Bridge across the Bosporus

Feb 23rd 2006
From The Economist print edition

MORE than 80 years after being ★supplanted[1] by the Turkish republic, the Ottoman empire will not die. Bloodshed in the Balkans; Arab and Kurdish nationalism across the Middle East; ★Turcophobia[2] in Armenia; （1）all are echoes of a dynasty that survived for 600 years▲ and whose dominions e____ ① ____ from the Danube through the Levant to Algiers. Few historians have dared compress the story of this extraordinary enterprise into a single volume. “Osman’s Dream” shows why.

Osman led one of several Turcoman tribes, of Central Asian descent, that were competing for control of Anatolia at the beginning of the 14th century. (The dream in question was interpreted to mean that Osman would found an imperial house; （2）“Ottoman” is the European corruption of his name▲). By the mid-16th century, Osman’s descendants had killed off the Byzantine Empire and t____ ② ____ its capital, Constantinople (renamed Istanbul), into the world’s greatest mosque city. They also had control of the Muslim holy places, Mecca and Medina, in Arabia.