Fiona’s Reviews > The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs > Status Update

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

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

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.