Roger Crowley: Bernard Lewis, the Ottoman Empire, and Modern Turkey
[Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and spent part of his childhood in Malta. He read English at Cambridge University and taught English in Istanbul, where he developed a strong interest in the history of Turkey. He has traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean basin over many years and has a wide-ranging knowledge of its history and culture. He lives in Gloucestershire, England. He is also the author of 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West.]
In October 1953 the historian Bernard Lewis wrote an article for History Today about the Ottoman Empire and its relations with Europe. The occasion was the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople; his purpose was to plead for a more balanced assessment of the empire and to accord it an honourable place in world history, to see the fall of Constantinople not as a ‘victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization’...
Lewis laid out the historiography that has informed European views of the Ottomans. The events of 1453 happened on the cusp of the printing revolution; one of its first uses was to disseminate virulent accounts of ‘the damnable menace of the Grand Turk of the infidels’; particularly influential was the 17th-century bestseller, Richard Knolles’ The General History of the Turks, about ‘the present terror of the world’.Out of these antecedents has come a complex set of emotional associations about the Turks, coloured by racial memory, admiration for classical Greece and the development of modern nationalisms which have skewed an objective assessment of a great world civilisation:‘for most Europeans,’ Lewis argued,‘the loss of Constantinople is a great historical disaster, a defeat for Christendom which has never been repaired.’ While drawing a distinction between the heyday of the empire in its pomp and its ramshackle exodus in the 19th and 20th centuries, he sketched the achievements of the mature empire – its comparative tolerance, its efficient governance, its creation of peace and security within the Arab lands and the Balkans, its stability, its regeneration of an ossified Byzantine Constantinople, the beauty of its art and architecture. Above all, Lewis pleaded for a study of the Turks through their own eyes and their own words rather than through the prejudices of western travellers....
The Ottomans remain a conundrum, both distant and very near. The last subjects of the Ottoman Empire are still alive, yet its language is so dead that Turkish people cannot read their grandparents’gravestones. Its life was so long that it encompassed both the golden age of Suleiman the Magnificent and the decline of the Sick Man of Europe; the open-armed welcome to the Jews after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the fate of the Armenians in 1915. Lewis was inviting us to salute the majesty of the former but has been accused of airbrushing the latter. The Ottomans puzzle the Turks almost as much as they do outsiders. Ataturk encouraged his new republic to jump over the decadent Ottoman centuries and claim connection with the ‘purer’Turkishness of their central Asian origins. In the process the Turks too have been left with a soul-searching debate about ethnicity, history and identity. A clear perspective on the multiple faces of the Ottoman Empire remains a work in progress.
Read entire article at History Today
In October 1953 the historian Bernard Lewis wrote an article for History Today about the Ottoman Empire and its relations with Europe. The occasion was the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople; his purpose was to plead for a more balanced assessment of the empire and to accord it an honourable place in world history, to see the fall of Constantinople not as a ‘victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization’...
Lewis laid out the historiography that has informed European views of the Ottomans. The events of 1453 happened on the cusp of the printing revolution; one of its first uses was to disseminate virulent accounts of ‘the damnable menace of the Grand Turk of the infidels’; particularly influential was the 17th-century bestseller, Richard Knolles’ The General History of the Turks, about ‘the present terror of the world’.Out of these antecedents has come a complex set of emotional associations about the Turks, coloured by racial memory, admiration for classical Greece and the development of modern nationalisms which have skewed an objective assessment of a great world civilisation:‘for most Europeans,’ Lewis argued,‘the loss of Constantinople is a great historical disaster, a defeat for Christendom which has never been repaired.’ While drawing a distinction between the heyday of the empire in its pomp and its ramshackle exodus in the 19th and 20th centuries, he sketched the achievements of the mature empire – its comparative tolerance, its efficient governance, its creation of peace and security within the Arab lands and the Balkans, its stability, its regeneration of an ossified Byzantine Constantinople, the beauty of its art and architecture. Above all, Lewis pleaded for a study of the Turks through their own eyes and their own words rather than through the prejudices of western travellers....
The Ottomans remain a conundrum, both distant and very near. The last subjects of the Ottoman Empire are still alive, yet its language is so dead that Turkish people cannot read their grandparents’gravestones. Its life was so long that it encompassed both the golden age of Suleiman the Magnificent and the decline of the Sick Man of Europe; the open-armed welcome to the Jews after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the fate of the Armenians in 1915. Lewis was inviting us to salute the majesty of the former but has been accused of airbrushing the latter. The Ottomans puzzle the Turks almost as much as they do outsiders. Ataturk encouraged his new republic to jump over the decadent Ottoman centuries and claim connection with the ‘purer’Turkishness of their central Asian origins. In the process the Turks too have been left with a soul-searching debate about ethnicity, history and identity. A clear perspective on the multiple faces of the Ottoman Empire remains a work in progress.