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By David S. Katz
This publication is ready the primary writings that formed the conception of Turkey for expert readers in English, from Edward Gibbon’s positing of imperial Decline and Fall to the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (1923), illustrating how Turkey has regularly been part of the trendy British and eu event. it's a nice sweep of a narrative: from Gibbon as usual textbook, via Lord Bryon the pro-Turkish poet, and Benjamin Disraeli the Romantic novelist of all issues japanese, by way of John Buchan's Greenmantle First international conflict espionage fantasies, after which Manchester Guardian reporter Arnold Toynbee narrating the struggle for Turkish independence.
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Additional info for The Shaping of Turkey in the British Imagination, 1776–1923
Example text
Finally, on 6 July 1439, in the cathedral of Florence, the Orthodox representatives conceded papal primacy and fudged a large bit over the filioque dispute that had become the symbol of the schism between East and West. The importance and relevance of the Ottoman siege of Constantinople from the beginning of the fifteenth century on the development and expansion of the Renaissance is not always given sufficient weight in our conventional narrative. Under the influence of Jacob Burckhardt’s paradigmatic study of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), we tend to begin with the political fragmentation of late medieval Italy, and the resulting desire of its illegitimate leaders to enhance their standing in the eyes of the public by employing another group of self-made individuals, the artists and scholars, to produce work that enhanced the ruler’s glory.
1362–1389), who had the honour of capturing the city of Adrianople (Edirne), well into the European side (and today at the point where Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria meet): By the pale and fainting light of the Byzantine annals, we can discern, that he subdued without resistance the whole province of Romania or Thrace, from the Hellespont to Mount Hæmus, and the verge of the capital; and that Adrianople was chosen for the royal seat of his government and religion in Europe. Constantinople, whose decline is almost coeval with her foundation, had often, in the lapse of a thousand years, been assaulted by the Barbarians of the East and West; but never till this fatal hour had the Greeks been surrounded, both in Asia and Europe, by the arms of the same hostile monarchy.
68 is the climax, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 and the final, irrevocable fall of the remaining eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine. Even more than the notorious fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the first volume, this chapter is gripping, even inspiring, in its depiction of the final days and hours of the Byzantine Empire. 89 ‘Before I enter on the siege of Constantinople’, Gibbon notes, ‘I shall observe, that except the short hints of Cantemir and Leunclavius, I have not been able to obtain any Turkish account of this conquest’.