Why did the Ottomans miss out on the Renaissance and Enlightenment if it all was happening right next door?
Muslim ban against depicting the prophet derphamed in art.
Bled over into a complete shunning of art in general in favor of calligraphy.
>>1148322
They had their own cultural renaissance in the 16th and 17th century which produced a lot of Ottoman poetry and architecture, and periodically hosted European artists at court, but the Ottoman aristocracy and middle class did not know Latin and there wasn't much of a market for Latin texts. The diplomatic gap between the Porte and the rest of Western Europe kept both at arms length of one another, limiting mutual cultural exchange to ambassadors at court.
certainly bigot acts like the ban on printing and general rise of Islamic fundamentalism after Selim helped but IMO main cause was differences in demographics compared to Europe.
My English is shit, read Halil İnalcık for more.
Ottomans suppressed the printing press because they protected scribal guilds, and as a result got the industrial revolution late and lagged behind European societies.
The feeling I got from this book is that the empire was just too loosely governed and based on tribute to develop the proto-capitalist economies that fueled European growth.
http://www.amazon.com/History-Arab-Peoples-Albert-Hourani/dp/1441787933
That is, the Ottomans were backwards for many of the same reasons that Eastern Europe was backwards. No disruptive growth and innovation due to an extraction based economy.
The Russian Empire did better in the long run due to borrowing Western administrative models, and reformers such as Peter the Great who centralized state power.
Also, the Ottomans were sophisticated enough to hold their own on the defensive in WWI. Their problems were largely due to internal management.
