The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire - Hardcover

Alan Palmer is the author of historical biographies including Tsar Alexander I, Metternich, Bernadotte, Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II and a brief life of Kemal Ataturk. He has written several military and diplomatic histories as well as a book on London's East End, and he is also author of The Penguin Dictionary of Modern HIstory, 1789-1945 and of its companion, The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth Century History.

There was something rotten in the Sublime Porte, but as with most processes of political decay, pinpointing the exact cause of disease eludes consensus. Was it the barbaric ritual of garrotting every new dynast's brothers, the better to pre-empt pretenders? Or the elevation of venality as an administrative method? The ethnic strains pulling apart all multinational empires? Or was it simply the events of 1683, when the crescent banner retreated from the walls of Vienna? Palmer begins in that year and narrates the tales of sultans and grand viziers through Kemal Ataturk, the founder of secular Turkey. The vast literature on those two-plus centuries demands an experienced expositor, which Palmer eminently is. The author of a dozen histories (Banner of Battle: The Crimean War [1987]), he accents those military and diplomatic events--wars with Austria and Russia--that pounded the empire to the verge of collapse and earned it the contemptuous moniker "The Sick Man of Europe"; then, of course, the empire found the resources for a remarkable resuscitation. An overview generalists will appreciate. Gilbert Taylor