Followings are the reviews of
Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923
by Caroline Finkel.
This is a new history of the Ottoman Empire (1300-1923).

source: http://www.osmansdream.com




Reviews

1. Anthony Pagden Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science, UCLA

2. Margaret MacMillan author of Paris 1919

3. Hugh Pope author of Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World

4. Heath W. Lowry Ataturk Professor of Ottoman & Modern Turkish Studies, Princeton University

5. Andrew Wheatcroft Reader in English, Stirling University

6. Gerald MacLean Senior Research Fellow, Middlesex University

7. Donna Landry Professor of English and American Literatures, University of Kent at Canterbury

8. Jerry Brotton BBC History Magazine, July 2005

9. Jason Goodwin Literary Review, July 2005

10. The Good Book Guide, August 2005

11. David McLaurin The Tablet, 10 September 2005

12. The Scotsman, 24 September 2005

13. William Dalrymple The Scotsman, 10 December 2005

14. Michael Kerrigan The Scotsman, 17 December 2005

15. Ilber Ortaylı Cornucopia Magazine, Issue 34, 2005

16. Roderick Conway Morris Times Literary Supplement, 27 January 2006



1. Anthony Pagden Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science, UCLA

Osman's 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 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.



2. Margaret MacMillan author of Paris 1919

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



3. Hugh Pope author of Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World

Osman's 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.



4. Heath W. Lowry Ataturk Professor of Ottoman & Modern Turkish Studies, Princeton University

Finkel has brilliantly woven together a highly readable survey of 600 years of Ottoman history. Well researched and beautifully written, Osman's 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 spots-from the Balkans to the Arab world.



5. Andrew Wheatcroft Reader in English, Stirling University

In the last few years there has been a flow of good new studies on the Ottoman Empire. But none has been a history of the Ottomans from start to finish, based on a wide range of sources, but a flowing narrative rather than a textbook. Now with Osman's Dream we have a narrative history that will be hard to surpass. Finkel unites this long history in a manner that disentangles its complexities, brings its individuals to life, and connects the Ottoman past to the Turkish present. Even with well known episodes, she manages to add something new, often through the deft use of Ottoman sources in a sprightly translation. It is a huge book, but for this reader, never seemed overlong.

There is often one book that will outlast all the others on any given subject, and will define the topic for a generation. Finkel already has a reputation in her academic area of Ottoman studies. The truly remarkable aspect of Osman's Dream is that it is good not just on her speciality, but all the way through, from the 14th to the 20th century. Might this not be THE history book of 2005?



6. Gerald MacLean Senior Research Fellow, Middlesex University

History at its Best

This is the book we have all been waiting for; Finkel's Osman's Dream not only makes all previous histories of the Ottoman Empire obsolete, but all future historians will have to take note of this brilliantly concise yet thoroughly revisionary account of over 600 years of Turkish civilization. Based on the latest archival research, Finkel dispels the myths of orientalist historians whose accounts of the 'terrible Turk' declining into the 'sick man of Europe' continue to hold sway in the popular imagination. Elegantly written, Osman's Dream should be read by everyone interested in history, the Ottomans, imperialism, and the current status of Turkey's application to enter the EU. A wonderful achievement.





7. Donna Landry Professor of English and American Literatures, University of Kent at Canterbury



Osman's Dream is that rare thing, a work of groundbreaking history that is also extremely timely. This book is crucial for anyone seeking to understand relations between East and West or the place of the Turkish republic in the world today. The epic story of the Ottomans from their origins in the steppes of Central Asia to their occupation of much of Europe, this is the first book to uncover the empire's own dynamic history. The book shimmers with the splendour of the imperial court at a time when European nations were barely emerging from backwoods primitivism. Multiracial, multicultural, multinational, for much of its history the Ottoman empire exceeded Europe in religious tolerance and cultural richness. Caroline Finkel's beautifully written narrative challenges from the ground up the orthodoxies and stereotypes that haunt popular views of the Ottomans and the Turks. Everybody who was fascinated by the "Turks" exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (2005) should buy and read this book. It is a sophisticated synthesis of the best new scholarship and original archival research, with lessons for today's contentious nationalisms at every turn.





8. Jerry Brotton BBC History Magazine, July 2005

Forgotten Empire

As Turkey edges closer to the EU, Jerry Brotton welcomes a balanced account of its predecessor
(from BBC History Magazine)

Fifteenth century Ottoman Chroniclers tell the story of the dream of Osman, the first sultan, who imagined that a tree sprouted from his navel; its shade covered the world, presaging the global reach of the subsequent Ottoman Empire. Over 600 years later, in 1927, Atatürk set out his vision or dream of the Turkish Republic in a speech that effectively ended the empire. These two dreams frame Osman’s Dream, an absorbing, monumental story of one of the most reviled and misunderstood empires.

Between Osman’s dream and Atatürk’s, the Ottoman Empire presides over the death of Byzantium, as well as spawning 38 sultans and a territorial reach that at its height encompassed millions of multi-ethnic subjects from India to the gates of Vienna. Finkel’s achievement is to provide not only a reliable and authoritative account of the dizzying political and administrative development of the empire, but to also step through the minefield of myth, controversy and vested political interests that have skewed most previous attempts to offer a balanced assessment of the Ottomans. As Finkel points out, western historians have reduced the empire to an orientalist “theatre of the absurd”, peopled with salacious sultans, evil pashas and inflexible clerics. On the other hand, Finkel shows how modern “homegrown” Turkish historians “spin” aspects of the Ottoman past “which suits modern political purposes”, by avoiding contradiction and complexity, and showing “a reluctance to acknowledge the existence of dissent which is an abiding feature of politics in modern Turkey”.

Finkel carefully carefully sifts fact from fiction as she chronicles the empire’s emergence from the Turcoman tribal groups of Central Asia, through its gradual control of Anatolia, the catastrophic defeat at the hands of Tamerlaine in 1402, to its recovery and ultimate victory over the Byzantine Empire with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.She explains the shift from nomadic aggression to imperial and religious supremacy through the more well-known codifiers of empire, Mehmed II and Süleyman the Lawgiver. But she also highlights the achievements of neglected sultans like Selim I (1512-152, who conquered Egypt in 1517. The book deftly portrays the Ottoman Empire for what it was a, a polyglot institution that stood in the between Christian West and Muslim East: a position that defined its spectacular emergence, but which also ultimately destroyed it.

However, Finkel strenuously resists the Gibbonesque “decline and fall” arguments that have bedevilled most accounts of the Ottomans. Stepping deftly through the labyrinthine rise of the power of the janissaries and the harem in the 17th and 18th centuries, she argues that “the empire was no longer able to choose whether to accept or reject foreign influence, but used the means at its disposal to reject what were deemed its harmful effects”. However, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 destroyed the ancien régime certainties forever and accelerated the internal dissensions that slowly led to the empire’s disintegration throughout the 19th century. The violent and bloody rise of republicanism, the empire’s fatal entry into the First World War, and the massacre of Armenians is handled with great sensitivity, and Finkel pulls no punches when dealing with Atatürk’s rise to power and “the repression that accompanied the creation of the post-Ottoman state”. Osman’s Dream is a marvellous achievement, which deserves to provoke widespread debate.



9. Jason Goodwin Literary Review, July 2005

What makes a Turk?

People in this country can’t have heard so much about since Gladstone vilified them in 1876. They’ve been in Brussels; they spooked the French; and they had the turnstiles rattling with the RS’s recent show, Turks: A Journey of 1,000 Years. Who are these people?

The timing of Caroline Finkel’s splendidly written Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire reflects the buoyant state of Ottoman scholarship. Neglected archives have been triumphantly mined by a new generation of scholars, and Finkel’s intimacy with the material makes this the most authoritative narrative history of the empire yet published.

In 1777 an Istanbul Armenian, d’Ohsson, wrote his Tableau général de l’Empire othoman. Finkel, though she quotes him, is not interested in tableaux: look elsewhere for details of battles, rituals, costumes, and the like. Her narrative focuses on the dynamics of the imperial story, bucking the outworn thesis that this was an empire which, having risen to its height, stagnated, then declined.

In the sixteenth century, when a mature Sunni state came to reflect on its own past, it became fashionable to ascribe the Ottomans; early success to the implacable piety of the Turkish frontier, ranged against the Christian kingdoms of Byzantium and Europe. The truth is far less cut and dried. Osman’s good fortune was to lead the foremost of all the raiding bands which by the fourteenth century had brought Turkish encroachment on Greek Anatolia to within a stone’s throw of Byzantium: as he conquered, so the reivers of a border society, Christian as well as Muslim, joined him for what they could get. But the conquests that followed were not spun off to rivals and protégés: Finkel’s detailed story suggests how the dynasty kept its grip.

Beyond good generalship, there was always spin. Osman’s dream of empire – like the story that Osman’s father had his grant of land from the Seljuk sultan of Rum, or could trace descent from Japhet and Noah – helped the Ottoman’s initial quest for legitimacy. Finkel shows how their increasingly confident espousal of orthodox Sunni Islam strengthened the administrative basis of their rule, but also provoked opposition to it. The marcher lords – the Ottomans’ allies and rivals – were apt to resent centralisation, in faith or politics. In 1416 a rebellion on the fledgling empire’s European borders was led by a holy man, preaching union with God: though he was arrested and executed, Sheikh Bedreddin’s doctrine’s were to flourish for the life of the empire. In the end, though, the dynasty was preserved by its continuing – though not constant – success in battle.

By 1453, the Black Sea had become an Ottoman lake. The Ottomans ruled most of Anatolia and the Balkan peninsula to the Adriatic and the Danube, and had taken Constantinople, which had strategic value and brought the dynasty prestige (the name Istanbul only became official in 1930, Finkel notes, delightfully quoting the song: ‘Why did Constantinople get the works? / That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’/ ‘Istanbul!!’).

Mehmed the Conqueror signalled it’s rebirth as an Islamic city with the mosques he and his statesmen founded as hubs of the new city districts; the tomb of the Ayyub Ansari, a companion of the Prophet, was miraculously rediscovered; meanwhile Mehmed’s Topkapi Palace cloistered the person of the sultan with awesome ritual. ‘For the next century, sultans appeared before their court only on two annual religious holidays.’

They continued to appear before their enemies at the head of their troops, however. It was just as well: the ‘westward-looking Balkan-Byzantine power’ of the Ottomans, buttressed by Sunni orthodoxy, was rivalled by the populist Shi’ite Safavid empire of Iran. Booted into the sultanate in 1512 by the already overweening influence of the janissaries, Selim turned to tackle the Safavids with brutal efficiency, and modern firearms. Strategic imperatives led him to take over Syria and Egypt, too, with the guardianship of Mecca and Medina. To the secular imperial tradition of Constantinople the Ottomans had now added ‘an equally glorious sacred tradition. Secular and sacred traditions would together sustain the legitimacy and authority of [the sultan’s] successors’.

The immediate heir to the combined traditions added a third. -Suleyman the Magnificent exploited the role of the just sovereign, and was known to the Ottomans as Suleyman Kanuni, the Lawgiver, for the attention he gave justice and the codification of non-sharia law. The magnificence belonged to the first half of his long reign, in which he campaigned on several fronts and extended Ottoman rule over most of Hungary; later he tended to asceticism, perhaps partially inspired by the approaching Islamic millennium year of 1591-92.

Suleyman projected - all too successfully, Finkel suggests – the image of a just sultan ruling an ordered dominion: his heirs fell victim to it in the altered, post-millennial world, judged against the yardstick of a perfect state which never existed. Historians, she complains, have been too swift to follow them.

Drawing on eyewitness accoun5ts and one rhymed autobiography (Ottomans were nothing if not cultured), Finkel’s lively analysis of the febrile politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explains how the nature of the sultanate and the relative power of bureaucracy and the palace harem changed, as did the relationship between the power centre and the provinces.

The empire entered the nineteenth century with one institution which had not, regrettably, changed much. The janissaries, like functionaries in the administration, were originally recruited from a levy of Christian boys in the Balkans. They were Europe’s first standing army, at the sharp end of Ottoman expansion into southeastern Europe, Egypt and Iran.

Long before their fighting prowess declined, however, they became a dangerous force to be reckoned with at home. For all their dynastic ambition, the Ottomans had never sorted out succession: at the death of the sultan, his sons jockeyed for the sultanate among themselves. Popularity was what counted, above all among the janissaries.

It wasn’t always a question of a donative. In 1512 the janissaries deposed Sultan Bayezit in favour of his son, Selim, who was a warmonger. It was the first but by no means 5the last time. Selim’s own son, Suleyman the Magnificent, succeeded peacefully. He fathered at least five boys, four by his wife, the notorious Roxelana; only one of her sons, another Selim, survived his father. Even then, the janissaries would not admit him into his own palace at Topkapi until he had paid them for the privilege. So it went on.

In 1826 Mahmud II finally destroyed the janissaries and reorganised the army, the prelude to reforming every institution in the empire. With sultans back in the saddle, the questions of legitimacy rose up again: in a Europe dominated by France, England and Russia, what was the basis of Ottoman rulership? The Hapsburgs, ruling their own multi-ethnic multi-confessional conglomeration, faced a similar dilemma. In both cases, the only solution seemed to be for the empires to explode under the weight of their own self-contradictions.

The Ottomans tried several angles during Tanzimat. A non-sectarian ideal of ‘Ottoman citizenship’ vied with a vision of constitutional liberalism within an Islamic framework; later, the sultan’s role as caliph was revitalised when losses in the Balkans deprived the state of most of its Christian subjects, and the Arabs were courted for the first time; pan-Turkism flared into life, modelled on Russia’s pan-Slavic propaganda. In taking her story down to 1927, Finkel puts Kemal’s autocratic policies into the perspective of a generation which had witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman ideal, and needed a new dream.



10. The Good Book Guide, August 2005

Prejudice dogged the Ottoman Empire throughout the six centuries that it flourished until it came to an end on the battlefields of World War I. It was dubbed the centre of 'Oriental despotism' and tagged 'the sick man of Europe', but only by those who had an axe to grind. Ottoman expert Finkel believes we have much to thank the Empire for in our modern lives. In this first book to pull together the full story of the dynasty, she focuses on its colossal military might, stretching from eastern Europe to the Persian Gulf, and North Africa to the Caucasus, and on its cultural legacy. Featured here .are giants such as Suleyman the Magnificent and Abdulhamid II, along with the lesser mortals who tried to fulfill the dream of the Empire's founder, Osman the first sultan. This is history written with a dynamic, modern feel and penetrating gaze.



11. David McLaurin The Tablet, 10 September 2005

Empire with no clear purpose.

The Ottoman Empire began life as a small principality in western Anatolia in the opening years of the fourteenth century. Within 150 years the Ottomans had taken Byzantium and most of the Balkans. By the time of Su1eyman the Magnificent (1520-1566) they ruled from Hungary to Yemen, Mesopotamia to Algiers. Success was partly a result of superior weaponry, and partly because their rivals could but sporadically unite against them. But if the first 300 years were glorious, the next three and a half centuries were a tale of melancholy decline. It is this part of Caroline Finkel's book that is most instructive.

After a brief technical superiority, the Ottomans fell behind the rest of Europe. Ottoman textiles were not of sufficient quality to compete with foreign products and the production of woollen cloth was abandoned in 1732. Yet Anatolia was the home of Angora (Ankara) yam. Printing arrived in the Empire in 1727, but lasted only 64 years, during which time 24 titles were produced, each of the print runs consisting of about 500 copies each. The Ottomans made few advances in the science of government. They relied on tax farming, a wasteful way of raising revenue. Beset by wars on all sides, they were constantly faced with shortages of man- power and ready cash. Conscription was ham-pered by desertions and many emolments existed purely on paper. Istanbul's reach was limited. Anatolia was in a state of intermittent chaos in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies. Grand Viziers attempted to conciliate provincial grandees with little success. Many provinces were semi-independent principalities such as Moravia?, the Crimea and later Egypt, all drifting towards full autonomy. Added to these centrifugal forces was frequent disorder in Istanbul itself: shopkeepers, Janissaries, clerics and other malcontents often had the power to effect a change of government. On several occasions a terrified Sul¬¬tan bad the corpse of an unpopular minister thrown over the wall of the Topkapi Palace to placate the mob. It did not always work: of the 41 sultans, 14 were deposed, or disposed of.

The Ottomans never solved the constitutional question: how does one run a large empire, and what is its purpose? However, Finkel makes clear that this was not entirely their fault. Selim III (1789-1807), perhaps the wisest of Sultans, tried reforming the army, but ended up deposed and later murdered. The reforming Sultans ~o followed him, Mahmud II (1808-1839) and Abdulme cid I (1839-1861), were more successful in

that they managed to keep their thrones and their lives, and deal with the overpowerful vested interests that overthrew Selim III.

But why did these reforms not work? Why did the Empire continue to decline? Finkel shows that Tanzimat ("Reordering"), by aiming to make all equal before the law, struck at the three inequalities that sprang from Islamic law: between women and men, slave and free, Muslim and non-Muslim. The poll tax levied on Christians and Jews was the Empire's main source of revenue and its abolition threw the finances into chaos. Perceived attacks on Muslim privilege eventually undermined the loyalty of the army - which was recruited exclusively from Muslims. Tanzimat's "Ottomanism" as the basis for common identity in the end satisfied no one, certainly not the emergent nationalists.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909), a reactionary conservative who loved nothing better than a Sherlock Holmes story last thing at night, was perhaps more realistic. By his time the Balkan and predominantly Christian provinces had largely gone: his recipe for holding the Empire together was Islam, and the emphasis on the role of the Sultan as Caliph, the commander of all the faithful. The bouse of Osman had always claimed to have inherited this title from the Abbasids, but only at the end of the Empire did it make use of it. Indeed, in 1914, on entry into the First World War on the German side, Sultan Mehmed V proclaimed a Holy War, instructing the Muslim subjects of the British Empire to rise up against the infidel.

None of them did. In 1923, abolishing the Caliphate, Ataturk decided that what remained of Turkey could be held together only by an appeal to Turkish nationalism, something quite alien to the spirit of the Empire. Indeed, Finkel never refers to her subjects as anything but Ottomans, stressing their supranational identity.

This is a fine single-volume account of a long and at times complicated period. One can be tempted to read it in the light of the Turkish bid for entry "into Europe", but for Finkel, who clearly loves her subject, the Ottomans were in Europe, shaping its destiny, long before the nation called Turkey was even dreamed of.



12. The Scotsman, 24 September 2005

The Ottoman Empire has been in the spotlight of late, and the subject of a fair few studies-some of high quality-which makes the freshness of Finkel's 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.



13. William Dalrymple The Scotsman, 10 December 2005

The most unexpected book I read this year, however, was Caroline Finkel's magnificent new historical panorama, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire: 1300-1923 (John Murray, £3. 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 VS Naipaul, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntingdon, all of whom continue to manufacture entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history.



14. Michael Kerrigan The Scotsman, 17 December 2005

Fascinating and remarkably readable.



15. Ilber Ortaylı Cornucopia Magazine, Issue 34, 2005

Battles do count

Osman's Dream is at heart a romantic book in the grand old tradition of historical narrative. It traces the story of the Ottoman dynasty from its small-scale start in northwestern Anatolia in the fourteenth century straight through the great period until 1700, then on, through the era of decline, ending with the First World War and the end of the dynasty. The approach is firmly and unrepentantly narrative, taking in battles, court conspiracies and international treaties as a matter of course. This is a tradition that many of Caroline Finkel's contemporaries dismiss almost automatically as hopelessly obsolete. But if accepted in its own terms, it can result, as here, in books that are beautifully executed and extremely useful.

The great European historians Hammer von Purgstall and JW Zinkeisen, and our own equivalents, I H Uzuncarsili, Ahmet Rasim or Server Iskit, set the pattern, but modern Turkish historians have mainly abandoned an interest in political or military chronicle, finding such tales dull and meaningless. What they reaJly mean is that such chronicles are exceedingly difficult to bring off: how do you combine description and analysis? The fashion has been, latterly, for fuzzily conceived "social histories" drawing upon a great multitude of sources that nevertheless have yet to be given proper evaluation.

Caroline Finkel knows, of course, about depth, about cultures, about difficult sources (not only can she read the Ottoman ones, she can even make a stab at Hungarian), but concern for the profundities does not prevent her from moving her craft rapidly and skilfuJly across the surface. So, from obscure beginnings on the frontiers of the Byzantine empire, the Ottomans became the successors of Rome (and Istanbul was called by them "Konstantiniye" to the end).

When we speak of a society's history we are speaking of its fate, and people who were alive at any historical time were well and truly aware that dramas were under way that would affect them directly - forget the longue duree allegedly making this or that outcome inevitable. Battles and treaties mattered: they could have an impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.



16. Roderick Conway Morris Times Literary Supplement, 27 January 2006

Caliph of all

Although Turkish-led, the Ottoman Empire was from the outset a joint Muslim-Christian enterprise. There may well have been s many Christian as Muslim fighters, if not more, gathered around the flag of the late thirteenth-, early fourteenth-century Osman, one of a number of warlords intent on carving out their own fiefdoms in the marchlands of the shrinking Byzantine Empire. Having secured a small principality in north-western Anatolia near Constantinople, and defeated a Byzantine force sent to dislodge them in 1301, the Ottomans, as they came to be called after their first commander, crossed the Dardanelles in the early 1350s to plant their banner in Europe. They rapidly expanded into the Balkans, bringing large new populations of Christians of multiple ethnicities within their control. Nor was this achieved by conquest alone. Many Orthodox Christians, and later Hungarian Protestants, threatened with forced conversion or extermination by the Catholic West, found Ottoman rule prefemble. "Rather the Turkish turban than the Roman mitre", in the words of the slogan current at the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It was not until Selim I's annexation of Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the Islamic Holy Places in 1517 that Muslims came to represent the majority in the "Guarded Domains".

More than once, most dmmatically after Bayezid was disastrously defeated by Tamer-lane in i 402, Ottoman sultans almost entirely lost control of the Empire in Asia, while their grip on its European territories became firmer. Indeed, for much of its history, the Empire's Muslims were more turbulent and posed a greater threat to the dynasty's survival than its Christian subjects. Ottoman sultans almost invariably produced heirs by non-Turkish and (by birth) non-Muslim mothers. During the height of the Empire's success, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was governed and guided by a meritocratic military and adminis-trative elite dominated by Christians recruited in their youth and converted to Islam. Of 217 Grand Viziers from the beginning to the end, over two-thirds of them were Christian-born.

The Ottomans never attempted the wholesale conversion of their Christian subjects. The rea-son for this was partly fiscal. Broadly speaking, citizens either paid taxes or were obliged to do military service. Non-Muslims were liable to a poll tax, but were exempt from conscription. Thus it was native-born Turks and converts who provided the military manpower for an Empire that was, in theory at least, pennanently at war with the infidels beyond its borders and with "heretics", notably the Shia dynasty of the Turkish Shah Ismail of Iran and his successors.

While officially Sunni, the Ottomans had, from the earliest days, close associations with various dervish orders (still significant in Turkey today). As Caroline Finkel notes near the begin-ning of Osman's Dream, "coexistence and compromise between different manifestations of religious belief and practice is one of the abiding themes of Ottoman history". Within the realms of the Empire, even apostasy was tolerated, if deemed not to have occurred under duress, whereas both home-grown religious extremists and those seen to be fifth columnists for neigh-bouring heterodox regimes, seeking to upset the balance, were dealt with harshly. The Wahhabis of Arabia were anathema to the Ottoman establishment. With the help of Mehmed Ali, the Albanian-born semi-autonomous governor of Egypt, Mecca and Medina were liberated in the early nineteenth century after their seizure by insurgents, whose base (now part of Riyadh) was levelled. The Saudi Emir was brought to Istanbul and beheaded.

Osman's Dream takes its title from a putative vision of the eponymous creator of the dynasty, which revealed to him that he and his ilk were destined for great things. Finkel is excellent in elucidating such founding myths and investigat-ing the development of the Ottoman mentality, as she is in many other areas. A specialist Ottoman historian, with a particular knowledge of the Empire's military life - always of central importance in Turkey's history - Finkel has managed to produce a scholarly, lucid, judi-cious and enjoyable account of over 600 years of history in a single volume, which will surely be the standard work of its kind for many years to come. Finkel draws on original archival and manuscript material as well as a vast range of recent scholarship in a number of languages. But she avoids unnecessary technical terminol-ogy unfamiliar to the general reader, while providing an extensive bibliogmphy and notes for further reading. Her chronological narmtive, inevitably factually dense at times, is enlivened by quotations from chronicles, memoirs and letters. Picturesque nicknames, important handles in a society with a plethom of individu-als sharing the same appellation, are included and translated. So we encounter, along the way, Ali Pashas known variously as Surmeli ("He of the kohl-lined eyes"), Elmas ("Diamond"), Bulutkapan ("Cloudsnatcher"); Kuyucu ("Well-digger") Mumd Pasha; Bosnak ("Bosnian") Husrev Pasha; Cezzar ("Butcher") Ahmed Pasha; and Dagdevirenoglu ("Son of the Over-turner of Mountains") Mehmed Pasha, and so on.

Usefully signposted throughout are "firsts", which often signal significant shifts in political and social attitudes. We learn, for example, of the first use by the Ottomans of the title "Sultan" (applied to Osman's son Orhan); the first formal marriage of a Sultan to a member of his harem (between Suleyman - the Magnifi-cent as he is known in the West, but since the eighteenth century "Kanuni", the Lawgiver, to the Turks - and Hurrem - Roxelana to the Europeans); the first Sultan to die in Istanbul (Selim II, as late as 1574); the first coins marked "Struck in Istanbul" as opposed to "Constantinople" (late eighteenth century); and the first - and last - Sultan to go on a foreign tour (Abdulazziz, in 1867). There is much here that is instructive for our understanding of not only Ottoman and Euro-pean history but also contempomry Turkey and the Islamic world in general. Finkel's tracing over the centuries of the unfolding perception of the Caliphate is just one instance of this. When Uzun Hasan, a Turkish rival in eastern Anatolia and Iran, tried to inflate his own status by informing Mehmed II that by taking Shiraz he had come into possession of "the Home of the Caliphate", the Conqueror of Constantino-ple seems to have been singularly unimpressed. The subsequent Ottoman acquisition of the Holy Places put them more firmly in line for the title. Given that the Caliphs were traditionally supposed to descend from the tribe of the Prophet, a fake genealogy had to be concocted to back up the claim. But subsequent Sultans showed little or no interest in styling them-selves in this fashion.

It was not until the 1770s, with the loss of the Crimea, that the notion received new currency, in the wording of a treaty that recognized the Sultan as the "Caliph of all Muslims" - as Caroline Finkel points out, "a title rarely used by Ottoman Sultans but one which, formalized in terms which fitted Western mther than Islamic conceptions of religious authority, expressed the Sultan's claim to pre-eminence among Muslim princes. . .". And it was only in the reign of Abdulhamid II, during the late nineteenth century, that the "Shadow of God on Earth" came to consider "his position as Caliph superior to thal of Sultan and accord it more importance". By this time, the preference was in many ways an index of desperation, mther as the Pope, during the same period, finding him-self deprived of temporal power, promulgated the dogma of papal infallibility.