Short description
The Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds and hearts. This book charts the history from the first campaigns to the Charge of the Light Brigade, from the Crusades to the Dardenelles, and brings to life innumerable aspects of Ottoman life.
Long description
The Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds and hearts. Over six hundred years the Empire swelled and declined; the royal line bent, but never broke, from Osman, born in a desert tent around 1280 to Abdul Mecid, dying in a Paris flat in 1942. Its precipitous rise from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills of Anatolia to a power which ruled on the Danube and the Euphrates stunned contemporaries.For three hundred years it held sway and Istanbul had the richest court in Europe. But the decline was prodigious, protracted, and total. Dramatic and passionate, detailed and alive, comic and gruesome, Lords of the Horizons charts the swirling history from the first campaigns to the Charge of the Light Brigade, from the Crusades to the Dardenelles, and brings to life innumerable aspects of Ottoman life, caravans carrying parcels of spice and bags of gold, Western emissaries witnessing executions, distant sentries on far frontiers, jewels, meals, shadow plays and stray dogs. A history, a journey, and a world all in one.
Review
This 'history' of the Ottoman Empire looks at a polyglot empire of 36 nations without a common language; Islamic in religion but Byzantine in its ceremony; Persian in its dignity; Arabic in its calligraphy; and governed by a parvenu class of Balkan renegades. Part history, part travel book, part romantic vision of a lost world, this book, in which anecdote, speculation and chronology become inextricably mixed, has its own peculiar charm. (Kirkus UK)