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Suleiman the Magnificent - Lies - Extra History (Patreon)

Published:
2016-04-23 17:07:00
Imported:
2022-01

Content

Why was Suleiman called "the Magnificent"? And why did he make choices that, in the end, doomed his empire?

Files

Suleiman the Magnificent - Lies - Extra History

Buy the limited edition Suleiman & Justinian shirt! http://bit.ly/23AtasO Suleiman lost faith in those who surrounded him, fearing that they schemed to replace him. Why do we so rarely see such destructive suspicion in our governments today? We also need to talk about what made the West dub Suleiman "Magnificent," and the flourishing of arts and education which took place under his reign.

Comments

Anonymous

Are you guys starting the new series next week or the week after?

Anonymous

Well, I suppose I can’t be surprised that the Lies video didn’t address the major problems with the series’ presentation of Süleyman. I assume there's no chance for a "Lies of the Lies" video? Though I do have to say, I was especially disappointed to see this quote: “And why did he make choices that, in the end, doomed his empire?” Apparently Süleyman’s decision to kill Mustafa (or whatever else you’re referring to) doomed the Ottoman Empire to fall… almost four hundred years later. What nonsense! I could analyze the problems with this video too, but I doubt anything would come of it. I just hope that you’ll keep in mind my advice about choosing sources, and that your future videos will be based on the work of actual historians. For those interested in analysis of the series, see the comments in: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/suleiman-vi-of-5151962">https://www.patreon.com/posts/suleiman-vi-of-5151962</a>

ExtraCredits
>>1692501

Well, I can't honestly say I expected you to be happy, but even if we clearly have some standing points of disagreement (wholly apart from some issues I've acknowledged as mistakes), I do take your feedback to heart. I would certainly encourage anyone interested to read Chamboozer's very detailed analysis (which includes some source suggestions for those interested in further reading!) which was linked.

Anonymous

I like these videos but the problems pointed out by Chamboozer is too great, it will taint whatever else you create in the future because in all likelihood there wont be an expert commenting on those future topics and so I wont know how bad the mistakes where. Meaby they wouldnt have mattered or meaby they would, I wont know. Removing you guys from Patreon, hope you tighten up the research before episodes. For example you could send the manuscript to a PhD student in whatever field the video is on before to catch the worst stuff. It probably wont cost all that much.

Anonymous
>>1693317

Indeed, it’s a great idea! Most historians consider themselves educators after all. Some would jump at the chance to contribute to a show with such a wide audience. Extra Credits should be emailing professors asking for help finding reliable sources on which to base the show. Perhaps they could even find professors willing to contribute to the “Lies” videos, helping them to avoid mistakes and further educate their audience from a historian's perspective.

Anonymous

Something did feel off about this series in particular. I know you guys are doing your best. I have to say I agree with Chamboozer and Thor, publishing your sources would be a good thing and having those sources checked by professional historians is an excellet idea. You have a large fan base of educators, reach out to them and use them. In your conversation with Chamboozer you mention not wanting to publish your sources because you don't want people thinking of you as reputable essentially, but that's ridiculous. Many people already think of you as a reputable source regardless of your wishes. I've also seen many educators reach out to you guys in the comments asking if they can use your videos in their classrooms. You guys have encouraged and reinforced that behavior in many ways. You can't encourage teachers to use your videos but not publish your sources. As they say, you can't have it both ways. My education stopped at high school and I love having these little history lessons to look forward to every week. I do not want them EH to stop. I don't pretend to know better than anyone but it seems that the suggestions made by Chamboozer and Thor are not unreasonable. I also noticed that during Suleyman you guys were doing two different sponsored series. Maybe the division of labor of essentially producing two shows simultaneously is too much? I wouldn't mind if you delayed the some Patreon voted topics for a sponsored series if it means covering each topic thoroughly. You have to keep the lights on after all and the sponsored series are a big help in that regard. I think that publishing your sources will need to happen and not being willing to do so or even discuss your sources makes it look like you're trying to cover something up and ends up distilling bad faith. I don't want to see the series discredited. I know you guys lead busy lives. We all do but that extra effort of publishing your sources and checking with real historians just for suggestions of the best sources will go a long way not only to adding to your credibility but also in delivering a stronger cohesive and reliable view of the subject you're covering. Having been a fan of your group for awhile now I can say this fairly confidently: you guys want to do good work and handle each topic with care and respect it deserves. You guys educate and in doing so make the world a better place. I've enjoyed your work even in topics I was uninterested in at first. Do you know how tired my friends are of me boring them with stories of Justinian? I've picked up several books on the subject, and the Punic Wars, and Sengoku Jedai, and Admiral Yi... Half Priced Books loves taking my money like that... Tangential Learning is strong but it is a roulette. Only a few people will chose to research past the videos. I love learning, I love you guys and your work. Please consider the views expressed by Chamboozer. Different note: I love the They Might Be Giants image reference when speaking of Istanbul during Lies. I was sincerely hoping for something like that!

Anonymous
>>1695107

As Soraya has said elsewhere, there are some disagreements they have with his readings of the history. I would prefer EH tell their reading of the story with some input from historians, then dictate the reading of whichever historian they find. So long as they're factual. Aside from the dream sequence, and some weighted opinions on a couple of matters, I can't think of anything factually incorrect with this telling. I don't think I would like this series if Chamboozer had been involved. Even when EH justified every war Suleiman fought, with exception to the campaign where he died, he considered EH to be depicting Suleiman as a blood-crazed warlord obsessed with conquering Europe. I did not get that impression from this series' depiction at all.

Anonymous

Great job on the series, EH/EC! This was a really interesting style to experiment with. Some people have had complaints about it, but I don't think it was a bad idea. It's important to experiment with and practice with your craft. I think you did this the best in the series about Franz Ferdinand, a very touching and moving series. You may have decided to scale back on this formula, but I hope you won't abandon it entirely. The series on Ferdinand was the height of EH for me.

ExtraCredits

[Soraya's Note: Patreon's formatting is still broken, which means that I can't separate this into paragraphs. I've tried to simulate them by adding a whole bunch of hyphens, but it won't be pretty. Sorry for that. But anyway, I asked James to please comment on this since I did not feel comfortable speaking for him. With no further ado, here's James:] Hi everyone. I try not to step in here because I don’t want to influence the discussion, but the policy on sources is my policy and it’s unfair to Soraya to make her defend it. At the bottom of this I’ll list all the sources for the Ottoman series, but in general I will not be posting sources because I want Extra History to be a starting point for people, not an ending point. ------------- I don’t want people simply reading the sources we’ve read and I certainly don’t want them copying and pasting our list and writing a paper having just looked at our videos. More than that though, I’ve learnt from making games that if we don’t just provide something easily packaged people will go out and search for it. Think of all the times you might have looked up something for Dark Souls or Pokemon. And that’s what we want. We want Extra History to be a jumping off point, not an end. ------------ We are not historians, we have far too much respect for historians to ever claim that title, we are entertainers and, I’d like to flatter myself and say that perhaps we can claim to be educators. Our work here is synthesis, bringing together may independent viewpoints into an interpretation. ------------- And one of the key points of Extra History is that interpretations aren’t “wrong”. You may disagree with them. We had people who said we were too hard on the crusaders during The First Crusade and we had people that said we were too soft on the Soviet Union in Kursk. You may feel that Suleiman’s execution of his son didn’t lead to the decline of the empire or that Marcus Aurelius choosing his son Commodus over some far more qualified individual didn’t initiate the decline of that empire. I do, but it’s ok we disagree, interpretations of history are fought over and changed all the time. In fact understanding history, rather than simply knowing names and dates is what Extra History is all about. And finding an understanding that helps you make sense of decisions we have to make here and now, today, is the most important part. It’s why we have Lies. So everyone knows we aren’t “right” but that, like all history, we offer a perspective. -------------------- Which leads us to the other reason we don’t show sources. I’d rather have a vigorous debate over whether Suleiman actually lead to the decline of his empire than the thing that I think academia too often gets sidetracked by: quibbling over sources. Listing whole pages of source and reference material back and forth at one another is something I too often see in academia and on the internet, and I’d rather move to a more substantive form of discussion where we reflect on and interpret the events to help us make better sense of our world. -------------------- And many of you may be studying some of the topics we cover; I will 100% cede that you probably know more about them than I do, but I’d ask you not to use that as a basis to “speak from authority” and dismiss viewpoints which are not your own or your institutions as I think it hampers the dialog that, to me, is the most important part of discussing history. Which brings us back to sources. Because this is at the root of how we get into cycles of just citing sources at one another as happens on so many internet message boards: we have two groups of people with different viewpoints and, rather than discussing the merits of those viewpoints, they begin to search for sources that agree with them to “prove” they’re right. ----------------- So, at the outset of Extra History, I made a personal decision that the educational merits of the show would be higher if it drove people to find their own sources and to discuss differing perspectives than to list our sources. I continue to believe that to be correct. That said, because there was such interest, this one time, I will hand out our source list: ---------------- (This is incomplete because I did wrote this series in November/December and have had to return most of the books, but here we go ; ) --------------- Ibrahim Pasha by Hester Jankins ------------------- Osman's Dream by Caroline Finkel ------------ Suleiman the Magnificent: Sultan of the East by Harold Lamb ------------- Ottoman Centuries by Lord Kinross --------------- Suleiman the Magnificent by Andre Clot -------------- For Suleiman’s poetry, I’d love to know if anyone found a good anthology in English. I ended up just using a ton of websites to cross reference because I couldn’t find one I liked.

ExtraCredits
>>1695724

Don't worry, we're not going to stop experimenting with styles on Extra History! I'm really glad you enjoyed this particular experiment, and for all that it was divisive, I'm actually really glad we tried it. I did see a lot of people commenting who loved the series more than any other, and that's to be expected I think since no one style works for every person, and something that works really poorly for one person is going to be perfect for another. While I don't know that we would come back to something with this amount of narrative oversight, the framing concept worked really well, and the general pathos is something we've always done to one degree or another.

Anonymous
>>1698113

“And one of the key points of Extra History is that interpretations aren’t “wrong”. You may disagree with them… You may feel that Suleiman’s execution of his son didn’t lead to the decline of the empire… I do, but it’s ok we disagree, interpretations of history are fought over and changed all the time.” I’m sorry James, but this just isn’t a valid position to hold. There is such a thing as an academic consensus. “Interpretations of history are fought over” is only a valid thing to say if the interpretation you’re discussing is actually being fought over. Decline isn’t. There is consensus among the modern academic community that Decline was a myth. You can disagree with that interpretation, but that means you’re teaching pseudohistory. When presented by evidence that professional historians (i.e. the people I cited on the other page) disagree with your position, you shouldn’t be saying “well it’s my interpretation and I’m justified in having it.” That’s no different from people who reject mainstream science because they want to protect their own worldview. You are simply not as educated in this topic as the professional historians and you can’t claim to contest their theories. Now maybe you don’t believe me (or the historians I quoted beneath the other video) when we say that Decline is considered a myth by modern-day academia. If that’s the case, I can provide you with however many citations you need. Now if you really think Decline is debatable, I challenge you to provide a single citation from any modern historian (which for this purpose I will classify as anything published since the year 2000) who says that he believes in the Decline Thesis. We can say that an interpretation of history is wrong when the overwhelming majority of modern academics believe that that interpretation is wrong. In this case they not only believe that it is wrong, they believe that it is poisonous. I’m merely grateful that you didn’t give Decline a very big role in your series. I can understand you believing in it before, because you relied on bad sources. But I can’t understand this attitude that you’ve expressed in the above quote. On that topic, Lord Kinross’ book “The Ottoman Centuries” is another which stands out as even more outdated and inappropriate. Just like Clot, Kinross was not a professional historian. Go pick up his book right now and look at how small his bibliography is. Hester Jenkins – do you realize when that book was written? 1911! Harold Lamb’s book is from 1951! It’s 65 years old! And you thought they weren’t going to mislead you? Of the ones you listed, only Caroline Finkel’s book qualifies as reliable: it’s both recent and written by an academic. Indeed it’s a very good book. But that gives us one good book out of five you’ve listed. “I’d rather have a vigorous debate over whether Suleiman actually lead to the decline of his empire than the thing that I think academia too often gets sidetracked by: quibbling over sources.” Are you seriously saying that you’d rather have an uninformed discussion than defer to the experts? That’s what it sounds like. To be honest, from this statement it seems like you might simply not understand or respect actual historians. When people want to discuss a scientific topic like black holes, should they just debate about how they might work among themselves or find a source which explains the topic? It’s the same with history. The people who spend their lives studying it are the ones who must be deferred to when discussing it. “And many of you may be studying some of the topics we cover; I will 100% cede that you probably know more about them than I do, but I’d ask you not to use that as a basis to “speak from authority” and dismiss viewpoints which are not your own or your institutions as I think it hampers the dialog that, to me, is the most important part of discussing history.” I'm not speaking from authority. I’ve offered to provide my sources from the very beginning. And saying that Decline is a myth is not my view, and it is not my institution’s view. It is the view held by all of Western academia. Thirty years ago you could have said that Decline was in debate. It is no longer so. I just don’t understand how you can claim to know this history, or to have valid interpretations of it, when you think ancient books and those written by pop-historians are a good place from which to learn. And James, I'm really truly sorry to have to make this comparison, but this belief that "all interpretations are valid" makes you to actual historians what Flat-Earthers and Climate Change deniers are to actual scientists. An interpretation can only be valid if it is backed up by reliable historical sources.

Anonymous

James &amp; Soraya, Thank you for explaining your stance in regards to sources. I had not thought of the possibility of someone copying and pasting sources for reports and the like. I was trying to be fair to both sides. I really enjoy EH and you guys have my support. I've learned a lot and studied a lot of things I wouldn't have without the spark of interest you guys have gave me. I'm sure many others feel the same. At the end of the day I think everyone here wants to support you guys. I mean why else would we be here, right? I did not know that you guys have historians and such reach out to you to help select source material. I'm very glad to hear that. I'm glad that you guys plan on doing some touch ups on Suleiman. I feel there's a lot more there to be sussed out. You guys do a great job of making history approachable and engaging. I will continue to support you. Thanks responding to my concerns. ------------------------------------------- Also to reiterate I love the They Might Be Giants visual nod in the Lies! An amusing touch that I truly enjoyed.

ExtraCredits
>>1698589

Wait, did Carrie sneak another They Might Be Giants nod into Lies that I somehow missed? She's a sly one! But yes, we do get most of our source requests from students who want to write a paper. I'm usually happy to provide them with one or two sources as a jumping off point, but a good dive through a bibliography or even plugging into Google will get them a lot further even than reading our sources and thinking that's enough. And if you yourself have gone spelunking through some research to find out more about an EH topic, then that's fantastic! That's one of my two favorite things about working on this show - tied with the moment when someone says "I'm not normally into history, but I loved this!"

Anonymous

It's ok. I forgive you for not using me as a unit of measurement.

Anonymous

I wanted to follow up with a comment I posted on the last video. I said that the last several minutes of episode 6 was overdone, and that I hoped that would be addressed in Lies, which it was, literally first thing, so good on you. That said, what we have in the first 10 minutes of Lies feels very much like a sort of reinterpretation of his history to not appear Islamophobic. Frankly, there was so much dark about what Süleyman did that, if we approached it with the same unforgiving vigor in the name of historical truth that was given to the First Crusade video, it would be attacked. Well, if you choose to do a series on these people, they should shown for what they were. Granted, the arts and architecture that Süleyman's patronage brought was great, but the atrocities and complete and utter barbarism towards those closest to him were glossed over. In their place, it seemed to me, was an artsy expression which attempted to tie the choices of the Ottomans and other Islamic caliphates with "our" problems. The constant comparisons to Justinian seemed to show that they were the same, when they very clearly were not, as stated in the example presented by you of systemic filicide. More over, it was to tie his reign to the line of evolution of Western ideology, when our evolution broke from one another long before. That was literally the goal, as stated, in the first 9 minutes of Lies. We are all the same, we would have all done the same things, but why don't we? While I totally agree that battles like in Hungry and Rhodes were totally justified from an empirical standpoint, and I have no problems with them; the viewpoints, ideology, and rationale for why so much of the actual decisions he made, the laws of The Lawgiver, were rooted in a codified system of political and religious governance that, to our viewpoint today, was barbaric even compared to much of the Europe at the time. As I said, I have been a fan of your show for a long time and will continue to be a patron of it. I'm just disappointed that it felt like the team went to such efforts to tell the story artfully, rather than brave the arrows of being called an Islamiphobe by stating truthfully where Islamic rulers acted in accordance with Islam and it was terrifying, you pulled your punches in a way that wasn't seen with the Japanese Sengoku Jidai or Admiral Yi, the Zulu, or the First Crusade. I'm just saying, you guys have earned my respect in the past, but if you aren't interested in displaying the unwholesome acts of Islamic history, for fear of reprisal, please don't offer it as a segment of a show I really like.