The Ottoman Empire has long been portrayed as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was quite different: the Ottomans' multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious dominion extended deep into Europe's heart. The Ottoman rulers considered themselves as the new Romans because to their breadth and versatility. Marc David Baer recounts the Ottomans' remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, tracing their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage; how they used 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 World War I. This account challenges our understanding of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, and the Reformation as Western notions.Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide. Radically retelling their remarkable story, The Ottomans is a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power, and the first to truly capture its cross-fertilisation between East and West.