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The Rise of the Turk
For over 300 years the Ottoman Empire dominated the Old World as no power had since Rome. From 1300 to 1600 it sat astride Eurasia’s trade routes, challenging all comers and generally dominating them. The chief adversary of European Christianity, it projected power into Africa, India, Persia, and Russia.
Crescent Dawn: The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Age, by Si Sheppard, follows the rise of the Ottoman Empire from its beginning to its zenith. It documents its rise to world domination.
It shows they began as an obscure high steppe tribe pushed into Syria as refugees by the Mongols in the 12th and 13th centuries. After conversion to Islam they became a power in eastern Anatolia, starting their path to imperial hegemony by defeating the Byzantines in battle in 1302. As Sheppard shows, an inexorable growth followed. Initially against the Byzantines, they erupted into Europe in the late 1300s.
From there they became the dominant regional power. Over 200 years they spread into the Balkans, the Holy Lands and the Tigris-Euphrates valley. They extinguished the Byzantine Empire and threatened the major Eastern European and Mediterranean powers in the west and the Persians in the east. They did so through the skillful use of technology. Sheppard reveals they were early adaptors of gunpowder, with the world’s best siege warfare capability.
The story Sheppard relates is a fascinating kaleidoscope of nations and personalities. Mehmed I and II and Suleiman the Magnificent share the stage with Skanderberg of Albania, Vlad Tepes (Dracula), Manuel II of Portugal, Charles V of Spain and Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. It spans from Tangiers in the west to Ethiopia in the south, the gates of Vienna in the north and the Indian subcontinent in the east.
Sheppard shows how the Ottoman’s stamp on the world still influences the modern world. None of what happened was inevitable. Near-run things dominate. The Ottomans almost lost the siege when they conquered Constantinople and almost won the siege of Vienna.
Their decline started when their eventual victory seemed inevitable. Voyages to the New World and the Portuguese ventures into the Indian Ocean were fueled by fear of the Turk. Yet they opened up markets and lands which allowed Europe to outflank the Ottomans.
Crescent Dawn is a fascinating read. It has relevance to the power politics of today’s world, offering lessons best heeded by 21st-century leaders.
“Crescent Dawn: The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Age,” by Si Sheppard, Osprey Publishing, February 2025, 528 pages, $40.00 (Hardback), $28.00 (E-book)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Published in Book Reviews
Did Al Ghazali’s interpretation of Islam destroy the Turks?
Not in this book. Considering he came along two centuries before the Ottomans I don’t see how it could have.
The Ottoman Turks were far more pragmatic than the Caliphates they defeated to rule Islam. Nevertheless, Islam’s immune system resists change and adaptation and is always ready to revert to seventh century factory settings. It is noteworthy that the Ottoman military, once the best equipped in the world, the first standing army be issued firearms, had to request a fatwa in the late eighteenth century for permission to teach Newtonian physics to artillerymen and weapons designers.
The endless divisive squabbles of a never-united Europe probably extended the lifespan of the Ottoman Empire by at least a century.
Atatürk (an atheist) founded modern Turkey in the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. Secularization, women’s rights (and suppression of ethnic minorities) established a more modern nation. But today Erdoğan is back to Islamizing the country and beginning to slough off western values and sees himself as heir to former Ottoman leadership of Islam.
It seems like Islam eventually becomes fixed, rigid and unworkable. It doesn’t happen all at once though.
The decline of Turkey reminds me of how Islam works in other societies. Eventually, Islam is taken more seriously and it enervates the societies it occupies.
Many jihadis come from pretty regular Muslim families but reading the Quran made them into jihadis.
In modern times, Islam sunk Iran and it is now trying to sink Turkey.
Al Ghazali was a secular student of philosophy. The 9/11 hijackers were not uneducated or from poor families. They all arrived at the realization that there really is no “moderate” or “reformed” mode of being a Muslim because the tolerance, primacy of empirical reasoning and respect for individual conscience is both the essence of Western culture and the complete antithesis of Mohammed’s project. The tribal identity that Islam is designed to instill then becomes a powerful force.
This book ends around 1600. The Ottomans were still heading for apogee, although by then the rockets fueling their economy had cut out when the Portuguese rerouted the spice and tea trade and the Spanish were bringing silver in by the ton from the Americas.
It does have an interesting discussion on why Europe ended up dominating the world that basically boiled down to only the Ottomans could successfully take a fortified European city or outpost, and they only with difficulty. Europeans would show up somewhere, get permission to put in a permanent base, fortified it, and then the locals could not oust them. Move a little further in, rinse, lather, and repeat until you have the whole stinking subcontinent.
Once the Ottomans lost economic dominance they could no longer afford to take European outposts and started going downhill from there.
Thanks for the review. Going on my never to be finished reading list. I’m currently working through Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. I found out it’s a diology so, of course, I have to read it first before Life and Fate which is what I originally wanted to read. I really enjoyed Agents of Empire which dealt with an Albanian family where one member fought in the Battle of Lepanto, another was a diplomat in the Ottoman court, etc.
What’s scary is I actually read all of every book I review and do it once a week. (It may not scare you, but it sure scares me.)
I am indeed impressed. You can’t skim through it if you’re going to give a review.