Caroline Finkel - Osmans Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire

[Finkels] mastery of the historical literature is obvious: The sheer amount of information packed between these two covers makes it a landmark achievement.

New York Sun

With this superb book, Finkel boldly covers new ground in striving to show the Ottoman Empire from within.... Having spent 15 years living in Turkey, Finkel is uniquely positioned to overcome the practical hurdles to Ottoman research, but her real strength is in historiography: she has a keen ability to extract salient observations from her sources even as she renders their political motives transparent.The result is a panorama of the Ottoman Empire to rival the best portraits of the Romanovs and Habsburgs, and a must-have for history collections.

Booklist (starred review)

Possibly the first book in English on the entire history of the Ottoman Empire for general readers. In [Finkels] well-written narrative, she breaks with Western scholarship by not treating the empire as the stereotypical Sick Man of Europe, preferring to let the extensive Turkish sources tell a story of an enormous, complex, multiethnic state.

Library Journal

Readable survey on one of the worlds great empires.... Finkels text is a satisfying blend of narrative history, anecdote and character study.... The more we know about the Ottomans, the more easily comprehensible the subsequent history of the region they ruled becomes. Finkels study makes a useful contribution.

Kirkus Reviews

Finkels striking innovation is to turn a mirror on the Ottomans and examine how they saw themselves and their empire.... A refreshingly original perspective... this history makes a riveting and enjoyable read for all audiences.

Publishers Weekly

A magnificent new historical panorama.... For perhaps the first time in English, a genuine Ottoman scholar has written a clear narrative account of the great empire based mainly on Turkish rather than hostile western accounts.The result is not only a revelation; it is a vital corrective to the influential but partial and wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia, such as V. S. Naipaul, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntingdon, all of whom continue to manufacture entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history...

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, The Scotsman

Osmans Dream is a deeply sympathetic, compelling and highly readable account of the rise and fall of an immensely complex and dynamic society which, at its height was the most the most far-reaching and the most powerful Empire the world had ever seen. But it is also something more. For Caroline Finkel has not only told the history of how a band of Turcoman warriors from eastern Anatolia came to dominate so much of the world. She has also shown why that history matters, why today we are in no position to understand, not merely the modern Republic of Turkey but also modern Islam unless we also understand the past, and the present perception, of the greatest and most enduring of the Islamic states.

ANTHONY PAGDEN, Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science, UCLA

How timely to have such a lucid, well-researched, and fair-minded history of the Ottoman Empireand one too which treats it not as some exotic and alien world, but as part of our common past.

MARGARET MACMILLAN, author of Paris1919

Osmans Dream is a treasure for anyone who wants to know exactly what happened when in the Ottoman Empire. Here at last is a reliable history that takes into full account not only the work of international and Turkish historians but also the writings of the Ottomans themselves.

HUGH POPE, author of Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World

Finkel has brilliantly woven together a highly readable survey of 600 years of Ottoman history. Well researched and beautifully written, Osmans Dream will be essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about the Empire that ruled for centuries over so many of our contemporary trouble spotsfrom the Balkans to the Arab world.

HEATH W. LOWRY, Ataturk Professor of Ottoman & Modern Turkish Studies, Princeton University

The Ottoman Empire has been in the spotlight of late, and the subject of a fair few studiessome of high qualitywhich makes the freshness of Finkels history the more striking. The secret, apart from an irresistible narrative style, is a generous openness to every aspect of Ottoman life and culture, and a willingness to address Ottoman problems on their terms. What has often come across as an impossibly exotic procession of Viziers, Beys and Pashas is here brought vividly home to the general reader.

The Scotsman

Copyright 2005 by Caroline Finkel

Published in hardcover in the United States in 2006 by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Published in paperback in 2007 by Basic Books

First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by John Murray Publishers, a division of Hodder Headline

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Words and Music by Jimmy Kennedy and Nat Simon

1953 (Renewed) Chappell & Co.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

HC: ISBN 13 978-0-465-02396-7 ; ISBN 0-465-02396-7

British ISBN 0-7195-5513-2

PBK: ISBN 13 978-0-465-02397-4 ; ISBN 0-465-02397-5

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The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Plate 1, .Hakk Uzunarl, Gazi Orhan Bey vakfiyesi, 724 Rebilevvel-1324 Mart, Belleten V (1941) 2801; 2, Johann Schiltberger, Ich Schildtberger zoche auss von meiner heimat... (Augsburg, 1475) n.p.; 3, Topkap Palace Museum Library (Suleymnnme, H.1517 f.31v); 4, Schloss Eggenberg Museum, Graz; 5, University Library Budapest (Miscellany, Cod. Ital. 3 f.144v); 6, Jrgen Franck/Cornucopia; 7, Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, Istanbul (no. 68/154; W. Schiele 1968); 8, Topkap Palace Museum Library (Album, H.2153 f.145v); 9, Gulielmus Caoursin, Guillelmi Caonrsin [sic] Rhodiorum Vicecancellarij: obsidionis Rhodie Vrbis descriptio... de casu Regis Zyzymy: Commentarium incipit (Ulm, 1496) n.p. [f.33r]; 10, A. Vayssire, Lordre de Saint-Jean de Jrusalem ou de Malte en Limousin... (Tulle, 1884) frontispiece; 11, William Stirling-Maxwell, Examples of the Engraved Portraiture of the Sixteenth Century (London and Edinburgh, 1872) 41; 12, Topkap Palace Museum Library (Hunernme, H.1524 f.165v); 13, Topkap Palace Museum Library (Futh al-harameyn, R.917 f.14r); 14, Mazovian Museum, Plock, Poland/Muzeum Mazowieckie w Plocku (MMP/S/2); 15, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art (POT1688); 16, Topkap Palace Museum Library (Srnme-I humyn, H.1344 f.279r); 17, Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, Istanbul (R 28.874); 18, Topkap Palace Museum Library (Album, B.408); 19, Topkap Palace Museum Library (Album, H.2134 f.1r); 20, Museo Civico Correr, Venice (Memorie turche, MSS. Cicogna 1971/36); 21, G. J. Grelot, Relation nouvelle dun voyage de Constantinople