Colin Imber - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Colin Imber

Gorgias Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2010

Historian, 2019

an ally but instead as an associated power. The full force of American military strength, though,... more an ally but instead as an associated power. The full force of American military strength, though, would take at least a year to prepare and longer to arrive on the Western Front. After April 1917, it was American potential that mattered, and that was still in the future. In sum, in 1917, the Ides of March did not augur well for either the Allies or the Central Powers. Part of the reason was that there were disturbing signs not only of domestic political divisions but also of dangerous social polarization in this, the third year of the war. After three years of industrial mobilization, there occurred the first stages of a wave of strikes that spread throughout Europe and lasted until roughly 1923. This phenomenon was both war related, in the way it reflected wartime inflation and inequality of sacrifice, and secular. Since the 1880s, moments of major trade union growth were followed by strike activity. And 1917 was no exception. Indeed, the intensity of these struggles suggests that the postponement since 1914 of workers' demands on wages and conditions of labor had acted like the lid of a pressure cooker. Inflation fueled the fire, and trade unions and other social groups-in particular women protesting shortages and outrageous food prices-took to the streets or downed their tools despite the needs of the war machine. Indeed, the March Revolution in Russia had been triggered by a women's protest over bread prices. The political truce of the first half of the war also came to an end. The German Social Democratic Party split in early 1917. Those wanting an end to the war met at Gotha on 6 April and founded the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). Once again, women's groups were prominent in this radicalization of the political left. The British Liberal Party split, in part over personalities, as well as over conscription and the suppression of the 1916 Rising in Ireland. Georges Clemenceau, who became French prime minister in November, was a divisive leader. For example, he had his Radical colleague Joseph Caillaux arrested for advocating peace negotiation and welcomed his conviction for a

In 1938 Paul Wittek delivered .a series of• ıectures at the Sorbonne whose p:urpose was to explai... more In 1938 Paul Wittek delivered .a series of• ıectures at the Sorbonne whose p:urpose was to explain why the Ottomans suffered defeat at the battle of Ankara in 1402 and• how, after defeat aıid a decade of civil war, the Empire was able t~ recover its unity • and strength a:nd to resume its conquests in the Christiım world, culminating, .in the fall ()f Constantinople in 14:53. The thesis which Wittek propoun-d~d. developed naturally from his Sorboniıe lectures of 1936, publiı:; hed as <<Deux chapitres de l'histoire des Turcs de. Rouın» 2 az:ıd appears i~ a variant guise in his London lectures of 1937, publis-.• hed as «The rise of the Ottoman Empire» 3 • üf these three publications, «De la defaite d' Ankaraala prise Constantinople» has perhaps b~en the. most influential. Almost fifty years after its publica:tio~, no •one h~. challenged i ts flindamental assumptions, whereas 1t is comman to find i ts ideas, and even. ,phrases, uncr1tically repeated. Its seemingiy mesmeric effect appears to derive froni the fa.ct that it provides a cohereiı.t-or fairly • coherent ~ ex:planation for the events of an obscure and complex period, and to challenge its thesis requires a .knowledge of diverse and fragmentary source •material in a number •of difficult languages.

Times Literary Supplement Tls, 2003

Dechiffrer le passe d'un empire

Violence in Islamic Thought from the Mongols to European Imperialism, 2018

Studies in Ottoman History, 2010

One, but not the only end of Ottoman history writing was to entertain and to edify 1. It is a sel... more One, but not the only end of Ottoman history writing was to entertain and to edify 1. It is a selection of "prayers before battle" that have the latter end in view that will be considered here. The range in time will be fixed by the "chroniclers' narrative" 2 and Negri's Cihàn-nUmâ recension completed between end 1486 and early 1493 3 on the one hand, and by Selânikï (on the battle of Egri) on the other. The field of choice within these dates has been reduced by the exclusion of important but (to me) inaccessible works. Subject to these limitations, I try to concentrate in the following pages on a variety of prayers before battle, and I venture to offer them as my contribution to the Festschrift for V. L. Ménage. Descriptions of pitched battles 4 afforded occasions for elaborations on the theme of the petition-prayer (hàcet namàzi; salât al-fiàca) 5 and 'supplication' {taiarru') in passages where the sultan humbly turned to God for help. The linking of taiarru' with prayer and significant words (gunàh) indicates that the writers who elaborated on this theme were undoubtedly thinking of humiliation 1 V.L. Ménage, "On the recensions of Uruj's 'History of the Ottomans' ", BSOAS 30 (1967), 314.1 am very grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation, whose generosity enabled me to do research as a Humanities Resident Fellow at Washington University, St. Louis, in the spring of 1991. I should like to thank C.H. Fleischer and A. Karamustafa of Washington University, St. Louis, for their comments on a draft of this article in May 1991, and for the great generosity with which Professor Fleischer put his library and numerous microfilms at my disposal.

The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, 2009

The Religions of the Book, 2008

Assessments of what motivated crusades and crusaders are inevitably speculative,1 some commentato... more Assessments of what motivated crusades and crusaders are inevitably speculative,1 some commentators seeing crusading as ‘a genuinely popular devotional activity’,2 while others prefer to explain it as a search for economic or other material benefits. All, however, admit — if sometimes unwillingly — that there can be no single explanation for the phenomenon. The Crusade of Varna — a campaign in which the combined forces of the pope, the king of Hungary, the Byzantine Emperor, the duke of Burgundy, Venice, Ragusa and the emir of Karaman confronted the Ottoman sultan, Murad II 3 — provides a good case study of the complexities of crusading. At one level it is easy to understand the events of 1443–5 simply in terms of Realpolitik, with the alliances during the crusade of Christian with Muslim and Muslim with Christian highlighting its secular character. The campaign was, however, still a crusade. It was a military enterprise under the leadership of the pope, undertaken by the church against an infidel enemy and, as such, it satisfies the definition of a crusade formulated in the thirteenth century by the Decretalist Hostiensis (d. 1271).4 Nonetheless, even if the participants in events publicly proclaimed the war to be a crusade, this does not necessarily explain their motives. The idea of a crusade can just as easily serve as a justification for an action undertaken for other reasons, as it can for inspiring the action in the first place, and this complicates the question of motivation. So too does the question of individual motives. The knights and common soldiers who took part in the campaign cannot have shared the secular goals of its leaders, nor would they have understood a crusade in the same terms as canon lawyers or cardinals. In brief, therefore, the motives that inspired the crusade of Varna were tangled and certainly not uniform.