"Ottoman Ghosts
Daniel Lazare
If, in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, you had asked any practitioner of realpolitik which great power represented the wave of the future, the answer would have been easy: the Ottomans. They were everything the Europeans were not. Instead of an endless tangle of feudalities and sub-feudalities, their empire was a unified war machine run by an all-powerful sultan, with a grand vizier in charge of day-to-day operations much like a modern prime minister. Instead of headstrong barons and earls perennially at war with one another, the Ottoman army was a centralized, disciplined body equipped with the latest cannons and musketry. Instead of a complicated array of tolls, manorial dues and forced-labor obligations, the Ottoman tax system was simple, efficient and considerably less oppressive from the viewpoint of the peasantry. Even in the area of religion, the Ottomans seemed to have forged ahead. Where European Christendom was burdened by an overweening church and interminable debates over whether Jesus was divine, human or both, the Ottomans offered a stripped-down monotheism that was tolerant and egalitarian. Jews and Christians who wished to partake of Ottoman-style Islam with its strong Sufi influences could do so. Those who did not were required to pay a modest poll tax but were otherwise left alone."
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