Seemingly contradictory ideas of privacy and community dominate Ottoman cities. While houses are internally divided to guard female modesty behind a frontage studded with peep-holes, streets in cities like Amasya are often bridged by first-floor passageways between different houses. This book contains 17 papers by architects and archaeologists looking at how the Ottoman house was structured, how it has varied over time and space, and how surviving examples are faring in a world of breeze-block construction. Although the examples discussed are all Near Eastern, and mostly from Turkey, the revelations this book contains about structuring principles will make it a valuable companion to understanding architectural relics from all over the Ottoman Empire.

Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808 is the first book of the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. It describes how the Ottoman Turks, a small band of nomadic soldiers, managed to expand their dominions from a small principality in northwestern Anatolia on the borders of the Byzantine Empire into one of the great empires of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe and Asia, extending from northern Hungary to southern Arabia and from the Crimea across North Africa almost to the Atlantic Ocean. The volume sweeps away the accumulated prejudices of centuries and describes the empire of the sultans as a living, changing society, dominated by the small multinational Ottoman ruling class led by the sultan, but with a scope of government so narrow that the subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, were left to carry on their own lives, religions, and traditions with little outside interference.

The Ottomans ruled much of the Arab World for four centuries. Bruce Masters's work surveys this period, emphasizing the cultural and social changes that occurred against the backdrop of the political realities that Arabs experienced as subjects of the Ottoman sultans. The persistence of Ottoman rule over a vast area for several centuries required that some Arabs collaborate in the imperial enterprise. Masters highlights the role of two social classes that made the empire successful: the Sunni Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, and the urban notables, the acyan. Both groups identified with the Ottoman sultanate and were its firmest backers, although for different reasons. The ulama legitimated the Ottoman state as a righteous Muslim sultanate, while the acyan emerged as the dominant political and economic class in most Arab cities due to their connections to the regime. Together, the two helped to maintain the empire.

The Ottoman Empire and its conflicts provide one of the longest continuous narratives in military history. Its rulers were never overthrown by a foreign power and no usurper succeeded in taking the throne. At its height under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Empire became the most powerful state in the world a multi-national, multilingual empire that stretched from Vienna to the upper Arab peninsula. With Suleiman's death began the gradual decline to the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 in which the Ottoman Empire lost much of its European territory. This volume covers the main campaigns and the part played by such elite troops as the Janissaries and the Sipahis, as well as exploring the social and economic impact of the conquests.

A new approach to late Ottoman visual culture and its place in the world With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque—the first English-language book on the topic—Ünver Rüstem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between 1740 and 1800 the Ottomans consciously coopted European forms to craft a new, politically charged, and globally resonant image for their empire’s capital. Rüstem reclaims the label “Ottoman Baroque” as a productive framework for exploring the connectedness of Istanbul’s eighteenth-century buildings to other traditions of the period. Using a wealth of primary sources, he demonstrates that this architecture was in its own day lauded by Ottomans and foreigners alike for its fresh, cosmopolitan effect. Purposefully and creatively assimilated, the style’s cross-cultural borrowings were combined with Byzantine references that asserted the Ottomans’ entitlement to the Classical artistic heritage of Europe. Such aesthetic rebranding was part of a larger endeavor to reaffirm the empire’s power at a time of intensified East-West contact, taking its boldest shape in a series of imperial mosques built across the city as landmarks of a state-sponsored idiom. Copiously illustrated and drawing on previously unpublished documents, Ottoman Baroque breaks new ground in our understanding of Islamic visual culture in the modern era and offers a persuasive counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of global art history.

"Houses can become poetic expressions of longing for a lost past, voices of a lived present, and dreams of an ideal future." Carel Bertram discovered this truth when she went to Turkey in the 1990s and began asking people about their memories of "the Turkish house." The fondness and nostalgia with which people recalled the distinctive wooden houses that were once ubiquitous throughout the Ottoman Empire made her realize that "the Turkish house" carries rich symbolic meaning. In this delightfully readable book, Bertram considers representations of the Turkish house in literature, art, and architecture to understand why the idea of the house has become such a potent signifier of Turkish identity. Bertram's exploration of the Turkish house shows how this feature of Ottoman culture took on symbolic meaning in the Turkish imagination as Turkey became more Westernized and secular in the early decades of the twentieth century. She shows how artists, writers, and architects all drew on the memory of the Turkish house as a space where changing notions of spirituality, modernity, and identity—as well as the social roles of women and the family—could be approached, contested, revised, or embraced during this period of tumultuous change.

Seemingly contradictory ideas of privacy and community dominate Ottoman cities. While houses are internally divided to guard female modesty behind a frontage studded with peep-holes, streets in cities like Amasya are often bridged by first-floor passageways between different houses. This book contains 17 papers by architects and archaeologists looking at how the Ottoman house was structured, how it has varied over time and space, and how surviving examples are faring in a world of breeze-block construction. Although the examples discussed are all Near Eastern, and mostly from Turkey, the revelations this book contains about structuring principles will make it a valuable companion to understanding architectural relics from all over the Ottoman Empire.

Standing at the crossroads of many cultures, Ottoman style is spiced with influences from Chinese and Indian to French and Italian. In this spectacular volume, Istanbul-born interior designer Serdar Gülgün narrates a tour of his beautiful home, a historic mansion on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Constantly inspired by the atmosphere of his ancient city, Gülgün believes a successful interior design is a place of experience in which authentic elements of culture fuse and achieve alchemy, awakening all the senses and transporting its inhabitants to a place of fantasy.

This book tells the astonishing story of a secular building and its inhabitants over six centuries and four successive civilizations. The Bailo House was constructed as a public loggia in the 14th century by Venetian officials in their Aegean colony of Negroponte on the Byzantine island of Euripos. Italian designs were followed and copied in the style of the lagoon's palaces, digging the foundations through the earlier Byzantine layers. It later became seat of an Ottoman official, also housing his apothecary. It subsequently passed into the hands of a local Ottoman dignitary, who completely transformed into a typical Middle Eastern mansion. In the early 19th century it was reshaped once again with a neoclassical facade to conform to the European models promoted by the Modern Greek state. Extensive study, excavations and restorations over a ten-year period revealed remarkable evidence for one of the few remaining examples of secular architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as abundant and rare information about urban planning, material culture, economic and cultural exchanges, art and aesthetics, etc. It is the tale of a harbor town that was always cosmopolitan, a port of call along the Silk Road, the winter base of the Ottoman fleet, a European enclave in the East.

This book studies the role of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey in providing refuge and prosperity for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Byzantium in medieval times and from Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It studies the religiously-based communities of Ottoman and Turkish Jews as well as their economic, cultural and religious lives and their relations with the Muslims and Christians among whom they lived.