Empire Ottoman

The Crusaders, the spice trade and the rise of the Ottoman Empire In 1095, the first Christian crusade against Islam was larmched. There were many motives for participation in the crusades, not all religious. Although Pope Urban preached the radical doctrine of fighting a holy war, some were motivated more by mammon. As the first Crusaders gathered in Byzantium to larmch their assault south, some Venetian merchants were well aware of the fact that their traditional spice trade routes were already under threat from Islamic military and commercial competition, so aiding an army that... 

Figure 2.4. During the period when the Ottoman Empire controlled the spice routes leading to Europe, it was noted for its flourishing arts, science, medicine and sophisticated culture.

Figure 2.6. The coffee shop, as a place to enjoy social interactions and to benefit from business deals (at least for males), began in the Ottoman Empire and was adopted throughout the rest of the world. It is a rare high street in any city that does not now have at least one coffee shop.

The First World War saw the break-up of empires including the Ottoman Empire whose capital Constantinople became Istanbul. Out of the remnants of that empire a series of artificial states were created which arbitrarily divided up and threw together various peoples. Under League of Nations mandates, France acquired Syria and Lebanon and Britain procured Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. 

In the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire became established on the Pontus coast and until the end of the seventeenth century the sea was often called the Turkish Lake , as all other Circum-Black Sea territories belonged to the Ottoman Empire. 

In 1706 the Description of the Black Sea was published. It was prepared by RA. Tolstoy, the first permanent ambassador in Russian history in the Ottoman Empire [2]. 

McMurray, Jonathan S. Distant Ties Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway. Westport, Conn. Praeger, 2001. 

After thirty stormy years, the British mandate for Palestine was coming to an end. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire following World War I had assigned Palestine to British mandatory control after centuries of Turkish rule. The mandate had stipulated that a Jewish homeland should come into existence in Palestine, and Jews had commenced going there in considerable numbers. There had been Arab resistance— notably during the years 1936-1939, when 60,000 British troops had proved unable to keep the peace of the Holy Land against the Arab gangs. 

To hold back this tide had for more than a century been the major objective of British policy in the Middle East. Now, for reasons as cogent as those which had compelled successive British governments to face bitter criticism at home for their support of the Ottoman Empire, we found ourselves required to seize the torch from Britain s weakened hand and to continue to stand guard over the Middle East, lest the world in which we lived should be distorted into a new and perilous shape. For us, as it had been for Britain, our principal local asset in this task was the Turkish soldier. His fighting qualities were the cornerstone of our structure of security. 

Greek inhabitant of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In fact, ZaharofTs origins are, like Reilly s, a mystery. At one time or another, he claimed to have been bom in Constantinople, Odessa, or the Anatolian town of Mugla and in 1849, 1850 or 1851 (McCormick, 1965 16-17 Rochat-Cenise, 1943 10). One biographer, Robert Neumann, described the situation thusly ... 

In 1554, the first coffee-house was opened in Constantinople (the present-day Istanbul). In the second half of the 17th century, in the wake of the expansion and fall of the Ottoman Empire, coffee houses spread all across Europe, to Vienna, Venice, Paris, Marseille, London, Hamburg and to other places (Fig. 5.191). 

Though the century ended quite differently, in the beginning of the 1700s, the world found itself an unusual circumstance a period of relative peace. In the Near East and northern Africa, peace was imposed by the Ottoman Empire. In central Africa harbors of slave trade pockmarked the coast, but the interior remained out of reach of outside adventurers. In the New World inhabitants struggled to recover from... 

The Tanzitnat (Reorganization) period of the nineteenth century is a crucial turning point in the history of the Ottoman Empire, since it marks the advent of a wide range of modernizing measures. These include the abolition 248... 

Eor an historical overview, see Erik J. Ziircher, Turkey (New York I. B. Tau-ris, 2004), pp. 9-90. Historians of the Ottoman Empire use the term Tanz-imat to denote the period between 1839-76. The reformist spirit certainly persists through the reign of Sultan Abdiilhamid II (1876-1909), despite his repressions. 

At its height in the mid 1500s the Ottoman empire (1326-1923) extended Turkish rule over much of the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Western Russia. By the late eighteenth century it was in steep decline. 

Like the Hellenistic list makers, we are still subsuming the cultural landscapes of others into our world, but now through the power of tourism. Taj Mahal and the Great Wall become part of our own cultural landscape, in the same way that archaeological museum displays have captured others landscapes the Elgin marbles and Cleopatra s Needle were located into the cultural landscape of London, not the Mediterranean (having been previously disassociated from their original locations by the Ottoman Empire). The landscape role of features such as these derives from the individual personal experiences of tourists, rather than from external political actors. 

Istanbul is a world famous historical city and represents a mixture of influences from the early Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the modern state of Turkey. It is a city whose heritage derives from many different civilizations. 

The Persian and Ottoman Empires clashed in the Caucasus for centuries, drastically changing the ethnic makeup of the area. Armenians, Kurds, Persians, and Turks were exiled, relocated, and resettled. Until the systematic slaughters of the late 19th... 

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