In the Spring of 1990, when the politics of eastern Europe and the certainties of Soviet communism were overthrown, I made my first journey to Istanbul, on foot. We walked twenty miles or so a day, and at night we bedded down in friendly farmers’ hay-barns, or under feathered quilts.
From the Baltic we tramped to the faded drumbeat of recessive empires, German or Russian, that had scoured the country like opposing tides. The Habsburgs cast long shadows, too: those ‘little kings of Vienna’ as the Ottoman sultan Süleyman once styled them.
In Eger, a town in Hungary above the Alfold, or Desolate Plain, on which Ottoman and Habsburg armies clashed so frequently and inconclusively in the 17th century, we saw a lonely minaret rising above a dusty town square. Long ago this was the northern most minaret in Europe. Shorn of its mosque, it marked the high-tide mark of Ottoman conquest, in this small city of vegetable plots and cool, dark cellars in which the people of Eger liked to store their wine.
From Eger, crossing the flat plains of eastern Hungary, into the hills of Transylvania, and over the rampart of the Carpathian mountains, we found ourselves moving to a different beat. The rhythms of music changed; tea became coffee, black and oily; the Calvinist and Catholic churches of the Hungarians – which sheltered us for many weeks – were interlaced with the rounded mushroom outcroppings of the Orthodox, their icons and their painted walls. Perhaps the gypsies did it best, with their coloured prints and skirts and arrhythmic clapping and sudden improvisations; or the semi-nomads we encountered on the mountain ranges, in rain-capes of fantastic design; or the sudden proliferation of hats – hats tall, round, brimless, dented, felt. Or was it – in Romania and Bulgaria – an impulse to trade, to conceal, to engage?
I think we caught Europe at a moment of clarity, and what we saw was a world that slanted towards Istanbul.
This book was triggered by that experience.
The pages which follow are broadly but not wholly chronological. I’ve woven narratives – on the seizure of Constantinople, say, or the career of Süleyman the Magnificent, or the assault on Vienna in 1683 – between chapters that focus on significant aspects of the empire’s administration. How did the Ottomans fight? How did they go to sea? What were the rhythms of life within the Empire, the bass notes of an imperial settlement that reached from the Pyramids to the steppe? Elsewhere I’ve tried to picture the empire at different epochs in its long history, drawing on a mass of contemporary observation and anecdote.