Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The Ottoman Empire stretched at its height from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the mouth of the Volga on the Caspian Sea and from the Yemen to Budapest. Its inhabitants varied enormously from ultra-Islamic Arab sheikhs to ultra-Protestant princes of Transylvania and included Orthodox Greek patricians in Istanbul Algerian pirates and a great many Jews some of them refugees from Spain. The Empire’s history reflects two of the Sultan’s innu- merable titles: ‘Marcher Lord of the Horizon’ and ‘Rock that Bestrides the Continents’. There were times when another title ‘Feather on the Breath of God’ was taken seriously. The Sultan was also caliph head of Islam. But it was a sophisticated and adaptable Islam a far cry from the harsh desert version to the south. The Empire fought wars all over the place at one stage even sending a fleet to fight the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a considerable threat to cen- tral Europe and to the European Mediterranean states especially Spain: an Ottoman army complete with camel transport and prob- ably also elephants twice besieged Vienna itself in 1529 and 1683. The janissaries the Sultan’s plume-headed praetorian guard with their wild whirling music and their peculiar style of marching caused much knees-knocking even far away in Paris. It was if you like the last barbarian invasion. But it was also and Gibbon in the eighteenth century understood it as such the last creative moment of the Roman Empire. (MP)