Talk:Byzantine–Ottoman wars/GA1

GA Reassessment

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Plenty of tags and the last three sections all question the GA status. Tags obviously need to be dealt with and I am thinking it would be easier to delist this and allow editors to work on it. @Chamboz, VenusFeuerFalle, and Gog the Mild: AIRcorn (talk) 03:21, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Not really my era I'm afraid. Lots of uncited text, but a skim doesn't reveal any which is obvious nonsense or even clearly incorrect. I would have though that it could be resolved fairly rapidly by someone with access to the sources - pinging Constantine; what do you think? Gog the Mild (talk) 22:32, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Hmmm, it is an OK article, but rather superficial and teleological. The entire series of conflicts is presented as almost a progression of inexorable (and inevitable) Ottoman conquest. Several sections are rather problematic; the "Causes of the Byzantine defeat" in particular is essay-like, schematic and sorely needs good sources. The article also tends to play to the "limitless Ottoman hordes" trope to a worrying degree, as best seen in the depiction of the fall of Constantinople: "The city's fall was not a result of the Ottoman artillery nor their naval supremacy....the defenders were overcome by sheer attrition as well as the skill of the Ottoman Janissaries". Yeah, well, if not for the cannon and the naval supremacy, Constantinople's walls were perfectly capable of holding out against numerically superior armies, as had been demonstrated many times before. This is a variant of the "limitless Russian hordes" argument from WWII, and just as outdated.

There's quite a lot of editorialisms in the article, but that can be fixed; what can't be fixed that easily is the subconscious editorial POV, which IMO takes sides in favour of Byzantium: the Ottomans are almost faceless, a monolithic mass of invaders; even where their leaders are mentioned by name, they simply conquer; there is no mention of the fact that many of these leaders acted on their own, of internal dissensions, or of the difficulties they faced by having to shift armies from Anatolia to Europe and vice-versa, especially after they lost Gallipoli in 1366. Indeed, the Savoyard crusade is entirely missing, as is any mention of the return of Gallipoli in 1376, which was arguably one of the biggest "what if" moments for the history of the Balkans.

Generally, the article lacks a lot of context: at least a discussion of the context of the Ottoman beylik's establishment, i.e., pre-Ottoman Turkish Anatolia and the Byzanine-Turkish relations there; at least some mention of gunpowder empires and the ghazi thesis and its refutation; the political fragmentation of the Balkans, and the centrifugal tendencies in the Byzantine Empire; the siphoning off of the wealth generated from trade to the Italian maritime republics, which left Byzantium permanently cash-strapped; the divide between hawks and doves in the Byzantine establishment as to how to best deal with the Ottomans; the Ottoman Interregnum gets barely a mention; etc. etc. In short, it faces the common problem of having been written with the narrative in mind (and that imperfectly as well), without any real examination of the historical forces at work and the framework in which the main players operated.

Even if the missing references are put in, and the prose tightened, I still would consider the article in its present state to be a C-class rather than GA. Constantine ✍ 09:17, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Constantine; especially for actually reading the article. So it seem that it should be downgraded, and can I recommend that Constantine's comments be copied to the talk page, as a guide for future editors? Gog the Mild (talk) 10:46, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

@Aircorn and Gog the Mild: I've gone ahead and delisted the article. Cheers, Constantine ✍ 22:11, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Constantine. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:27, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Yep thanks. AIRcorn (talk) 23:06, 18 January 2020 (UTC)