Wallenburg wrote:Vistulange wrote:Overall, the entire anachronism and the fitting of 19th and 20th century conceptualisations into "holes" which are from the 14th and 15th centuries. Not the history, i.e. the events that happened in his account, but the framing and the contextualisation of the history at hand which belies his overall approach to the "debate".
Ethnic cleansing and slavery are hardly modern concepts. They've been pretty well understood for millennia. It's just become widely considered immoral in the last century.
Absolutely, that's not what I am arguing. The whole idea of conflating "Turk" with "Muslim", or even "Turk" with the "Ottoman Empire" is very, very debatable, however. The Ottoman Empire itself underwent such immense identity shifts that it's impossible to consider the Ottoman state in 1453 the same as the one that ended in 1923. What I have a problem is the notion of considering certain imagined communities, i.e. nations and in my humble opinion, religions, to be immutable and non-temporal, and applying a post-18th century outlook to events that precede the maturation of certain ideas.
Otherwise, historical facts are not my beef with his approach, and neither is it my field of expertise to talk to great lengths about.