The Magnificent Porte. Six Centuries of the Ottoman Empire

Full of secrets and contradictions, the Ottoman Empire stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers along the borders of East and West. It had a colossal influence on the history of Europe, being quite different from it. Comparable in scale to the Roman Empire, by the end of the 16th century it occupied three continents and united under its power many languages and peoples: its subjects included Albanians, Armenians, Greeks, and many others. The fall of Constantinople and the wars with the Russian Empire, religion and art, the first nomadic settlements of the Seljuks and the creation of the Turkish Republic, Osman I and Atatürk - in an effort to understand this remarkable country, French historian Olivier Bouquer created a detailed portrait of the Sublime Porte and six centuries of its history. “How did the sultans manage, instilling fear in Vienna and invoking horror among papal legates, to spread Islam in Central and Eastern Europe - in territories where it was completely foreign? How did they manage to last almost half a millennium? How did they manage to create a state 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 Bouquer).