I picked this up in the library to shed more light on the very early years of Anatolia, specifically on the Seljuk Turks who stormed into the old Persian Empire in the 1050s, seized the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdad, in 1055 and went on to inflict a seismic defeat on the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the equivalent – for the region – of our Battle of Hastings, which marked the decisive shift of control of Anatolia i.e. modern Turkey, away from the Christian Greeks and towards the Islamicised Turks.

On reflection it was foolish to expect much on just this one era from a book which is only 165 pages long, only claims to be a short history, and which has reached the origin of the Ottoman Turks (the 1250s) by page 23 and the fall of Constantinople (in 1453) by page 32.

The Seljuk period is skimmed over in a few brief pages and the Battle of Manzikert in a couple of brief sentences. I’m glad I had read the long, detailed account of the build-up, the battle itself, and its historical repercussions, in John Julius Norwich’s book, Byzantium: The Apogee.

Odd tone

This is an odd book. All the important dates and ideas are here, but Professor Stone comes across as a rather grumpy and capricious older fellow, who makes dated attempts at humour, and is easily distracted by historic trivia.

He takes a dismissive tone to much historical debate, a kind of urbane, pooh-poohing lofty tone. For example, he jocosely points out that Iranian schoolchildren learn that Turkish barbarians came and stormed their civilised empire, while Turkish schoolchildren learn that effete, decadent imperial Persia was revived and renewed with the strong, virile blood of the Turks. Similarly, discussing the influence of Asian tribes on the early state of Russia (in the 1500s), he writes,

The Russian princes eventually copied the Tatars, Moscow most successfully, and in 1552, Ivan the Terrible conquered the Tatar capital, Kazan, on the Volga. Nineteenth-century warhorses then presented Russian history as a sort of crusade  in which indignant peasants freed themselves from ‘the Tatar yoke’. (p.20)

‘Nineteenth-century warhorses’? I’m still not totally sure what he means by that phrase. Does he just mean boring schoolmasters, or is he also referring to the wider culture of Russian writers and journalists and thinkers etc.

He mentions the many areas or issues where the early history of the Turks is contested by historians, where there are conflicting theories – but rarely without being pretty casual, sometimes rather dismissive, or even facetious.

There is a twentieth-century claim that the early Ottomans (which is a westernisation of Osmanli) were bright-eyed fighters for the cause of Allah, itself the answer to a rather Christian-triumphalist claim that they were noble savages who had to learn everything from Byzantium, but the evidence either way is thin. (p.23)

Jocose

So all the right dates are here, along with nodding references to the main cruxes or issues of Turkish historiography – and the book does give you a good quick overview of the entire history from the Seljuks to the glories of the great Ottoman Empire (at its peak in the 1550s) and then its long decline down to the death agonies in the First World War, and then the rebirth of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

But all conveyed in a deliberately jocose, facetious way.

The Turks had a modern army, whereas the Christians were still fighting pre-gunpowder wars, in which heavy cavalry, imprisoned in armour, charged off pretentiously after quarreling leaders had windbagged away as to who would lead. (p.27)

‘windbagged away.’ Presumably Stone thinks – or his editors suggested – that he could make the knotty and complex history of medieval and Renaissance Turkey more palatable if he slipped in wrote it in a jokey and irreverent tone.

The Pope staged a great conference in Rome in 1490 and, as in Cold War days, it attracted all manner of bores, adventurers and braggarts – poor Cem [the Ottoman sultan’s exiled brother], some stray Byzantine pretenders, a fake Georgian prince or two, men wanting money to print unreadable tracts, Portuguese waffling at length, Hungarians going on about their woes… (p.43)

Hence the ho-ho tone of much of his commentary (‘Portuguese waffling at length, Hungarians going on about their woes’) – except that it itself is heroically out of date. It reads like the jokey slang of the Just William stories, or Geoffrey Willans’ Down with Skool! books from the 1950s. Looking it up I see that Professor Stone was born in 1941, so is now 78, was around 70 when this book was published. On one level, then, it feels a bit like a repository of naughty schoolboy attitudes from the 1950s.

Turkish trivia

Not only is the tone odd, but Stone is easily distracted by eccentric factoids and historical trivia. For example, it is odd that the prelude to this short book, where space is surely a premium, spends five pages describing the German academic exiles from Nazi Germany who came, settled in Istanbul, and helped set up the world-class university there. All very well and interesting, but not really the first or most important thing which readers ought to know about Turkish history.

Once we get to his swift outline of the Turks’ obscure early history in Central Asia, it is dotted with odd explanations, for example the fact that the Italian word pastrami derives from a Turkish original which he uses to illustrate some key aspects of the Turkish language – the way it includes preposition, tenses and other information by making changes to internal vowels and adding prefixes and suffixes and structural changes (although this brief paragraph is not really very useful).

He is particularly fond of the way medieval crowns and titles have descended by historical accidents to the most unlikely descendants. Thus he tells us that, after the last crusaders had been kicked out of the Holy Land in 1291, some took refuge in highly fortified islands, such as Cyprus, the ruler of which called himself ‘King of Jerusalem’ for generations afterwards, the title eventually passing to… the Courtenay family in Devon!

Similarly, he describes the machinations by which the Sultan Bayezid (1360 – 1403) kept his brother Cem detained by various Christian powers far from the throne, until Cem died – at which point Bayezit had all Cem’s descendants murdered – except for one, who fled to the Knights of St John on Rhodes, converted to Christianity, acquired a title from the Pope and… has a chief descendant in Australia!

The book is packed with trivial pursuit factoids such as:

• on the Bosnian-Serbian border there were silver mines Srebrenica, the town which saw massacres during the Yugoslav wars, derives from the Slavonic name for ‘silver’
• in the Middle Ages the Black Sea was the high road for the Russian trade in furs and slaves – the present-day Turkish name for prostitute, orospu, is medieval Persian, and the central part of it denotes ‘Rus’
• Turkish rulers hit on the idea of recruiting young boys from occupied lands (especially Greece) to the court, converting them to Islam, giving them an education and training. Some formed the nucleus of elite units within the army known, in Turkish, as the yeñi çeri (meaning ‘new soldiers’) who, over time, became known to Westerners as the Janissaries
• The Topkapi palace in Istanbul is laid out in courtyards with elaborate pavilions known as köşk, the Turkish word for an ornate wooden mansion, smaller than a palace – which is the source of the English word ‘kiosk’

And there are lots more distracting and diverting factoids where they came from.

Contorted style

Another major feature of the book is the odd, garbled prose style. On every page he phrases things, well, oddly.

To what extent was the success of the Ottomans based on Islam, or would you read this the other way round, and say that the Ottomans were successful when their Islam was not taken too seriously? (p.7)

His prose is not incomprehensible, just oddly laid out. Stiff. Ungainly.

There is a line in Proust, to the effect that someone looks on history as would a newly born chicken at the bits of the eggshell from which it had been hatched. (p.8)

You can see what he’s getting at, but can’t help noticing how inelegantly it has been phrased.

By the mid-fifteenth century Byzantium had shrunk to the point that it consisted of just Constantinople and its hinterland. (p.29)

Or:

The Mameluks had made endless trouble for Constantinople and with their fabled riches from trade they provided an obvious target for Selim, who trundled his gunnery and Janissaries to effect against them. (p.49)

I think he means that Selim trundled his guns and Janissaries off to fight the Mameluks, with (or to) great effect i.e. his guns and Janissaries were very effective. Odd phrasing though, isn’t it? And these oddities crop up on every page. After a while I began relishing the book, not only for its ostensible subject, but also for its car-crash prose.

As early as the eighth century, Turkish mercenaries had made their appearance in Persia, in the then capital of which, Baghdad, the Caliphate reigned over all Islam. (p.18)

A personal history of Turkey

Maybe you could turn my critique on its head by simply describing this book as a personal history of Turkey, one in which Professor Stone felt released from the corsets of formal, academic history writing, to air his opinions about everything – from penpushing bureaucracies to partisan school teachers, from the absurdities of the old Eastern Europe through the tastiness of Turkish tea – all served up in an idiosyncratic style which is continually reaching for the droll and the whimsical, rather than the serious or profound.

Madrid and Ankara are both artificial capitals, without economic activity between pen-pushing and boot-bashing. (p.54)

Conclusion

So, if you’re looking for a short history of Turkey written in idiosyncratic English, which certainly covers all the bases but also includes an entertaining selection of odd anecdotes and Turkey trivia – then this is very possibly the book for you!

Related links

• Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone on Amazon

Reviews of other books and exhibitions about the Middle Ages

• Opus Anglicanum @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (November 2016)
• Celts: art and identity @ The British Museum (October 2015)

• Rogier van der Weyden by Stephan Kemperdick (2013)
• The Wars of the Roses by John Gillingham (1981)
• The Art of the Northern Renaissance by Craig Harbison (1995)
• The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1919)
• The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States by Michael Haag (2)
• The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States by Michael Haag (1)
• Crusades by Terry Jones and Alan Ereira (1994)
• A Chronology of the Crusades
• ‘The Crusades’ from A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson (1976)
• The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made Britain (1) by Dan Jones (2013)
• King John: Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta by Marc Morris (2015)
• Byzantium: The Apogee by John Julius Norwich (1991)
• Early Medieval Art by Lawrence Nees (2002)
• The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)
• Consequences of the Norman Conquest
• The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris (2012)

• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400)
• Twelfth century chroniclers
• Historia Anglorum by Henry of Huntingdon (1154)
• A History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede (732)
• On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain by Gildas (540)

• The Conversion of Europe: 371-1386 by Richard Fletcher
• The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham (2009) Chapters 1 – 8
• Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire by Christopher Kelly (2008)
• The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown