Turks young and old.

Osman's Dream:

The History of the Ottoman Empire, by Caroline Finkel

(Basic, 660 pp., $35)

IN his Lectures on Modern History, posthumously published exactly a century ago and now available in a handsome edition from Liberty Fund, Lord Acton observed that "Modern History begins under stress of the Ottoman Conquest." Does that judgment surprise you? We've been hearing--endlessly--how everything in the Islamic sphere today is to be understood as a response to "modernity," variously construed. Yet Acton says that modern history itself--the world system that is still with us, however modified, with its origins in Europe--began as a response to the Ottoman conquest.

The legendary date for the founding of the Ottoman Empire is 1299, when Osman--the leader of a loose confederation of migrants from the steppes of Central Asia who had carved out territory in Anatolia (in present-day Turkey)--had a prophetic dream. In this reverie, a tree sprouted from his navel, and the shade of its branches covered the entire world. The holy man to whom he related the dream explained that Osman was chosen by God to sire a great dynasty; he gave Osman his daughter in marriage. From these humble beginnings a mighty Islamic empire grew, spreading throughout the Middle East and Eastern and Central Europe before expiring in the early 20th century after a long decline. This six-century span is Caroline Finkel's subject.

The opening of the Ottoman archives in Istanbul to Western scholars not long after World War II has given historians a wealth of material, and behind Finkel's book are hundreds of specialized studies. Moreover, as she notes in her preface, she has lived in Turkey for 15 years; her knowledge is not limited to book learning.

Finkel's survey is most valuable as a kind of reconnaissance, full of dynastic struggles, battles and decrees, unfamiliar names and places, and surprising intersections with other histories (European, Byzantine) that describe the same events from very different angles. It's a book that every interested reader--old Ottoman hands excepted--should wade through, simply to become better acquainted with the territory. But be warned. Alas, and very much contrary to the dust-jacket praise from novelist Orhan Pamuk, who knows better, Finkel is a terrible writer. She recounts event after event with no sense of pace, rather like one of those bores who insist on telling you about a movie you simply must see, then launching into an unstoppable scene-by-scene chronicle.

Even so, some salient themes emerge, running both with and against the grain of Finkel's intent. With: the extent to which Ottoman policy was pragmatic, often involving alliances with one set of infidels against another. (Only very rarely could the Christian states muster anything approaching a united front.) Against: the extent to which, from the very beginning, the empire was founded on a vision of the universal triumph of Islam, driven by conquest. In the 11th century, Turkic peoples relatively recently converted to Islam conquered large areas in what had been Christian Anatolia, preparing the ground for Osman. And, going back one step further, the conversion of those peoples came as a consequence of the explosive spread of Islam in the first waves of Muslim conquest. If Finkel is quite right to emphasize that the self-consciously religious imperative for conquest was only intermittently invoked, she is wrong not to acknowledge its potency over the whole arc of Ottoman history and all the way to our present moment.

Indeed, in her defensiveness, her determination at all costs to provide a corrective to what she regards as invidious characterizations of the Ottomans by earlier writers (she is most ungenerous to her predecessors in this respect), Finkel undermines her own project. It is sensible to say, as she does at the outset, that we should "interpret Ottoman history by the same standard as other histories," but the next sentence develops this thought in a way that is both absurd and self-defeating: "There are unique aspects of the history of every state, of course; but to emphasize them rather than the aspects that are comparable to the history of other states seems to me to miss the point."

It should be needless to say that the historian is not forced to choose one or the other. We should not approach Ottoman history as if it were a freakish outlier; neither should we fail to perceive what is distinctive, as we recognize the Englishness of the English, say, as against the Frenchness of the French. Instead of trusting that her readers are grown-ups who recognize that any human society is a complex compound of good and evil, that some places at some times are nevertheless more conducive to human flourishing than others, that we should be quick to learn and not hasten to condemn but neither should we allow our judgment to be paralyzed--instead of this, Finkel is always making excuses, hedging, or omitting altogether those "aspects of Ottoman history" that crude types are likely to seize upon.

The exercises in exculpation are sometimes inadvertently comical. Finkel notes that, like the Mongols, the Ottomans did not limit succession "to any particular member of the ruling dynasty: The question of who should succeed was a matter for God to determine." Often, as in European states--think of Henry VIII and his determination to have a son--God employed human agency to make His will clear. Hence the Ottoman custom whereby the son who seemed poised to assume the throne upon the death of the reigning sultan found it prudent to murder his brothers (in many cases half-brothers, since the sultan would typically father sons by a number of wives and concubines). One such instance recounted by Finkel took place in 1574, when Selim II died and his eldest son became Murad III. With an absolutely straight face, Finkel quotes the account of Murad's Jewish physician:

   But Sultan [Murad], who was so compassionate
   as to be unable to see blood
   shed, waited eighteen hours, in which
   he refused to sit on the Imperial throne
   or to make public his arrival in the City,
   seeking and discussing a way first to
   free his nine brothers of the blood who
   were in the Seraglio.... In order that he
   should not break the law of the Ottoman
   state ... weeping, he sent the mutes to
   strangle them, giving nine handkerchiefs
   with his own hands to the chief of
   the mutes.

A very sensitive man. As Finkel comments, "murder was the price of avoiding the civil strife which often attended the succession of a sultan."

Less amusing are Finkel's paeans to the Ottomans' wonderfully tolerant treatment of Christians in their empire. Christianity, like Islam, is a conversionist faith. You've heard of the Great Commission? Christians in the empire were forbidden to fulfill this fundamental obligation, while Muslims were strictly forbidden, often on pain of death, to convert to Christianity. (Sound familiar?) Churches could be arbitrarily seized and converted to mosques or destroyed, the property sold. And so it went.

If you make it through Finkel's book, as I hope you will despite the barriers, you should reward yourself by reading something by Ivo Andric, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist born in Bosnia, of Croatian ancestry. His fiction offers another window on the world shaped by Osman's dream.

Mr. Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture, a bimonthly review.