To trace the boundaries of the vanished Ottoman Empire, take a map of Europe and the Middle East and start shading in every country that, for the last 15 years, has been in the news thanks to civil war, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. From Bosnia in the northwest to Baghdad in the southeast, the world’s most dangerous zone is made up of Ottoman successor states, carved out of the corpse of the empire by rebellious ethnic groups (Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania) or high-handed European imperialists (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq). Just as the collapse of the U.S.S.R. made it possible to feel nostalgic for the Cold War as a time of relative stability, so the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire – a consummation devoutly wished by Europe for most of the 19th century, and finally achieved after World War I – can make even that corrupt, despotic regime look good.

We may have forgotten about the Ottoman Empire, in other words, but it hasn’t forgotten about us. That is why “Osman’s Dream” (Basic Books, 660 pages, $35), a comprehensive new history by British scholar Caroline Finkel, is so timely, and why its limitations are finally so disappointing. For what Ms. Finkel has written is less a history of the Ottoman Empire than a chronicle, a numbingly comprehensive catalog of every sultan and grand vezier, every military campaign and treaty, every conquest and rebellion. Long before reaching Ms. Finkel’s 75 pages of notes and bibliography, her mastery of the historical literature is obvious: The sheer amount of information packed between these two covers makes it a landmark achievement.

The problem for a general reader (and Ms. Finkel claims to be writing for “general readers who know little of the Ottomans”) is that most of the information in “Osman’s Dream” is of no real use. Of course, it is always valuable to ascertain the events of history, to set down what happened when. But the common reader, who has no professional stake in the subject, does not read history to memorize a succession of dates and names. He reads pragmatically, looking for knowledge about the past that will help him understand the present and anticipate the future.

Good popular history, without reducing the past to a mere fable, uses it to answer questions: How did people live, think, and act in conditions different from our own? What potentialities of human nature did they achieve, and which did they allow to atrophy? How did their doing and suffering create the world that we have inherited? Especially when it comes to a subject like the Ottoman Empire, which to most Western readers is a blank only partially filled in by myth and literature, facts become usable only as parts of a larger story.

It is this larger story that Ms. Finkel fails to supply. “Osman’s Dream” charts the history of the Ottomans primarily in military and diplomatic terms; culture, economics, politics, daily life, the personalities of great men and women, appear seldom if at all. We learn that one sultan succeeds another, but not what a sultan actually did on an average day. We see that, for an Ottoman courtier, it was practically guaranteed that a splendid career would end in death – one grand vezier after another falls from grace and gets strangled or beheaded – but never understand why, despite this fatality, ambitious men clamored for the job. We are told that the empire conquers one city after another – Constantinople, Cairo, Baghdad, Belgrade, very nearly Vienna – but not how its armies were organized, or how those cities looked. For all the information packed into this long book, it is surprising how many questions “Osman’s Dream” leaves unanswered.

Start with the most fundamental: Why did the Ottoman Empire rise so spectacularly, then stagnate so long, and finally fall to pieces at a touch, like an old tapestry? The empire that would eventually spread over three continents started out, in the 14th century, as just one of many small Turkish emirates, fighting for pre-eminence in Anatolia. The Ottoman or Osmanli Turks, named for the dynasty’s founder, Osman, had only one obvious advantage: Their lands bordered the crumbling hulk of the Byzantine Empire, a vacuum into which the energetic Turks quickly expanded.

By 1389, with the famous battle of Kosovo Polje (whose memory still inflames Serb-Muslim tensions in the Balkans today), the Ottomans had established their dominion over the Balkans. In 1453, they finally took Constantinople, the old capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the sultans started to style themselves as world monarchs, the heirs of the caesars. In 1517, they conquered the Mamluk Empire, gaining control of Egypt, Syria, and – most important for this orthodox Sunni state – the holy places of Mecca and Medina, allowing the sultans to claim supreme authority in the Muslim world. In 1526, at the Battle of Mohacs, they conquered most of Hungary, and a few years later approached the gates of Vienna. No wonder that Sultan Suleyman I, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, was known in the West as “the Magnificent”: Under his reign, the Ottoman golden age, the empire seemed unstoppable.

What never really becomes clear in “Osman’s Dream” is why the Turks were able to expand so rapidly. Was it the weakness of surrounding states, the divisions among Christian Europe, Ottoman military tactics and technology? The question is all the more acute since, on Ms. Finkel’s showing, the governance of the empire was always unstable at best. Rebellions were almost the Ottoman version of elections: A discontented general or provincial governor would take up arms, not to overthrow the dynasty, but to get some attention for his grievances, or just to win promotion. Large areas of the empire seem to have been only nominally under Istanbul’s control.

Throughout its centuries of power, the empire never established a reasonable system of succession: The death of each sultan opened a freefor-all among his sons, often resulting in civil war. The notorious practice whereby each sultan murdered his brothers, which did so much to create the Western image of Turkish barbarism, was the closest the empire came to a rule of succession. Remarkably, despite this thinning of the ranks, the Ottoman dynasty reigned without a break from Osman to Mehmed VI, the last emperor, who abdicated in 1922 with the creation of modern Turkey.

Likewise, “Osman’s Dream” leaves the reader wondering about the rapid decline in Ottoman fortunes. Why was it that, starting in the late 17th century, the empire fell rapidly behind its rivals, especially the rising power of Russia? By the 19th century, European powers were breaking off pieces of the empire more or less at will; this was the period when Turkey became known as “the sick man of Europe.” But efforts at modernizing and reform were constantly thwarted by entrenched interests, in a vicious circle that seems reminiscent of the late Roman Empire. Here, again, one longs for more insight into the Ottomans’ cultural, political, and economic problems than Ms. Finkel provides – especially since the Ottoman failure has done so much to shape the world we live in today. When the Ottoman Empire was founded, America hadn’t yet been discovered; today, it is the United States that mainly has to deal with the consequences of its collapse. Given the vital importance of the Ottoman story for our world, “Osman’s Dream” has to be counted as a missed opportunity.

akirsch@nysun.com