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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.

now that he was fifty and they were still eighteen, his overinvestment took on the tone of desperation, like a decrepit hand reaching toward the elixir of youth. He meddled in their affairs, half pretending he was one of them, but he always had, at the ready, the upper hand of extensive past experience.
Tom had deluded himself into thinking that the students’ energy would rub off on him. It wasn’t contagious,

I felt nostalgia for the quaint and personal era of the phone tree, parents calling parents calling parents to let them know about a two-hour delay, or else we’d all just tune into the radio with a hope and a prayer. I also felt nostalgia for those innocent pre-Columbine years. Once a month, we lined up for fire drills and marched outside, high on the fresh air, the timed multiplication-table tests abandoned

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

You should write a campus novel,” said Sophie. “Except instead of it being about professors with status anxiety living coddled existences in old Victorian houses, it’s about adjuncts with survival anxiety stealing bagels from department meetings and buying office supplies in the toy section of CVS.”
“The problem is it’ll sound like satire,” I said.
“That’s exactly the point. We’re living the genre

Ibn Khaldun argued that empires pass through five inevitable stages. Ottoman thinkers desperately tried to determine where theirs fell on the spectrum—beginning with the heroic age and passing through stages of consolidation, confidence and security, contentment or surfeit and decline, and finally disintegration—and what they could do about it. Naima believed that the Ottomans had reached the penultimate stage.

The first regicide in Ottoman history—carried out in horrible fashion and sandwiched between the two dethronements of Mustafa I—forever altered the bonds between the sultan and his subjects. Thereafter his power was limited, constrained by the law as interpreted by jurists, who, though appointed by the sultan to rule in his name, acted independently to limit his power. They curbed the sultan’s power

From the end of the sixteenth century, we witness an era once referred to derogatorily as the ‘sultanate of women’, in which the mother of the sultan (valide sultan), as post-sexual woman, was more influential than the sultan. She controlled the imperial household, transmitted political values, and protected and preserved the dynasty.

After Suleiman I’s passing in 1566, the Ottomans entered a new phase in the politics of reproduction. A sedentary as opposed to warrior sultanate arose, alongside the rise to influence of the women of the harem. Seniority became the new law of succession rather than military victory and fratricide. It made succession an automatic procedure. Facilitated by the fact that the successor also resided in the palace

Like other cities with attrition problems, Baltimore held tight to its unique and specific claims to fame: Edgar Allan Poe and Mr. Trash Wheel, Frederick Douglass and Utz potato chips, the Baltimore Orioles and Natty Boh, the champion of cheap beer in Baltimore with an iconic one-eyed mascot. King of camp John Waters was a regular at local haunts. A plaque in a 7-Eleven on Charles Street claimed the Oujia board had

beginning in the 1530s during the reign of Suleiman I as they battled the Habsburgs for control of the Western Mediterranean and the North African coast, the Ottomans also attempted to expel the Portuguese from the region stretching from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. This led to repeated unsuccessful attempts to capture the strategic Strait of Hormuz which controls the entrance to the Persian Gulf

the Ottoman maritime empire emerged in the same century as that of the Portuguese. Beginning with the reign of Mehmed II, sultans referred to themselves as ‘Lord of the two seas and two continents’. The sultans were the rulers of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Europe and Asia. From Egypt to Indonesia, the Ottomans rivalled the Portuguese in the battle for the seas and played a major role in international trade

the sultan turned against the Mamluks in the south. Again, the Ottomans used gunpowder weapons (canons and muskets) to defeat a Muslim rival armed with swords, bows, and arrows—the weapons of aristocrats and men of leisure who looked down on the musket, which any untrained soldier could use.

Murad I established the pitiless sultanic practice of murdering all one’s brothers and uncles—and often all one’s male relatives, no matter their age—upon coming to power. Fratricide was meant to ensure that the ruler had no familial rivals. The practice was codified in the mid-fifteenth century in the Ottoman law code attributed to Mehmed II.

As can be seen in the coins minted in his name, Murad I was the first head of the Ottoman dynasty to style himself as sultan, the secular civil and military leader. His predecessors Osman and Orhan had claimed only to be chiefs (bey). The name ‘sultan ‘ symbolises the Ottoman transition from tents to towns, from nomad archers to infantry, from Osman’s introduction of the first market tax

There was no doubt in Yashim’s mind that the fourth murder had completed a stage, established the preliminaries. The old altars had been re-consecrated, in blood. The second stage was underway, Yashim felt sure of that.

The dervish danced in the space defined by a ring of bystanders, who every now and then had to stand aside to let someone in or out of the café, giving Yashim a glimpse of the performer. He wore a white tunic, white puttees, and a white cap, and he flexed his hands and legs in time to some inner melody, his eyes closed. But the dancer was not entranced: from what Yashim could see, it looked like one of the simpler

The first thing Yashim noticed, after the stench he was forced to suck down into his heaving chest, was the light.
It rose in eerie columns from the vats into which, across an area of several acres, the animal skins were lowered for boiling and dyeing. Against a forest of flickering torches, each vat threw out a spume of coloured vapour, red, yellow and indigo blending and slowly dissolving into the darkness

The most sought-after eunuchs at the palace came from the Sudan and the Upper Nile, lithe, hairless boys whose femininity belied their enormous strength and even more colossal powers of survival. Hundreds of boys, he knew, were taken every year from the Upper Nile and marched across the deserts to the sea. Only a few actually arrived. Somewhere in the desert, the operation was performed;

Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out Üsküdar on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.
The Greeks had called Üsküdar Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water, where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into a great imperial city which bore his name.

Fifty years before a young woman had boarded a French packet en route from the West Indies to Marseilles. Raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, she was being sent to Paris to complete her education, and find a suitable husband. She never arrived. In the eastern Atlantic her ship was taken by a North African xebec, and the beautiful young woman became the prisoner of Algerian corsairs.

In the static world of hard facts and figures it was approximately twenty-five minutes before the gold ceased glowing, but the moments that passed while we worked the river were neither brief nor long, were in fact somehow removed from the very restriction or notion of time—we were outside of time, is how it felt to me; our experience was so uncommon we were elevated to a place where such concerns as minutes

I was not an efficient killer. I was not and had never been and would never be. Charlie had been able to make use of my temper was all; he had manipulated me, exploited my personality, just as a man prods a rooster before a cockfight. I thought, How many times have I pulled my pistol on a stranger and fired a bullet into his body, my heart a mad drum of outrage, for the lone reason that he was firing at Charlie,

‘Yesterday I saw a man leap from the roof of the Orient Hotel, laughing all the way to the ground, upon which he fairly exploded. He was drunk they say, but I had seen him sober shortly before this. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envemon your very centre. It is a madness of possibilities. That leaping man’s final act was the embodiment of the collective mind of San Francisco.

In the morning it was raining—constant, cold drops that turned the roads to muddy soup. Charlie was stomach-sick from the brandy, and I visited the chemist’s for a nausea remedy. I was given a scentless, robin’s-egg-blue powder which I mixed into his coffee. I did not know the tinture’s ingredients, only that it got him out of bed and onto Nimble, and that it made him alert to the point of distraction.

Every man dies with secrets. Big Angel was certain a happy man was a man who died with the worst things safely hidden. A life was a long struggle to come to terms with things and to keep some things from others. This was his deepest secret, and it wasn’t even a sin.

The border in those days was different. No huge wall. No drones, no infrared towers. What awaited the de La Cruz family was a raggedy line of wooden booths manned by Immigration and Customs agents sitting on stools in the heat, bored to despair as they breathed limitless clouds of car exhaust, and more cynical every day as every driver said, “No, I don’t have liquor in my trunk!”

Big Angel was turning seventy. It seemed very old to him. At the same time, it felt far too young. He had not intended to leave the party so soon. “I have tried to be good,” he told his invisible interviewer.
His mother had made it to the edge of one hundred. He had thought he’d at least make it that far. In his mind, he was still a kid, yearning for laughter and a good book, adventures