By Philip Mansel
ISBN-10: 0300172648
ISBN-13: 9780300172645
Levant is a booklet of towns. It describes 3 former facilities of serious wealth, excitement, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant quarter alongside the jap coast of the Mediterranean. In those key ports on the crossroads of East and West, opposed to all expectancies, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished at the same time. humans freely switched identities and languages, published from the prisons of faith and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the 1st to recount the colourful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut within the glossy age. He starts off within the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire within the 16th century and maintains throughout the towns' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated via civil war.Mansel seems to be again to determine what those striking Levantine towns have been like, how they differed from different towns, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He additionally embarks on a quest: to find no matter if, as usually claimed, those towns have been really cosmopolitan, owning the elixir of coexistence among Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the realm yearns. Or, less than the glittering floor, have been they volcanoes ready to erupt, because the catastrophes of the 20 th century recommend? within the pages of the previous, Mansel unearths very important messages for the fractured international of at the present time.
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Additional resources for Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean
Sample text
By the end of the eighteenth century foreign embassies and consulates were selling certificates of diplomatic protection, or berats – which included freedom from Ottoman taxes – originally meant for their employees, to hundreds of local Christians and Jews – sometimes Muslims too – in search of security and protection: further proof of an erosion in confidence in the Ottoman Empire. For example, the Canetti family – Jews living in Edirne, ancestors of the writer Elias Canetti – purchased protection from the Dutch embassy.
It had a garrison of 200 men paid from the Smyrna customs revenue. 35 One of the greatest of Ottoman writers, and the only one to devote himself to travel, was Evliya Çelebi. His travel book is a fundamental source for the Ottoman Empire. Born in Constantinople in 1610, he had been told in a dream to travel. Capable of reciting the Koran in eight hours (though, like most Ottoman Koran reciters, he did not know the Arabic in which it is written), he was son of the Sultan’s chief jeweller and a boon companion of Murad IV.
The kadi then ‘appeased the fury of the people’, by means unspecified. The presence in the harbour of sailors from North Africa, or the Kaptan Pasha and his fleet, often triggered riots. 118 During the War of the Holy League, opposing the Holy Roman Empire, Poland and Venice against the Ottoman Empire in 1683–99, as Austrian and Polish armies plunged into Ottoman territory in the Balkans, and even Louis XIV sent agents to decide which Ottoman cities would be easiest to seize,Venice – by no means a spent force – conquered much of Greece.
Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean by Philip Mansel
by Robert
4.1