Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire

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Macmillan, 2003 - History - 368 pages

"A work of dazzling beauty...the rare coming together of historical scholarship and curiosity about distant places with luminous writing." --The New York Times Book Review

Since the Turks first shattered the glory of the French crusaders in 1396, the Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds. For six hundred years, the Empire swelled and declined. Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, in three centuries it advanced from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at the Empire's height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched its aid. For the next three hundred years the Empire seemed ready to collapse, a prodigy of survival and decay. Early in the twentieth century it fell. In this dazzling evocation of its power, Jason Goodwin explores how the Ottomans rose and how, against all odds, they lingered on. In the process he unfolds a sequence of mysteries, triumphs, treasures, and terrors unknown to most American readers.

This was a place where pillows spoke and birds were fed in the snow; where time itself unfolded at a different rate and clocks were banned; where sounds were different, and even the hyacinths too strong to sniff. Dramatic and passionate, comic and gruesome, Lords of the Horizons is a history, a travel book, and a vision of a lost world all in one.

 

Contents

II
3
III
12
IV
22
V
29
VI
44
VII
50
VIII
65
IX
79
XXI
209
XXII
221
XXIII
237
XXIV
245
XXV
256
XXVI
269
XXVIII
289
XXIX
301

X
90
XI
110
XII
121
XIII
130
XIV
149
XV
158
XVI
164
XVIII
173
XX
185
XXX
322
XXXI
327
XXXII
329
XXXIII
333
XXXIV
336
XXXV
337
XXXVI
342
XXXVII
343
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About the author (2003)

JASON GOODWIN is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Investigator Yashim series. The first five books—The Janissary Tree, The Snake Stone, The Bellini Card, An Evil Eye, and The Baklava Club—have been published to international acclaim, alongside Yashim Cooks Istanbul, a cookbook of Ottoman Turkish recipes inspired by the series. Goodwin studied Byzantine history at Cambridge and is the author of Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, among other award-winning nonfiction. He lives with his wife and children in England.

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