The Magnificent Port. Six Centuries of the Ottoman Empire

Full of mysteries and contradictions, the Ottoman Empire stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers along the border of East and West. It had a colossal influence on the history of Europe, being unlike it at all. Comparable in scale... to the Roman Empire, by the end of the 16th century it occupied three continents and united under its authority many languages and peoples: among its subjects were Albanians, Armenians, Greeks, and many others. The fall of Constantinople and wars with the Russian Empire, religion and art, the first nomadic settlements of the Seljuks, and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Osman I and Atatürk - in an attempt to understand this amazing country, French historian Olivier Bouque created a detailed portrait of the Glorious Port and six centuries of its history. "How did the sultans manage, instilling fear in Vienna and horror in the papal legates, to spread Islam in Central and Eastern Europe - in territories that were completely foreign to it? How did they survive for almost half a millennium? How was a state created that became the last imperial formation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the embodiment of Muslim universalism? These questions are posed by the Ottoman era, which has become part of the long history of Islamic peoples" (Olivier Bouque).