Daily Archives: August 1, 2024

Top Tens – History (Rome): Top 10 Roman Empires (Special Mention) (4) Ottoman Empire

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Map of Ottoman Empire in 1683 by Chamboz for Wikipedia “Ottoman Empire” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

 

(4) OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1453-1922)

 

“Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople

Been a long time gone, Constantinople”

 

The first of the two most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the eastern Roman Empire – and the one which had the force of right of conquest to it, something the Byzantines themselves might have recognized as part of their own imperial doctrine, as well as substantially overlapping with the territory of the eastern Roman empire at its height under Justinian the Great.

It also had my foremost criteria for a top-tier or at least high-tier claimant to succession from the Roman Empire – possession of one of the two Romes, Rome or Constantinople, once Constantinople fell to Ottoman conquest in 1453.

“After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II declared himself Roman Emperor: Kayser-i Rum, literally “Caesar of the Romans”, the standard title for earlier Byzantine Emperors in Arab, Persian and Turkish lands… Mehmed’s claim rested principally with the idea that Constantinople was the rightful seat of the Roman Empire, as it had been for more than a millennium”.

Indeed, Mehmed apparently took a swing at the first and original Rome itself, emulating Justinian the Great and “reuniting the Empire in a way it hadn’t been for nearly eight centuries” – starting a campaign in Italy with the invasion of Otranto in 1480 but which was cut short by his death in 1481. His successors didn’t follow up on that but instead ” repeatedly (albeit never successfully) attempted to conquer the capital of the rival contenders to the Imperial Roman title” with their sieges of Vienna. Those rival contenders of course being the Habsburgs as claimants for the Holy Roman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire also had the “additional though questionable claim of legitimacy” from past alliances between the Ottoman dynasty and the Byzantines through marriage.

Hence one of the dates proposed on occasion (albeit also often tongue in cheek) for the fall of the Roman Empire is 1922, the end of the Ottoman Empire.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Top Tens – Philosophy & Science: Top 10 Books (5) John Gray – Straw Dogs

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(5) JOHN GRAY –

STRAW DOGS: THOUGHTS ON HUMANS & OTHER ANIMALS (2002)

 

“I’ve got a Nietzsche trigger finger!”

No, seriously – this brag (by another entry in this top ten) might well sum up the philosophical pessimism and thoroughgoing misanthropy of John Gray.

That or how I learned to stop worrying and love that humanity sucks.

Indeed, one might quip that Gray out-Nietzsches Nietzsche. For Gray, Nietzsche was a pansy who didn’t go far enough in proclaiming God as dead, since he substituted his own myth of the superman for God. (He literally writes that in this book. Well, except the pansy bit).

And yes, Gray’s oeuvre might be summed up as humans suck – a philosophy of posthumanism or anti-humanism.

Hence the subtitle of this book, which encapsulates the book’s thesis that humans have yet to reconcile themselves with evolutionary theory that they’re just another type of dumb animal.

What are we but fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl or apes that couldn’t climb and had to think? That’s my quip but it might as well be Gray’s. Indeed for Gray, that thinking part is overblown – “Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life.”

One might well wonder what was the point of writing the book then, if all this thinking business is just an illusion – but I do love me some grumpy philosophical pessimism, which this book has in spades.

“Gray attacks humanism as a worldview in conflict with the view of humanity as part of the evolution of life on the planet…a secular version of the Christian view of humans as differentiated from the natural world. Gray blames humanism, and its central view of humanity, for much of the destruction of the natural world, and sees technology as just a tool by which humans will continue destroying the planet and each other”.

My favorite philosophy is aphoristic, which this book also has in spades, meandering between pithy quips and “short essays on different topics”.

Straw Dogs was praised by none other than English author J.G. Ballard, himself of a somewhat pessimistic philosophical bent and “who wrote that the book “challenges most of our assumptions about what it means to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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