Lords of the Horizons;
  A History of the Ottoman Empire
   Jason Goodwin
  1998 A John MacRae Book/Henry Holt & Co. NY USA
   ISBN: 0805040811


For 600 years this empire swelled & declined from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to Budapest; from the Caspian Sea to Tripoli. At one time it controlled all of the Balkan peninsula, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, even north of the Danube. The first Osman, a lowly nomadic turkman, struck at the soft edges of decaying Byzantium & so began an illustrious lineage where commerce ruled & generations of Moslems & Christians have fought.

If you've ever wondered about The Balkans; about the hatred between Turk & Greek; between Moslem & Christian; Albanian & Serb. If you've ever wondered what Kosovo was all about & why the sons of the Middle East cannot let bygones be bygones, get hold of Jason Goodwin's Lords of the Horizons & steep yourself a hefty brew, because it will take you back in time & across fabulous lands.

There was a silly song I remember from my childhood about Constantinople becoming Istanbul, I didn't understand the lyrics. I even took a thorough history of the world for six years with only an occasional reference to the Ottoman Empire. On our atlases it always lay there covering the Middle East, an unexplained presence, hidden behind the walls of Mohammedanism.

The reason I give Lords of the Horizons only three teapots is not related to Jason Goodwin's writing skills so much as the endless reiteration of like-named heirs with all sorts of titles & myriad henchmen who also have oodles of titles & so on & so forth until I could hardly tell the wheat from the chaff.

I do, however, now know why everyone in that region is at each others' throats & remember subjugations from hundreds of years back. each generation doomed to repeat their hatreds.

This is a magnificent effort, with the Lineage of Sultans, An Ottoman Chronology, a sparce Glossary, a solid Bibliography & a long Index.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of Lords of the Horizons. Jason Goodwin recreated the vitality & panorama of the life & times of an empire which Europeans felt as a huge, mystical presence to the East. The second half, not unlike the Empire, settled into mind-boggling reiteration of bureaucratic corruption & endless vying for control.

More from Jason Goodwin: The Gunpowder Gardens&On Foot to the Golden Horn
(06/25/00)

Rebecca