of him in the first place? In the fifteenth century, Romania was a buffer state between two powerful empires, with Vlad Dracula’s family caught in the middle, a bad place to be. Still, Vlad Dracula, and his father for that matter, was a nationalist who believed in the self-determination of his country, and he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to secure it. Did that make him a hero or a monster – even today such questions can be hard to answer. The subject of nationalism is a tricky one for a globalised world to deal with. Do we seek peace by closing our borders, or do we preserve it by keeping them open? Is it a sin to love our country, or should we rather have no country at all?
At the time of Vlad Dracula, nationalism did not have the ramifications it has today. It was closer in meaning to its original root, natio, which means birth. These days when we think of nationalism we often think of National Socialism, and Hilter. Or perhaps we think of Patriotism, a word that we often associate with Winston Churchill, George Washington, and consequently, with war. In the fifteenth century the idea of nationhood was still young, but that did not mean a man (or woman) could not lose their life for it.
As a young man, Vlad Dracula had not yet gained his status as monster of the Hall of Fame. He was, like his adversary Mehmet the Conqueror, a leader in the making. The two must have been similar in many ways, and their proximity at the court of the Ottoman sultanate must have sown the seeds for the intense and painful conflict that would follow. But who would come out best? Who would be the hero or the monster, or were they both at once? The expression, fighting fire with fire comes to mind when you are dealing with the twin fiends of cruelty and ambition. But one thing is certain, they are both currently perceived as the heroes of their country – Mehmet because he took Constantinople and ushered in a golden age of glory, and Vlad Dracula because he stood up to the Ottoman advance at a time when everyone else was backing down from it.
As nations, we create so many heroes in a spirit of nationalism that it can be hard to separate the fiction from the fact, which is why we need the subtleties of historical fiction to see the stew of the past for what it might have been: a one-sided story. But that does not mean there are no pitfalls for the writer.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic”.
The historical Dracula, Prince of Wallachia (present-day Romania), and also known as Vlad the Impaler because he was said to have impaled his enemies on stakes, spent many years in the palace of the Ottoman Turks. Between 1442 and 1448 he was present at the Ottoman court, where he met the man who would later become his great adversary: Mehmet II, later known as the Conqueror.
Vlad Dracula, who was born sometime between 1428 and 1431 and is believed to have died in 1477 (his body was never found), acquired a reputation as a bit of a 'badass'; he was also closely connected to the most infamous figure of popular legend, the vampire. As far as reputations go, it was one to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, which considering the quarrelsome state of Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century (not to mention the rest) was perhaps not such a bad thing. The man who would confront such an adversary as Vlad Dracula would have to be made of stern stuff, and he was.
Murad II, the ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire between 1421 and 1451, foresaw that his son and heir, Mehmet, would one day conquer Constantinople, the Greek metropolis, but he may not have been quite so delighted if he had glimpsed the rest of Mehmet’s future, which was more the stuff of nightmares than a dream of conquest. Because besides being a born leader, Mehmet was also responsible for the introduction of the law permitting fratricide, the murder of a sibling.
Mehmet called his new law the Law of Governance, and claimed that it would strengthen the empire because it would prevent rivalry for the throne. He introduced it because he had already murdered his own brothers in order to become the heir, and once you do that, the safest thing to do is to make it all legal, which he did, shortly after he became Sultan. The new law meant that a ruling Sultan would no longer have to smother his brother by dead of night with a pillow, or strangle him with a swatch of silk while nobody was watching. He could make it an official event.
Of course, and perhaps most astonishingly, the law meant that Mehmet was effectively giving his own sons permission to kill their brothers one day as a precautionary measure ‘for the common benefit of the people’, as he stated. In a way he was sanctioning the murder of his own children.
However, nobody is all bad. When he proposed the passing of the law, Mehmet had no children of his own. And when he did have them, his own children did not engage in fratricide themselves. They chose instead, in the first instance at least, to come to an agreement. In that sense the law could have been seen as a deterrent. It was a Machiavellian way of seeing things, but it certainly allowed the empire to prosper for a good many years without fear of rebellion.
By the time Mehmet crossed paths with Vlad Dracula at the court of his father, besides being somewhat ruthless, Mehmet was a highly ambitious young man, with the makings of a formidable leader. His father found him hard to contain, and his efforts to bring his son into line practically cost him his life. When Mehmet became Sultan, at the tender age of 19, he was ready to take on most of Eastern Europe. And he would have taken on the rest of it too, were it not for Vlad Dracula.
Dracula has had a bad press. In the Hall of Fame he is The Impaler, and by most accounts a monster. Not because of his association with the vampire myth, so much as his reputation for inflicting cruelty on his victims – the kind of cruelty you don’t want to think about, and particularly during mealtimes. But how bad was he, really?
History is always constructed from the reports of others, and like many leaders before him and after, Dracula had his enemies. Some of them were Saxon merchants from the north, others were Hungarians and still more were Turks. All had in common the desire to get rid of him. And on that basis, you have to ask yourself to what extent these reports about the character of Dracula were true, and to what extent they were exaggerated in order to turn his friends against him.
But why did they want to get rid of him in the first place? In the fifteenth century, Romania was a buffer state between two powerful empires, with Vlad Dracula’s family caught in the middle, a bad place to be. Still, Vlad Dracula, and his father for that matter, was a nationalist who believed in the self-determination of his country, and he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to secure it. Did that make him a hero or a monster – even today such questions can be hard to answer. The subject of nationalism is a tricky one for a globalised world to deal with. Do we seek peace by closing our borders, or do we preserve it by keeping them open? Is it a sin to love our country, or should we rather have no country at all?
At the time of Vlad Dracula, nationalism did not have the ramifications it has today. It was closer in meaning to its original root, natio, which means birth. These days when we think of nationalism we often think of National Socialism, and Hilter. Or perhaps we think of Patriotism, a word that we often associate with Winston Churchill, George Washington, and consequently, with war. In the fifteenth century the idea of nationhood was still young, but that did not mean a man (or woman) could not lose their life for it.
As a young man, Vlad Dracula had not yet gained his status as monster of the Hall of Fame. He was, like his adversary Mehmet the Conqueror, a leader in the making. The two must have been similar in many ways, and their proximity at the court of the Ottoman sultanate must have sown the seeds for the intense and painful conflict that would follow. But who would come out best? Who would be the hero or the monster, or were they both at once? The expression, fighting fire with fire comes to mind when you are dealing with the twin fiends of cruelty and ambition. But one thing is certain, they are both currently perceived as the heroes of their country – Mehmet because he took Constantinople and ushered in a golden age of glory, and Vlad Dracula because he stood up to the Ottoman advance at a time when everyone else was backing down from it.
As nations, we create so many heroes in a spirit of nationalism that it can be hard to separate the fiction from the fact, which is why we need the subtleties of historical fiction to see the stew of the past for what it might have been: a one-sided story. But that does not mean there are no pitfalls for the writer.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic”.
