Useful Enemies

Based the author's Carlyle lectures, Useful Enemies explores the theme of Western ideas of Islam and the Ottoman empire across three centuries.

Noel Malcolm read History and English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He began his career as Fellow of Gonville and Caius Colleege, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently, Foreign Editor of the Spectator, and then chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph. He gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford in 2001 and, since 2002, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius. He has published books and articles on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with a particular emphasis on Hobbes), and the history and culture of the Balkans, especially during the Ottoman period. He was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.

Preface
1: The Fall of Constantinople, the Turks, and the Humanists
2: Views of Islam: standard assumptions
3: Habsburgs and Ottomans: 'Europe' and the conflict of empires
4: Protestantism, Calvinoturcism, and Turcopapalism
5: Alliances with the infidel
6: The new paradigm
7: Machiavelli and Reason of State
8: Campanella
9: Despotism I: the origins
10: Analyses of Ottoman strength and weakness
11: Justifications of warfare, and plans for war and peace
12: Islam as a political religion
13: Critical and radical uses of Islam I: Vanini to Toland
14: Critical and radical uses of Islam II: Bayle to Voltaire
15: Despotism II: seventeenth-century theories
16: Despotism III: Montesquieu
Conclusion
List of manuscripts
Bibliography
Index