When in the course of not publishing a review of a book for some few weeks (an eternity in Internet Time), and generally being an inconspicuous presence with a negligible station vis-à-vis both the literati and Trumpian powers of the Earth, and that Twitter monster in comparison with which my recent inactivity seems altogether like the fleeings of those Lilliputian denizens of Tokyo, a decent respect for the opinions of my readers impels me to put something out to signal that I am still proceeding apace with my reading and haven’t quite dropped off the face of the Earth or abandoned my plan of bringing to you a steady diet of what’s old.

With that Preamble out of the way, let me talk about one hefty book I’ve been reading.

The Turkish History, From the Original of that Nation, To the Growth of the Ottoman Empire, with the Lives and Conquests of their Princes and Emperors by Richard Knolles

This is such enjoyable reading–and yes, I say that despite the extensive caveats I feel obliged to offer below. The narration is brisk and relays many picturesque episodes, which I think is the main reason it’s garnered plaudits from Byron, Southey, Hallam, and Dr. Johnson. (It reminds me a bit of Books 7, 8, and 9 of Herodotus, although the ethnographic focus of Herodotus’s former books is close to entirely lacking here.) Where Knolles excels, and shows a certain Herodotian/Thucydidean quality, is in his breathtaking narrations of sieges and battles. Here, just to take one example, is a section of the Battle of Myriocephalon in 1176 between the forces of Byzantine emperor Manuel I Kommenos and the Turkish Sultan Arslan, in which Manuel leads his forces directly into a trap.

 

“Inclosed as Deer in a toyl” (Yikes!) Dr. Johnson was surely correct to say that the obscurity of this work is due in part to the fact that within its narrative, the Christians get owned–spectacularly so–repeatedly. In 17th and 18th century Europe, it is doubtful that this sort of self-ownage (however wonderfully narrated) would have found much interest with the general public, though the work was reprinted multiple times and even given an extension by Paul Rycaut in the late 17th century.

In another picturesque battle set-piece, Knolles describes the siege by the crusader kings of Damiata, a heavily fortified town sitting at the mouth of the Nile, and an deemed by the crusaders as absolutely essential to take as a precursor for the conquest of Egypt. But here is how Knolles narrates it:

Chambers’ Cyclopaedia gripes that, “The historical value of the book is slender,” because “original research on the subject was hardly possible to Knolles.” In the absolute sense, this seems an unfair description of what the reader can expect, because there is an awful lot of (colorful) history retailed in the book, even if it is taken without credit from a dozen foreign sources. Perhaps the Cyclopaedia is making an implicit comparison between Knolles’ book and The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othoman Empire, a heavily-annotated work by Dimitrie Cantemir, the Voivoide of Moldavia, one of 18th century Europe’s intellectual giants, and as well someone much better situated to carry out original research using Ottoman (as opposed to Greek) sources. Having dipped into that work and compared passages on the same material, I decided Knolles was by far the more enjoyable narrator, whatever his historiographic shortcomings. (And let’s be frank: a princes, wars, and battles historiography, as both Cantemir and Knolles provide, and without even the deep psychologizing of a Guiccardini, will certainly seem lacking to us moderns in comparison with the sociological and methodological richness of today’s histories. But how lovely a picture they make despite this!)

It is also fair to say that Knolles suffers from a certain Euro-centrism–on top of those homer-type comments which show him to be writing for an English audience every bit as appalled by advance of the Ottomans into central Europe as liberals were at the election of Donald Trump–which is a symptom of his relying mainly on Greek sources. While telling the pre-history of Seljuk and Ogozian Turks, he spends a lot more of its time narrating the misadventures of the crusader kings and the power struggles in the late Byzantine Empire than it shows any detailed knowledge of the internal dynamics of the Turks; the progress and failures, the territorial gains and losses of the Christians are much more minutely detailed than those of the Turks, the putative subject of the book. (Though the details start to firm up on that side of things once Knolles turns to Osman and his father Ertuğrul.) I, for one, didn’t mind these shortcomings because what was narrated was majestically done.