Ottoman Centuries

In 1683, an Ottoman army that stretched from horizon to horizon set out to seize the "Golden Apple," as Turks referred to Vienna. The ensuing siege pitted battle-hardened Janissaries wielding seventeenth-century grenades against Habsburg armies, widely feared for their savagery. The walls of...

Looking forward to the joys of connubial bliss, newlyweds Lady Emily and Colin Hargreaves, diplomats of the British Empire, set out toward Turkey for an exotic honeymoon. But on their first night in the city, a harem girl is found murdered, strangled in the courtyard of the Sultan's lavish Topkapi Palace. Sir Richard St. Clare, an Englishman who works at the embassy in Constantinople, is present and recognizes the girl as his own daughter who was kidnapped twenty years earlier. Emily and Colin promise the heartbroken father that they'll find her killer.

In terms of geopolitics, perhaps the most seminal event of the Middle Ages was the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. The city had been an imperial capital as far back as the fourth century, when Constantine the Great shifted the power center of the Roman Empire there, effectively establishing two almost equally powerful halves of antiquity’s greatest empire.

In 1520, a twenty-six-year-old prince inherited the most powerful empire on Earth. Over the next forty-six years, he would conquer Belgrade, Rhodes, Hungary, and Baghdad. His navy would dominate the Mediterranean. His legal code would govern millions for three centuries. His architects would build monuments that still stand today. His people called him "Kanuni"—the Lawgiver. Europeans called him "the Magnificent." Suleiman the Magnificent tells the complete story of the Ottoman Empire's greatest ruler—from the siege of Vienna to the love affair that scandalized his court, from the ...

Crescents Edge: Book 4 of the Nicholas Cruwys Series 1784. The Royal Navy, reduced to a shadow of its wartime strength, struggles to police the Mediterranean with ships spread dangerously thin. For Captain Nicholas Cruwys, newly promoted and commanding the frigate Miranda, what begins as routine assignment to a peacetime squadron becomes a deadly game of empire and betrayal. When coordinated corsair attacks begin threatening merchant shipping with unprecedented skill and European-quality weapons, Cruwys is drawn into the labyrinthine politics of the Ottoman Empire, where French gold, ...

What if the life you keep postponing is already being built? You have a real piece of work somewhere in your life. Not your job. The other thing. The one you get at in the hour before everyone wakes up, or after they have gone to bed, in a room that is too cold, when you are already tired. Nobody is paying you for it. Nobody asked for it. Mustafa ibn Abdullah had the same arrangement, and he kept it for forty years. He was a soldier's son and a clerk in the Ottoman financial offices, so far down the ranks that historians had to go looking for his name in the margins of old documents. He had...

By revolutionizing and modernizing Russian arms, including the creation of Russia’s first naval force, Peter was able to pursue an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy that set the stage for the way the European map would be redrawn again and again over the coming centuries. Some of those forays were memorably countered by Western Europeans and the Holy League, but the Ottomans’ most frequent foe was the Russian Empire, which opposed them for both geopolitical and religious reasons.

In 1854, the Ottoman Empire signed a loan agreement to win a war. In doing so, it lost its future. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire had stood as a superpower, funding its vast armies and bureaucracy through its own treasury. But during the desperate struggles of the Crimean War, the Sultan broke with tradition and accepted the first foreign loan from British and French bankers. "Britain, the Ottomans, and the Trap of 1854" tells the tragic true story of how this single financial decision entangled a global empire in a web of debt from which it would never escape. This gripping work of ...

The Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power during the 16th century when Cecilia Baffo Veniero was kidnapped from her Venetian homeland and chosen to be the wife of Selim II, successor to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. She would be known as Nurbanu. The Mapmaker's Daughter vividly imagines the confession of Nurbanu as she lies on her sickbed narrating the spectacular story of her rise to the pinnacle of imperial power, determined to understand how her extraordinary destiny was shaped. 

A two-cent toll. A journey of 5,000 kilometers. One impossibly stubborn man. Kéraban is a wealthy Turkish tobacco merchant, generous to his friends and brave in adversity. He has one fatal flaw: absolute, inflexible stubbornness. Once he has made a decision, nothing—not reason, not danger, not the pleading of companions—will make him deviate from his chosen course. When Kéraban arrives at the Bosphorus to cross from Constantinople's Asian side to its European shore—a ferry ride of minutes across water barely half a kilometer wide—he discovers a new toll has been imposed: ten paras...

Augustine Sforza was trained to see the truth in a face — the weight of a jaw, the doubt behind a stare, the exact place where confidence ends and fear begins. In Rome, that gift made him the talk of the city, courted by cardinals and within reach of the one commission every painter in Italy would kill for. It did not save him the night an old rivalry finally came to a head, and he was left with a choice no artist should have to make. Exiled from the only city he's ever loved, Augustine is meant to disappear quietly into the Mediterranean and wait out his sentence. The sea has other plans...

Inside, you will hear about the history of the Ottoman empire, including: origins until the Balkan conquests; institutions and society: millets, guilds, trade, religion, and mysticism; 15th-century imperial style, 16th-century Golden Age, cracks before World War I; the Eastern Question; and much more!

Two souls. Countless lifetimes. One unbreakable bond that not even time can sever In My Family Is Everything, the author takes readers on a captivating journey through time, destiny, and enduring love. This instalment of the Mea Promissa Patria series introduces a new era and a new cast of characters, yet returns to the same profound theme: the unbreakable bonds of a soul family. Set in the heart of the medieval Ottoman Empire, the story follows Sarah, whose soul has been reborn into a new life as a man. Taken from his family as a boy and raised as a janissary, he comes to be known as ...

How did Turkish change across the centuries? How did the language of early Central Asian Turkic communities develop into later literary and historical forms, and eventually into the Turkish spoken and written today? The History of Turkish is a rigorous yet readable college-level introduction to the historical development of Turkish across major stages of its evolution. Written entirely in English, this book guides readers through Old Central Asian Turkish, Thirteenth-Century Turkish, Seventeenth-Century Turkish, and Modern Turkish with clear explanations, carefully selected examples, and ...

In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia.

"Christopher de Bellaigue has a magic talent for writing history. It is as if we are there as the era of Suleyman the Magnificent unfolds." —Orhan Pamuk, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Narrated through the eyes of the intimates of Suleyman the Magnificent, the sixteenth-century...

Stolen from his family. Forged into a weapon. Rade was only a boy when the Ottoman Empire tore him from his home and gave him a new name—Mehmet. Raised as a Janissary, he is taught loyalty, discipline… and how to forget who he once was. But some memories refuse to fade. As Mehmet rises through the ranks of the Sultan’s elite guard, he becomes a man feared on the battlefield—yet haunted by the life stolen from him. And when he meets Zehra, the Sultan’s daughter, everything begins to unravel. Their connection is forbidden. Dangerous. Impossible to ignore. In a world ruled by power, ...

Step into a gripping military history where imperial hubris and catastrophic blunders birthed the modern medical era. Perfect for your daily commute, this intense narrative sweeps from opulent European courts to the disease-ridden trenches of the Black Sea. Witness how a provincial religious...

The Ottoman Empire was one of the longest standing empires in the world. Started in 1299, the Ottomans would conquer much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeastern Europe. This classic by William Deans covers 600 years of Ottoman rule.

The Ottoman world was nothing like an exotic fairy tale featuring tyrant sultans, mean pashas, and ill-fated harem women. The true stories of genuine sultans and princes are a bit more complicated and no less exciting. Incredible facts about this empire still surprise anyone who starts discovering those stories. You’ll find out that, for quite a while, this Islamic state was effectively ruled by women, and that’s just the beginning.