Upending Western concepts of sexuality, the Renaissance, orientalism and genocide, Marc Baer presents the story of the six-hundred-year dynasty that connected East to West as never before.

The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multi-ethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans.

Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynasty’s demise after the First World War.

Join historian Marc Baer for a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power that will put much of the modern world, from the rise of Erdogan to the war in Yemen, into context.