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Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire |
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 Lords of the Horizons:A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin Henry Holt & Company 352 pages, 1999 ISBN 0805040811 Reviewed by John A. Broussard, PhD I first became fascinated with the Ottoman Empire when I learned about Sultan Abdul the Damned, who I assumed had earned that epithet because he had ten thousand wives. I fully expected Lords of the Horizons to verify that assumption. It didn’t. It turns out that Abdul - who is mentioned only twice in passing - is merely a minor figure in his country’s history. That Goodwin in 352 pages could have covered so much so well about a vast empire which lasted six centuries - one that, at it’s apogee, spread from Algeria to the Caspian Sea, from the Danube to Arabia - is an amazing feat in itself. More amazing is that he does it with such an astonishing felicity of language. The reader, unless already steeped in Ottoman history, will learn surprising things about that empire, and in words that sparkle. For the first three hundred years, "the empire was . . . such a prodigy of pep, so vigorous and so well-ordered, such a miracle of human ingenuity, that contemporaries felt it was helped into being by powers not quite human." And in the three hundred years of its decline, "fractious and ramshackle, its politics riddled with corruption, its purposes furred by sloth, it was a miracle of a kind, too, a prodigy of decay." Unlike the European peoples they threatened and invaded, the Moslem Turks showed amazing tolerance toward all religions, having little interest in converting subjugated populations. In fact, it was during their period of conquest that the Turks actually liberated the downtrodden Balkan Slavs from their feudal masters. Impressed as he is by the remarkable qualities of this tribe that exploded outwards from a tiny enclave in Anatolia, Goodwin does not gloss over the Turks’ cruelty. As he points out, however, they were never quite able to surpass their Christian adversaries in that respect. If there are any flaws in this narrative, they stem from the author’s perhaps too great willingness to accept anecdotal material as fact. I’m willing to believe that the presence of Turkish galleys "could be smelled from a mile away over the water," but I draw the line at Turkish riders who could "fire arrows backwards from the saddle at a moving target, at a rate of three a second." But these are minor matters. Even though I still do not know why Abdul was called The Damned, I have high praise for this marvelous work. Certainly, for anyone who wants to know more about how the breakup of the Ottoman Empire produced much of the contemporary tragedy of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, or for someone who simply wishes to experience history, beautifully written, Lords of the Horizons is required reading. |
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