In my last blog, I defended my allegations against the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
One of the claims I made was that he was not only reviving memories of the Ottoman Empire but actually wanted to reinstate the concept of Turkish hegemony in the region.
Discussion of the Ottoman Empire reminded me of a delightful lunch I once had with Özdemir Özgür, a distinguished Turkish Cypriot diplomat, who tirelessly worked to reconcile the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities. When Cyprus was divided by the Turkish invasion of 1974 Özdemir was most unusual in that rather than move, like most of the Turkish Cypriot community, to the north, then controlled by the Turkish army, he decided to stay in the south of the island under Greek Cypriot administration. As you can imagine his stance at the time made him most unpopular with many Turkish Cypriots and the Turkish Government in Ankara.
I first met Özdemir at the University in Nicosia when I was giving a talk there and then on several later occasions. When I was visiting Cyprus he would invite me to lunch at his favourite haunt, the Hilton Hotel. On this particular occasion he told me a story of how one day when he was dining with a group of Greek Cypriots, they started talking about Greek culture and the legacies it has left: democracy, philosophy, history, drama, medicine architecture, art and so on. Then one of his friends challenged him, "Özdemir, the Ottoman Empire lasted for five hundred years, what are its great legacies?" Özdemir admitted to me he felt stumped at the time. All he could think of was how good it had been at military organisation.
Of course, this is unfair but it is true that the world has tended to characterise the Ottoman Empire as a backward, cruel, brutal and despotic regime which brought misery and hardship to its subject peoples: known for seizing Christian babies to be schooled as Janissary guards for the Sultan, impaling and flaying alive its enemies, and resorting to mass killings and genocide. There were few regrets when the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of WW I and Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk), the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, believed that the Ottoman Empire was "a deadweight and best forgotten”.
Paradoxically, I would like to argue that the Ottoman Empire was, in fact, the cause of the rise of modern Europe and the Enlightenment that followed. It wasn’t a conscious catalyst but through its military conquests and its dominance in the Middle East, it forced the Christian European countries to rethink their economic and political practices. The key to a series of dramatic changes that heralded the end of the Mediaeval era and the rise of the Modern Europe was the disruption of trade. The Ottoman Empire closed the ancient east to west trade routes, labelled by the 19th-century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen as ‘the silk roads’. These trade routes had brought wealth to Byzantium, the maritime states of Italy, Venice and Genoa, shipping much sought after luxuries, in particular spices, to the elite of Europe.
The loss of these routes (Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453) was the economic driver for the exploration of new sea routes in the fifteenth century: Columbus (1492) - who was looking for a new route to the spice islands and discovered the Americas; Vasco da Gama who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to reach India (1497); Magellan whose fleet journeyed around the globe (1519 -22). France and England soon followed the enterprise of Spain and Portugal. These European powers not only vied with each other over maritime routes but also began to establish colonies to control the sources of this trade, and so a new world order emerged. I wonder if the Turkish President has thought about this!
Note: 1) I have written a popular history on Cyprus, A Traveller's History of Cyprus, Paperback 2011
2) An interesting read on the Silk Roads is Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, 2016
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