In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire was one of the world's great powers. Generations of travelers, explorers, traders, tourists, scientists and artists were drawn to these magical lands. Whether depictions of contemporary life in the bustling street, the court, the harem, or elegiac evocations of the ruins of antiquity, the hundred images selected here by artists from David Roberts and Edward Lear to John Frederick Lewis bring a largely vanished world vividly to life.

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.

"This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914', at Kooc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul, April 21-August 19th, 2015"-- Page 3.

The period between the 1880s and the 1920s was a time of momentous changes in the Ottoman Empire. It was also an age of literary experiments, of which autobiography forms a part. This book analyses Turkish autobiographical narratives describing the part of their authors’ lives that was spent while the Ottoman Empire still existed. The texts studied in this book were written in the cultural context of the Turkish Republic, which went to great lengths to disassociate itself from the empire and its legacy. This process has only been criticised and partially reversed in very recent times, the resurging interest in autobiographical texts dealing with the "old days" by the Turkish reading public being part of a wider, renewed regard for Ottoman legacies. Among the analysed texts are autobiographies by writers, journalists, soldiers and politicians, including classics like Halide Edip Adıvar and Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, but also texts by authors virtually unknown to Western readers, such as Ahmed Emin Yalman. While the official Turkish republican discourse went towards a dismissal of the imperial past, autobiographical narratives offer a more balanced picture. From the earliest memories and personal origins of the authors, to the conflict and violence that overshadowed private lives in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, this book aims at showing examples of how the authors painted what one of them called "images of a past world."

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.

Presents a comprehensive A-to-Z reference to the empire that once encompassed large parts of the modern-day Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe.