This book explores an event described by the Times as 'one of the greatest and most sensational political conspiracies of modern times'. On 21 July 1905, just after the Friday Prayer at the Yıldız Hamidiye Mosque in Istanbul, a car bomb exploded and left 26 dead with another 58 wounded. Sultan Abdülhamid II, the target of the attack, remained unscathed. The Ottoman police soon discovered that Armenian revolutionaries were behind the plot and several people were arrested and convicted, among them the Belgian anarchist Edward Joris. His incarceration sparked international reaction and created a diplomatic conflict. The assassination attempt failed, the events faded from memory, and the plot became a footnote in early twentieth-century history. This book rediscovers the conspiracy as a transnational moment in late Ottoman history, opening a window on key themes in modern history, such as international law, terrorism, Orientalism, diplomacy, anarchism, imperialism, nationalism, mass media and humanitarianism. It provides an original look on the many trans- and international links between the Ottoman Empire, Europe and the rest of the world at the start of the twentieth century. cdscds

In 1877, when Russia attacks the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abduelhamit II must fight a devastating war to preserve his ethnically diverse territories that stretch across three continents. At home, he feels threatened from within by Mithat Pasha, a respected reformer, who has popular support for a constitution that would curb the sultan's authority and give the people a voice in their government. Aware of these challenges, Abduelhamit's Belgian wife, Flora Cordier, hopes to remain his confidante and helpmate as he decides how to govern: the iron-fisted rule of his ancestors, the democracy proposed by Mithat, or the diplomacy that exposes his weakened military power. No matter his choice, he is responsible for the suffering of his people.To Save an Empire explores the impact of religious and ethnic conflict in the Ottoman Empire of the late 19th century on the lives of ordinary people-Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Refugees flee atrocities that incite revenge, but also arouse charity and love. A story of love found and lost, of war and its consequences. Today's Balkans and Middle East emerge from the era's political forces of terrorism, imperialism, nationalism, and religion. It is a modern story.______________________________________________________________________________"e;[Gall]...artfully brings to life the political intrigues of an empire sliding into irrelevance. The Ottoman Empire emerges as a kind of protagonist all its own, eager to become strengthened by its embrace of modernity and the West, but also anxious about surrendering its cultural and religious identity. ... A magnificently researched tale of a troubled empire that's also dramatically captivating."e; - Kirkus reviews "e;Fiction as only history can tell it, all the more moving because we know it is not fiction. ...a compelling story."e; - Bulent Atalay, physicist and author of Math and the Mona Lisa and Leonardo's Universe

This book traces the history of conflict and contact between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Ottoman Middle East prior to 1914.

The Ottoman Empire was a hub of flourishing intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the helm of its ascent was the omnipotent Sultan Selim I (1470-1520), who, with the aid of his extraordinarily gifted mother, Gülbahar, hugely expanded the empire, propelling it onto the world stage. Aware of centuries of European suppression of Islamic history, Alan Mikhail centers Selim's Ottoman Empire and Islam as the very pivots of global history, redefining such world-changing events as Christopher Columbus's voyages - which originated, in fact, as a Catholic jihad that would come to view Native Americans as somehow "Moorish" - the Protestant Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the dramatic Ottoman seizure of the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on previously unexamined sources and written in gripping detail, Mikhail's groundbreaking account vividly recaptures Selim's life and world. An historical masterwork, God's Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of a world we thought we knew.A leading historian of his generation, Alan Mikhail, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, has reforged our understandings of the past through his previous three prize-winning books on the history of Middle East.

This major new history of the Ottoman dynasty reveals a diverse empire that straddled East and West. The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic, Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, historian Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage. The Ottomans pioneered religious toleration even as they used religious conversion to integrate conquered peoples. But in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the empire’s demise after the First World War. The Ottomans vividly reveals the dynasty’s full history and its enduring impact on Europe and the world.

The renowned Turkish author’s memoir of serving Sultan Mehmed V provides a rare look inside the palace politics of the late Ottoman Empire. Before he became one of Turkey’s most famous novelists, Halid Ziya Usakligil served as First Secretary to Sultan Mehmed V. His memoir of that time, between 1909 and 1912, provides first-hand insight into the personalities, intrigues, and inner workings of the Ottoman palace in its final decades. In post-Revolution Turkey, the palace no longer exercised political power. Instead, it negotiated the minefields between political factions, sought ways to unite the empire in the face of nationalist aspirations, and faced the opening salvos of the wars that would eventually overwhelm the country. Usakligil includes interviews with the Imperial family as well as descriptions of royal nuptials, the palaces and its visitors, and the crises that shook the court. He also delivers an insightful and moving portrait of Mehmed V, the man who reigned over the Ottoman Empire through both Balkan Wars and World War I.

Examined here is the historical figure and architectural patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, the young mother of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, who for most of the latter half of the seventeenth century shaped the political and cultural agenda of the Ottoman court. Captured in Russia at the age of twelve, she first served the reigning sultan's mother in Istanbul. She gradually rose through the ranks of the Ottoman harem, bore a male child to Sultan Ibrahim, and came to power as a valide sultan, or queen mother, in 1648. It was through her generous patronage of architectural works-including a large mosque, a tomb, a market complex in the city of Istanbul and two fortresses at the entrance to the Dardanelles-that she legitimated her new political authority as a valide and then attempted to support that of her son. Central to this narrative is the question of how architecture was used by an imperial woman of the Ottoman court who, because of customary and religious restrictions, was unable to present her physical self before her subjects' gaze. In lieu of displaying an iconic image of herself, as Queen Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici were able to do, Turhan Sultan expressed her political authority and religious piety through the works of architecture she commissioned. Traditionally historians have portrayed the role of seventeenth-century royal Ottoman women in the politics of the empire as negative and de-stabilizing. But Thys-Senocak, through her examination of these architectural works as concrete expressions of legitimate power and piety, shows the traditional framework to be both sexist and based on an outdated paradigm of decline. Thys-Senocak's research on Hadice Turhan Sultan's two Ottoman fortresses of Seddülbahir and Kumkale improves in a significant way our understanding of early modern fortifications in the eastern Mediterranean region and will spark further research on many of the Ottoman fortifications built in the area. Plans and elevations of the fortresses are published and analysed here for the first time. Based on archival research, including letters written by the queen mother, many of which are published here for the first time, and archaeological fieldwork, her work is also informed by recent theoretical debates in the fields of art history, cultural history and gender studies.

This skillfully written text presents the full sweep of Ottoman history from its beginnings on the Byzantine frontier in about 1300, through its development as an empire, to its late eighteenth-century confrontation with a rapidly modernizing Europe. Itzkowitz delineates the fundamental institutions of the Ottoman state, the major divisions within the society, and the basic ideas on government and social structure. Throughout, Itzkowitz emphasizes the Ottomans' own conception of their historical experience, and in so doing penetrates the surface view provided by the insights of Western observers of the Ottoman world to the core of Ottoman existence.