My last visit to Istanbul, while passing along the Golden Horn in bright autumnal light, I came across a semi-deserted Ottoman tomb complex. A shady garden gave on to the courtyard of a mosque, behind which stood an octagonal tomb tower. This, I read, was the mausoleum of a long-forgotten Ottoman admiral, named Kilic Ali Pasha. The Pasha had distinguished himself fighting the massed navies of Christendom’s Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. For his bravery in this disastrous battle — where 200 out of 230 Ottoman ships sank and some 50,000 of their seamen lost their lives, he was made the Kaptan Pasha, or High Admiral. In 1573 he went on to seize Christian Cyprus from the Venetians. Here, it seemed, was a figure who might be taken to personify the Clash of Civilisations — “The Terrible Turk” incarnate — until, that is, I discovered that Kilic Ali was actually a Calabrian named Occhiali who had chosen to convert to Islam to enter Ottoman service. Any assumption of some inevitable battle between the forces of Asia and Europe was further challenged when I read that the complex had been constructed by another Christian convert, the great Sinan, formerly an Armenian named Joseph, and that the mosque was modelled on the great Byzantine church of Haghia Sophia. During the same period, the most powerful Ottoman vizier was the eunuch Hasan Aga, formerly Samson Rowlie from Great Yarmouth, while the Ottoman general known as “Ingliz Mustapha” was in reality a Scot, a Campbell no less, who had embraced Islam and joined the Janissaries.
Kilic Ali Pasha’s Istanbul tomb was situated in the perfect position for a man who lived such a cross-cultural life, balanced between two continents. Yet, for all its exoticism, Istanbul, the New Rome of the Emperor Constantine, has always been a European city. And while the Ottomans’ Turkic roots lay in Anatolia, and before that Central Asia, they nevertheless played a central part in European history: indeed at their peak, controlling one bank of the Danube, and encamped in the suburbs of Vienna, the Ottoman’s global empire governed nearly a quarter of Europe, including all of modern Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Greece. They were also western Europe’s biggest trading partner. These are the central facts that underlie Marc David Baer’s magnificent new book, The Ottomans.
“Like its language, the Ottoman Empire was not simply Turkish,” writes Baer, professor of international history at the London School of Economics. “Nor was it made up only of Muslims . . . Like the Roman Empire it was a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multiracial, multireligious empire . . . It was a European Empire that remains an integral part of European culture and history.”
The Ottomans believed that their advance into Europe meant that they were the inheritors of Byzantium and should therefore be considered the new Romans. This was something that people around the world were once happy to acknowledge: “Arabs, Persians, Indian and Turks referred to the Ottoman rulers as Caesars and their dominion as the Roman Empire,” writes Baer.