| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Gabriel Piterberg. An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play. (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, number 50.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 256. $60.00.
For far too long the Ottomans of the seventeenth century have been viewed as a society in "decline." Seen as increasingly unable to "compete" with a rapidly developing Western Europe, the post-sixteenth century Ottoman Empire is still portrayed as "the sick man of Europe," even in new editions of European and world history texts. Despite the fact that virtually no historians of the Ottoman Empire view "decline" as an adequate descriptor for the empire's last 300 years and the shelves of monographs on Ottoman economics, society, and politics that portray the Ottomans in very different ways, Ottomanists have had, apparently, little impact on the rest of the historical profession. In this book, Gabriel Piterberg argues that Ottomanists, in turn, have not been influenced nearly enough by the new historical approaches and theories.	1
Piterberg has written a book that deserves a wide readership—among other Ottomanists but also and especially among historians of Europe and Asia. Piterberg, too, dislikes the term "decline" and offers a much richer and more varied set of viewpoints from which to understand post-Suleyman Ottoman society. He takes a six-year period (1617–1623) through which to examine and dissect Ottoman historiography and the changing nature of the Ottoman world. During that short period, several connected events at the Ottoman center came to be known collectively as the Haile-i Osmaniye, or as Piterberg translates, the Ottoman tragedy. The author uses these events—the brief rule of the mentally disturbed Mustafa I, his removal and replacement by his young nephew Osman II, Osman's assassination and Mustafa's re-enthronement, and Mustafa's abdication—as a "laboratory" to examine the development of Ottoman history writing and the changing nature of the Ottoman state.	. . .

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