Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750
Noel Malcolm
Apr 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Michael Page
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16 hr 46 min
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About this audiobook
From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the eighteenth century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. Typically they reacted to it with fear and distrust; and such feelings were reinforced by the deep hostility of Western Christendom towards Islam. Yet there was also much curiosity about the social and political system on which the huge power of the sultans was based. In the sixteenth century, especially, when Ottoman territorial expansion was rapid and Ottoman institutions seemed particularly robust, there was even open admiration. In this path-breaking book Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon-and Islam as a political religion. Examining the works of many famous thinkers (including Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu) and many less well-known ones, Useful Enemies illuminates the long-term development of Western ideas about the Ottomans, and about Islam. Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war.
About the author
Noel Malcolm has published books and articles on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with a particular emphasis on Thomas Hobbes), and the history and culture of the Balkans, especially during the Ottoman period. He was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.
Michael Page has been recording audiobooks since the mid-1980s and now has nearly 500 titles to his credit. He has won two Audie Awards and several AudioFile Earphones Awards. A PhD and a professional actor, Michael is also a retired professor of theater.
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