The Eternal State

About This Book

In the year 1299, on a hilltop in western Anatolia, a Turkish frontier chieftain named Osman dreamed — so the story was later told — of a great tree rising from his chest whose branches covered the earth. From his tiny warrior band grew the Ottoman Empire: the state that took Constantinople with the largest cannon the world had ever seen, marched to the gates of Vienna, and ruled Christians, Muslims, and Jews from Budapest to Baghdad for six hundred years.

Here is the whole magnificent, terrible sweep of the Eternal State: Mehmed the Conqueror's guns before the walls of Byzantium; Suleiman and Roxelana, the slave girl who became empress; the janissaries — an army of enslaved children who ruled their masters; the harem politics of the Sultanate of Women; coffee, tulips, and the world's first coffeehouse revolutions; the long retreat from Vienna to the trenches of Gallipoli; the Armenian genocide; and the dawn morning in 1924 when the last caliph was put on the Orient Express and six centuries of empire ended forever.

Drawing on chronicles, travelers' letters, and the latest scholarship, this is the story of the empire that made the modern world — told whole, from the dream to the dying fall.