Empire: World History - 21. The Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

How did an Empire that stretched over thousands of miles and over half a millennium impact the world we live in today? William and Anita explain the focus for the second series of the Empire, which will focus on the Ottoman Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunple. Now, this is the exciting start of our second series. We've spent the first 20 episodes of Empire. talking about the British in India.

And I promise, I know a lot of you were really enamoured with that subject. And so are we. It's what we love. We will be circling back to that in the future. But for our second series, we've chosen the Ottoman Empire. And to explain it, William, we're going all the way back to the Romans, aren't we? To the Romans, and particularly to Byzantium, to the founding of the city of Constantinople by Constantine in the 4th century,

and rocketing forward to the arrequeting. of the Turks into Anatolia in the 11th century, and then the death grapple between the Turks and the Byzantines with the famous siege of Constantinople in 1453. So we're doing the Ottomans, and William Dalryunper, why should we care about the Ottomans? Just as quite a lot of contemporary conflicts, misunderstandings, tensions in the world can be explained if you understand the story of the British Empire in India. So an awful lot of the conflicts in the world and most of those in the Middle East can be explained if you know a little bit of Ottoman history. What William is saying is absolutely right. This is why the Ottomans are important, relevant and interesting.

So if you think that there is one fissure that lies between India and Pakistan, which has now created two nuclear states, which are pointing at each other and arguably could point elsewhere, the fragment of the fragment. of the Ottoman Empire, this enormous empire, has led to a great number of fishes. And we should actually just count some of them and just recognise what some of those are. So you still have fishes between Greece and Turkey. Which are still hugely far from peaceful neighbours with military manoeuvres and naval misunderstandings almost every summer. And a line that runs through Cyprus, right? And we have, in our recent memory, I mean, you know, sort of the first war and conflict in in my lifetime after the Falklands was the Balkan conflict, Kosovo. You had Serbia, Croatia,

Bosnia, Macedonia, all pulled in to what became a battle in modern history fought along very ancient lines, lines that stretch back into the history of the Ottomans. To the Battle of Kosovo and so on at the creation of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. Then moving eastwards, you have tensions between. the Turks and the Armenian, stretching back to the Armenian jellicide of 1915, which the Turkish government still does not acknowledge. Working southwards, you have tensions between the Turks and the Kurds, a conflict which actually went live last week in early December 2022, when there was a Turkish strike on Kurdish positions in Syria. Then further south still, you have the great conflict at the

heart of the Middle East, which is the Israel-Palestine conflict, created at the end of the First World War when the British government made a series of completely untenable promises to various different parties, none of which could be fulfilled. The Balfour Declaration promised a Jewish state in Palestine that wouldn't endanger the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. Two things that have been completely irreconcilable since then. They also promised the Hashemite family the whole of the Middle East. This is the whole business of the double cross. This is the whole business of the double cross. why the Ottomans matter. There is another reason the Ottomans matter. These are empires that have quite often been misrepresented by a Western canon, if you like. And also which is simply, again,

not part of the curriculum. As I say, you can go through the British history curriculum and learn virtually nothing about the British Empire. In the same way, you could learn almost nothing about the Ottoman Empire, which is the empire which gave birth for, the split up, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, gave birth to almost every major conflict that you see on the news every day coming out of the Middle East. In other words, if you can understand this history, you can understand where this daily news is coming from. And it's really important that we do understand this. And, you know, sort of even bringing us right up to date, this very term caliphate, the term that is used by ISIS, this also, you know, predates from a time when the Ottomans had their own caliphate,

a very different shape and form to the one that ISIS is promoting and proposing for the world. But the same idea. Absolutely the same idea. But, you know, again, that's another reason that we wanted to talk about this, because all too often, you know, if you have historical knowledge that is sparse, which it is, I think it's fair to say in schooling in this country, about this era, all you have is Hollywood representation or fictional representation. and that all too often is very, very basic.

Savages on horses, waving cimitars, and that's it. But it's just important. If you care about politics, if you care about the news, if you care about the problems and stresses in the world, it is important to know where they came from, which is why we alighted on the Ottomans. So this is the beginning of series two of Empire, the Ottomans. We are going to go rattling through a thousand years of history

in an hour with Peter Frankapan. So put your seatbelts on because this is going to be a rapid run through the history of the Middle East. But we are going to slow down and after this will be going at our normal stately pace through the extraordinary history of the Ottoman Empire. Ain't nothing stately about us, mate. Not a thing.