Status Updates From The Ottomans: Khans, Caesar...

Sufi role in revolutionary politics was significant, but until 1895 it was the Freemasons who were more important in opposition politics. The Freemason Murad V, envisioned as an enlightened sultan who would unite Turks and Greeks had come to power in a coup d’état aided by Freemasons in 1876. The nucleus of the Young Turks emerged from the members of a Masonic lodge established by those who had brought the sultan

The Crimea was the place where, in the words of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, one of the last defenders to leave Sevastopol, ‘you will see war not as a beautiful, orderly, and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war in its authentic expression—as blood, suffering and death.
The war left Russia aching to take revenge on the Ottoman Empire.

In 1829, Mahmud II decreed that civilian men had to wear a fez and Western-style jacket and trousers. He was the first sultan to have a portrait of himself wearing a Western-style kit distributed across the empire, displayed in barracks, government offices, and schools. In the 1830s, Mahmud II became the first Ottoman ruler to take lengthy imperial excursions whose sole aim was to see his empire (Rûmeli and Anatolia

Whereas once the Safavids were the main danger to the eastern frontier of the Ottoman realm, in the second half of the eighteenth century a new threat rose to replace that of the fallen Shi’i empire: Russia. The Ottoman sultans who first faced this new threat were less prepared to handle it, as seniority was the only reason they had ascended to the throne.

Along with a focus of putting women in their place, the Kadizadelis and the activist Muslim elite—including members of the dynasty and administration—promoted conversion to Islam. They were given an opportunity to do so by the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi in 1665, the greatest Jewish messianic movement after that of Jesus. This movement broke out in the Ottoman Empire, and Jews all over Europe would be