Ottoman Empire

   The Ottoman Empire originated as one of more than a dozen small Anatolian principalities that came into existence in the wake of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. These Turkish principalities were Islamic warrior states whose ongoing military confrontations with Christian Byzantium were inspired by religious motives, as well as by a desire for material gain. The tradition of ghaza , warfare against non-Muslims for the purpose of extending the domains of Islam, was a driving force among the Muslim frontier warriors ( ghazis) , and the ghazi spirit played a decisive role in shaping the Ottoman Empire.

   Much about the early history of the Ottoman state remains obscure, but its beginnings are usually traced to the achievements of a Turkish chieftain named Osman, the ruler of one of the smaller ghazi principalities. During the early 1300s, Osman’s ghazi warriors achieved a series of military successes against the Byzantine forces. These victories enhanced Osman’s reputation and attracted other chieftains and tribesmen to his realm. The growing military power at Osman’s disposal enabled him and his son Orhon to expand their domains in northwestern Anatolia. In 1326, Orhon captured the city of Bursa from the Byzantines and made it the capital of his state. As Orhon’s ghazi principality made the transition from a frontier society to an established state, his subjects came to be known by his family name, Osmanlis, or Ottomans. The sense of belonging to a single dynastic house created sentiments of solidarity and loyalty that gradually transcended tribal affiliations.

   Ottoman Expansion

   By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans had expanded to the shores of the Sea of Marmara, which forms part of the water connection between the Black Sea to the north and the Aegean Sea to the south. Over the course of the next two centuries, all of southeastern Europe came under direct Ottoman control. The Ottomans not only added new European territories to the domains of Islam, but they also extended their rule to the Arab lands where Islam had originated. The transformation of the Ottoman state into a world power began with the conquest of the city of Constantinople. On May 29, 1453, following a long siege, the forces of Sultan Mehmet II, the Conqueror, entered the Byzantine capital and brought an end to Constantinople’s role as the symbolic center of eastern Christendom. Henceforth known as Istanbul, the city became the seat of the Ottoman government and was restored to its former splendor by Mehmet II’s program of reconstruction and repopulation.

   The occupation of Istanbul provided the Ottomans with an unparalleled strategic base from which to dominate the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. Mehmet the Conqueror constructed shipyards in Istanbul; gathered skilled carpenters, merchants, and sailors from the coastal regions under his rule; and forged an Ottoman navy that eventually drove Venice from the Eastern Mediterranean and established the Ottomans as the supreme maritime power from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. The creation of a fleet also enabled the Ottomans to conquer and occupy such strategic Mediterranean islands as Rhodes (1522), Cyprus (1570), and Crete (1664).

   The creation of a successful navy was accompanied by improvements in the Ottoman land army that made it the most formidable military force of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the heart of the Ottoman military superiority was the development and extensive use of gunpowder weapons. The Ottomans adapted artillery technology to serve their special needs, most notably by developing light field guns that could be transported on wagons to distant battlefields. These guns were used against the feudal armies of Europe, whose infantrymen still fought mainly with pikes. These technological advantages enabled the Ottoman armed forces to defeat the armies of both Europe and the Middle East.

   The Ottomans sent their army regularly to the east to repel the advances of the Safavid Empire of Iran. When Sultan Selim I led the Ottoman army on an eastern campaign in 1516, his objective appeared to be the occupation of the Safavid imperial capital at Tabriz. However, he decided instead to neutralize the threat posed by the Mamluk Empire, which was centered in Egypt but which also controlled Syria and certain territories in southern Anatolia. The Ottoman army drove the Mamluks out of Syria, and, in early 1517, Selim marched his forces across the Sinai Peninsula and captured Cairo. This victory resulted in the Ottoman acquisition of most of the classical heartlands of Arab Islam and brought about the integration of the Arab and Ottoman Islamic traditions.

   The Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands established the sultans as the supreme rulers within the universal Islamic community. They were recognized as the protectors of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and therefore assumed the important duty of ensuring the security of the annual pilgrimage. To fulfill this responsibility, and also to contain the expansive Portuguese seaborne commercial empire, Selim ordered the creation of a Red Sea fleet. Although the Ottomans proved unable to compete with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, their domination of Egypt allowed them to establish hegemony in the Red Sea and to incorporate Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula, into their empire. In addition, Selim’s occupation of Egypt enhanced the Islamic standing of the Ottoman sultans by enabling them to gain access to the title of caliph. After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, the reigning caliph was taken to Istanbul and allegedly transferred the title to Selim and his successors in the Ottoman dynasty.

   Although Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566), the most powerful of the Ottoman rulers, achieved important military victories at sea and on the eastern front, he was primarily a ghazi -inspired sultan who concentrated on pushing the Ottoman frontier deeper into Europe. In 1520, Suleyman led the Ottoman forces in the capture of Belgrade, which became the primary staging ground for subsequent Ottoman campaigns. During the rest of the 1520s, Budapest and most of Hungary were brought under Ottoman control. Then, in 1529, Suleyman laid siege to Vienna, the Habsburg imperial capital and the gateway to central Europe. Although the outskirts of Vienna were destroyed and the city walls were breached in several places, the defenders held out until the threat of winter forced the Ottomans to begin their long withdrawal to Istanbul.

   In the years to come, Suleyman’s European campaigns consolidated Ottoman rule in Hungary and Serbia, but the sultan was unable to mount another siege of Vienna. Central Europe was beyond the limits of Ottoman territorial expansion; the area that did lie within those limits was so extensive - stretching from the Danube to Yemen, from Albania to the northern shores of the Black Sea, and from Algeria to Baghdad - that the Ottoman Empire was, at Suleyman’s death in 1566, the major European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern power. It was not only the leading Islamic state of the sixteenth century, it was a world empire of vast influence and territorial expanse.

   OTTOMAN RULE

   At the pinnacle of the Ottoman hierarchy was the sultan-caliph, an absolute monarch whose right to rule was derived from his membership in the house of Osman. As the Ottoman state changed from a ghazi principality to a world empire, the sultans instituted an imperial council, or divan , to deal with the increasingly complex affairs of government. The divan was presided over by the grand vizier, the most powerful official in the government hierarchy whose court was referred to as the Bab-i Ali, or Sublime Porte, most usually in the context of Ottoman diplomacy. He was the absolute deputy of the sultan and acquired the right to exercise executive authority in the sultan’s name. During the reigns of weak sultans, the grand viziers sometimes assumed extensive powers and made decisions without consulting the monarch.

   The three major groupings within the Ottoman ruling elite were the military, the civil service, and the religious establishment. The two main branches of the Ottoman armed forces came from quite different sources. The provincial cavalrymen, or sipahis , were freeborn Muslims who fulfilled an administrative as well as a military function. In an attempt to maintain a large army without making huge cash payments, the sultans awarded sipahis the rights to the income from agricultural land, known as timars. Each sipahi was assigned a specific timar from which he was allowed to collect the taxes that served as his salary. In return, the sipahi was expected to maintain order in his timar, to report for military service when called on by the sultan, and, depending on the size of his income, to bring with him a certain number of armed and mounted retainers.

   Although sipahis and their retainers made up the bulk of the Ottoman armies, the most efficient imperial military unit was the professional standing infantry corps known as the Janissaries. In the fourteenth century, the Ottomans institutionalized a method for procuring slaves from among their European Christian subjects. Known as the devshirme, a collecting system, it consisted of a levy every few years on adolescent male Christian children from the European provinces of the empire. The children were removed from their families and taken to Istanbul, where they were converted to Islam, tested and screened, and then trained for service in the empire. Most of them were eventually enrolled in the ranks of the Janissary corps, which, at its peak in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was the outstanding military unit in Europe.

   As a centralized imperial state, the Ottoman Empire was characterized by an immense and elaborate bureaucracy. The Ottomans drew on the administrative traditions of the Byzantines, the Iranians, and the Arabs to create a highly differentiated civil service. Most of the middle-level Ottoman civil servants were freeborn Muslims who received on-the-job training as apprentices in one of the several ministries. Along with the bureaucratic and military elite, the ulama formed the third pillar of the Ottoman ruling class. The Ottomans endeavored to establish shari ’ ah norms of justice by organizing the qadis, judges, into an official hierarchy and arranging for their appointments in the various administrative subdivisions of the empire. Over the course of time, an official known as the shaykh al-Islam emerged as the chief religious dignitary of the empire. He oversaw the appointment of qadis and madrasah teachers in the far-flung Ottoman territories and acquired status as the official whose legal opinion the sultans sought when they contemplated the introduction of certain administrative and fiscal measures.

   THE EUROPEAN CHALLENGE

   The once prevalent idea that the Ottoman Empire entered into a period of decline after the reign of Suleyman is no longer accepted. It is perhaps preferable to view the Ottoman experience from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries as a period of transformation during which the Ottomans struggled to find a new imperial synthesis in a changing international environment. External factors, most prominent among them the penetration of European merchant capital into the empire, caused a wrenching dislocation of the Ottoman economy. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Ottoman raw materials, normally channeled into internal consumption and industry, were increasingly exchanged for European manufactured products. This trade benefited Ottoman merchants but led to a decline in state revenues and a shortage of raw materials for domestic consumption. As the costs of scarce materials rose, the empire suffered from inflation, and the state was unable to procure sufficient revenues to meet its expenses. Without these revenues, the institutions that supported the Ottoman system, especially the armed forces, were undermined.

   The penetration of European manufactured goods into the empire and the eventual domination of Ottoman commerce by Europeans, and their protégés were facilitated by a series of commercial treaties, known as the Capitulations, which the Ottoman sultans signed with the Christian states of Europe. The first Capitulation agreement was negotiated with France in 1536. It allowed French merchants to trade freely in Ottoman ports, to be exempt from Ottoman taxes, and to import and export goods at low tariff rates. In addition, the treaty granted extraterritorial privileges to French merchants by permitting them to come under the legal jurisdiction of the French consul in Istanbul, thus making them subject to French law. The first treaty was the model for subsequent agreements signed with other European states.

   The Capitulations were negotiated at a time of Ottoman military domination and were intended to encourage commercial exchange. When the military balance between Europe and the Ottomans tilted in favor of Europe, however, European merchants, backed by the power of their states, were able to exploit the Capitulations to the disadvantage of the Ottomans. The treaties not only had a devastating effect on the Ottoman economy, but they also had long-term political implications. By granting the various consuls jurisdiction over their nationals within the Ottoman Empire, the Capitulations accorded the consuls extraordinary powers that they abused with increasing frequency in the course of the nineteenth century. External economic factors combined with a range of domestic problems, such as incompetent sultans, succession struggles, and political discord within the court, weakened the effectiveness of the central government. The shortage of revenue and the rise of inflation had a devastating effect on the large numbers of state employees on fixed salaries and created an atmosphere that fostered bribery and other forms of corruption. And finally, the government’s inability to make regular payments to the Janissaries or to fund the acquisition of new military equipment meant that the Ottoman armed forces lost the absolute dominance that they had earlier possessed. This loss of dominance was manifested on the battlefield. In 1683, the Ottomans mounted a second siege of Vienna, but they were defeated outside the city walls. In the 1690s, the Ottomans engaged in simultaneous wars with Austria and Russia and were defeated on both fronts. The Treaty of Karlowitz, signed with Austria in 1699, ceded most of Hungary to the Hapsburgs and marked the first major surrender of European territory by the Ottomans. The next year, the sultan signed a treaty with Peter the Great acknowledging the Russian conquest of the northern shores of the Black Sea. From this point on, the Ottomans were on the defensive.

   During the eighteenth century, the Ottoman forces defeated the Austrian army in two wars as well as the Russian army in two wars. These victories may have led the Ottoman ruling elite to conclude that the armed forces of the state were as relatively powerful as ever. That this was not true was demonstrated in the Ottoman-Russian war launched by the Ottomans in 1768. In the course of this war, the Russian Baltic fleet entered the Mediterranean and destroyed an Ottoman fleet off the coast of Anatolia. The land war was equally devastating for the Ottomans, as the Russian forces drove them out of Romania and the Crimea on the Black Sea. The settlement that ended the war, the Treaty of Küchük Kaynarja (1774), was one of the most humiliating agreements ever signed by the Ottomans. In addition to ceding territory, the sultan granted Russia the right to construct a Greek Orthodox church in Istanbul and to make representations to the Ottoman government on behalf of the Greek Orthodox community. These provisions laid the foundation for Russia’s claim to be the protector of the entire Greek Orthodox millet, the Ottoman term for a self-governing religious community, within the Ottoman Empire.

   DECLINE, REFORM, DECLINE

   Thus beginning in the early eighteenth century, the Western powers achieved and maintained military, political, and economic superiority over the Middle East. In the nineteenth century, Russia’s drive towards the sea, leadership of the Orthodox Christians, and promotion of pan-Slavism combined at times to produce an aggressive Middle East policy. Russian troops went into the Balkans during the 1806–1812 conflict with the Ottomans, the Greek struggle for independence in the 1820s, the Rumanian uprising of 1848, the Crimean War of 1853–1856, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.

   The Eastern Question centered on whether Russia would gobble up the Ottoman Empire’s European possessions, especially the straits, or be prevented from doing so by the other Great Powers. In the nineteenth century, many feared that if Russia ruled the Balkans and controlled the straits, all Europe would be at the mercy of the tsars. The Habsburg Empire bordered directly on Ottoman-held lands in southeastern Europe. It conquered Hungary in 1699 and naturally hoped to move down the Danube River toward the Black Sea. The Habsburgs also wanted to control lands south of the Danube, especially Bosnia and Serbia. The interests of the Habsburg emperors seem to have been mainly economic, but they also saw themselves as carrying an old crusading tradition against the Muslim Ottomans. As various Balkan states wrested their independence from the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburgs would often step forward as their patron, protector, and trading partner. The British Empire, suspicious of Russia’s aims during the nineteenth century, tended to back Austria in the Balkans. This suspicion also led to a general British policy aimed at preserving the Ottoman Empire against all outside attempts to divide or control its territory. The overriding reason for this policy was that Britain wanted to ensure a safe route to India for its navy and merchant ships. From about 1820, the beginning of steamship travel and better overland communication made it faster and safer to transship goods and people across Egypt or Mesopotamia, both of which were Ottoman lands. In a further attempt to secure its shipping routes to India, Britain also took Aden in 1839 and Cyprus in 1878, occupied Egypt in 1882, and made treaties with most of the Arab rulers along the Gulf from Oman to Kuwait.

   The best friend of the Ottomans was usually France. Its strategic location, with major ports on both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, made France a frequent contender for the mastery of Europe. Up to the nineteenth century, its greatest rival in the Mediterranean was the Habsburg Empire, which tended to bring France into alliance with the Ottomans. France claimed to have the oldest capitulatory treaty, and its merchants and investors were almost always foremost among Europeans doing business with the Ottomans. Religion, too, furthered the French connection. When Russia claimed to protect Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule, France advanced similar claims on behalf of Catholics.

   To stop the annexation of its territories, the Ottoman government attempted internal reform, which should be divided into three phases. In the first, such reformers as the Korpulu viziers of the late seventeenth century tried to restore the administrative and military system to what it had been when the empire was at its height in the sixteenth. When this failed, some of eighteenth-century sultans and viziers tried a selective westernizing policy, primarily in the army, but this second phase did not check Russia’s advance into the Balkans or Napoleon ’s occupation of Egypt. In the third phase of Ottoman reform, mainly in the nineteenth century, the government tried to westernize many parts of the empire in an effort to halt the secession or annexation of its territories.

   Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) was aware of the European designs on his country, as well as its internal problems, with some provinces in open revolt and a serious shortfall in tax revenues. He planned a full-scale housecleaning, a nizam-i-jedid, that would reform the whole Ottoman government. But with the military threat so imminent, Selim concentrated on creating the westernized elite army to which the name nizam is usually applied. The training of the nizam soldiers had to be carried out secretly. The Janissaries feared that an effective fighting force, trained by European instructors and using modern weapons, would expose them as useless parasites of the state. They also were not about to let their privileges be jeopardized by military reform, however necessary. As a result, they revolted, slaughtered the new troops, and locked up Selim. While Mahmud II held power, from 1808 to1839, the whole empire fell into disorder. Several of the Balkan provinces had become independent in all but name under local warlords. A nationalist uprising of the Serbs threatened to affect other subject peoples. Local landowners in parts of Anatolia were taking the government into their own hands, and the garrisons in such Arab cities as Aleppo and Mosul were held by dissident mamluk or Janissary factions. Russia was at war with the empire and had invaded its Danubian principalities. Although the Sultan wanted to reform and strengthen the Ottoman Empire, he also realized that westernizing reforms had to include all aspects of Ottoman government and society, not just the military; reformed institutions would work only if those they replaced were wiped out, and any reform program must be preceded by careful planning and mobilization of support.

   At first, Mahmud kept a low profile, quietly cultivating groups that favored centralization of Ottoman power, and slowly built up a loyal and well-trained palace guard to be used eventually against the Janissaries and their supporters. In 1826, he ordered a general attack on the Janissaries. This time the sultan had a strong army, the ulama, the students, and most of the people on his side. As a result, the Janissaries were massacred, their supporting groups abolished, and their properties seized for redistribution among Mahmud’s backers. This action cleared the way for a large-scale reform program. Highest priority went to developing a new military organization to replace the Janissaries, for the Greeks, backed by the Great Powers, were now rebelling against Ottoman rule. Mahmud gathered soldiers from all parts of the old military system into his new army, which was issued European uniforms and weapons and put in the charge of Western instructors. Ottoman youths had als to be trained in technical fields closely tied to the military; existing schools of military and naval engineering were therefore expanded, a new medical college founded, and new institutions later set up to teach military sciences. The general aim of the reforms was to concentrate power in the hands of the sultan and his cabinet. The ministries of the government were organized more tightly to eliminate overlapping jurisdictions and superfluous posts. In addition, Mahmud abolished the system of military land grants that had sustained the sipahis since the beginning of the empire. He also had to overcome opposition from most local and provincial officials, the feudal sipahis, the traditional government scribes, and the ulama. Often he failed. Too many members of the Ottoman ruling class had a vested interest in the status-quo. Worse still, westernization did not save the army from losing wars. By 1829, the Greeks had won their independence, their success due mainly to intervention by Russia, which in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829 gained significant new territories east of the Black Sea. The advances of Ibrahim Pasha al Wali’s Egyptian armies into Syria were yet another blow to Ottoman prestige, especially when Mahmud’s new army failed to dislodge them. Outside help would be needed if the empire was to survive. The first choice should have been France, but that country was backing Mehmet Ali and Ibrahim, so Mahmud turned instead to Russia. In the Treaty of Inkiar Skelessi, Russia agreed in 1833 to defend the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

   Britain, however, believed that the treaty gave Russian warships the right to use the straits, from which Western navies were excluded, so London campaigned against the threat of Russian domination in Istanbul. In a commercial treaty signed in 1838, the Porte increased Britain’s capitulatory privileges and limited to 9 percent its import tariffs on British manufactures. This relatively low rate stimulated British exports to the Ottoman market, thus wiping out many Ottoman merchants and artisans who could not compete against British mechanized production. But another result of the 1838 treaty was to increase Britain’s economic interest in the Ottoman Empire and hence its desire to keep the empire alive.

   Mahmud II died while Mehmet Ali’s army was invading Anatolia, whereupon the sultan’s navy defected to Alexandria. Mahmud’s successor was Abdulmejid (1839–1861), who reigned during the reform era of the Tanzimat . The guiding man of the early Tanzimat was Mahmud’s foreign minister, Mustafa Reshid, who happened to be in London seeking British aid against Mehmet Ali at the time Abdulmejid took over. On the advice of both the British and Reshid, the new sultan issued a proclamation called the Noble Rescript of the Rose Chamber, which authorized the creation of new institutions guaranteeing his subjects’ fundamental rights, assessing and levying taxes fairly, and conscripting and training soldiers. Mustafa Reshid had an entourage of young and able officials who believed that liberal reforms would save the Ottoman Empire. Almost all aspects of Ottoman public life were restructured. This restructuring meant creating a system of state schools to produce government clerks; reorganizing the provinces so that each governor would have specified duties and an advisory council; extending the network of roads, canals, and rail lines; and developing a modern financial system with a central bank, treasury bonds, and a decimal currency.

   The Tanzimat was not a total success. The subject nationalities expected too much from the 1839 rescript and were disappointed by the actual reforms. Balkan Christians did not want centralization of power; they wanted autonomy. Some now sought outright independence. The Rumanians rebelled in 1848, and it took a Russian invasion to quell their revolt. Without firm British backing, the Ottoman reform movement would have collapsed altogether. Britain’s insistence on upholding Ottoman territorial integrity was on a collision course with Russia’s attempt to increase its influence in the Balkans; the result was the Crimean War of 1853–1856. The Ottoman Empire, aided by British and French troops, defeated Russia and regained some territory. The price for Western support was a new official proclamation, Sultan Abdulmejid’s Imperial Rescript of 1856. All Ottoman subjects, whether Muslim or not, were now to enjoy the same rights and status under the law. Many Ottoman Muslims objected to giving Jews and Christians the same rights and status as themselves, an act contrary to the basic principles of the Shari ’ ah. The Tanzimat reforms, however, continued in such areas as land ownership, codification of the laws, and reorganization of the millets. Nationalism in the modern sense first appeared among such Christian subjects as the Greeks and the Serbs, who were closer to Western or Russian cultural influences. As nationalist movements proliferated in the Balkans, the Ottoman rulers grew even more worried about how to hold the empire together. Westernizing reforms were their first answer, but these raised more hopes than they could meet and did not create a new basis of loyalty. The reformers began pushing the idea of Ottomanism, loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, as a framework within which racial, linguistic, and religious groups could develop autonomously but harmoniously.

   To this the New Ottomans of the 1870s added the idea of an Ottoman constitution that would set up an assembly representing all peoples of the empire. The constitution was drawn up in 1876, with several nationalist rebellions going on in the Balkans, war raging with Serbia and Montenegro, and Russia threatening to send in troops. The New Ottomans seized power in a coup and put on the throne Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), who promised to uphold the new constitution. The ensuing Russo-Turkish War put the empire in such peril that almost no one could have governed under the constitution. Abdulhamid soon suspended it and dissolved parliament. For 30 years, he ruled as a dictator, appointing and dismissing his own ministers, holding his creditors at bay, keeping the Great Powers sufficiently at odds with one another so that they would not carve up the Ottoman Empire, and suppressing all dissident movements within his realm.

   Many Ottomans, especially if they had been educated in Western schools, thought that the only way to save the empire was to restore the 1876 constitution, even if it meant overthrowing Abdulhamid. Many opposition groups were formed, but they tend to get lumped together as the Young Turks. The key society was a secret order founded at the military medical college in 1889 by four cadets, all Muslim but of several nationalities. It came to be known as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Over time, many groups within Ottoman society accepted the CUP program that the empire must be strengthened militarily and morally, all religious and ethnic groups must be put on an equal footing, the constitution must be restored, and Sultan Abdulhamid must be shorn of power. In July 1908, the CUP inspired a military coup that forced Abdulhamid to restore the Ottoman constitution and elections were held for a new parliament. The coup did not ward off disintegration, however, as Austria annexed Bosnia, Bulgaria declared its independence, and Crete rebelled, all in late 1908. Hopes for rapid economic development were dashed when a French loan deal fell through in 1910. The next year, Italy attacked the Ottoman Empire in an attempt to seize Libya; Italian success was assured when Bulgaria and Serbia joined forces in 1912 and attacked the empire in the Balkans. In a few months, the Ottomans lost almost all their European lands. Even Albania rebelled in 1910 and later won Great Power recognition as an independent state. These losses were the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, which was dissolved in the aftermath of World War I.

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   FURTHER READING:

    Ahmad, Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey. London: Routledge, 1993;

    Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994;

    Fisher, Sydney Nettleton, and William Ochsenwald. The Middle East: A History. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1990;

    Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. A Concise History of the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983;

    Karsh, Efraim, and Inari Karsh. Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789–1923. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001;

    Mansfield, Peter. A History of the Middle East. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991;

    McCarthy, Justin. The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire. London: Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group, 2001;

    Perry, Glenn E. The Middle East: Fourteen Islamic Centuries. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1997;

    Yapp, M. E. The Making of the Modern Near East 1792–1923. London: Longman Group UK Limited, 1987.

   MOSHE TERDMAN