Treasure on the trail

The thousand years chosen by the RA is a nice round figure, the 600 AD a trifle arbitrary, the 1600 reflecting the geographicaland cultural zenith of the Ottoman Empire, but I am inclined to argue that the aesthetic journey continued into the early 20th century, in the long, slow decline of Ottoman taste and its surrender to sometimes ghastly European influences.

In the sense of tribal migration the journey ended with the expiry of the Byzantine Empire and 1453 is a convenient and symbolic date for it. By then the Turk no longer looked Mongolian; in crossing central Asia he had absorbed and been absorbed by the inhabitants of what are now northwest India and Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Iraq, the riparian peoples of the Caspian and by Armenia; he had assimilated alien languages and customs; religious confusions he had resolved by adopting Islam, a faith new just as he began his westward trek and a faith that had advanced east to meet him.

He had learned to settle in cities, to build mosques and their associated buildings, to decorate them with ornate brick and plaster, to embellish them with glistening tiles. He had become a poet and a teller of great tales. In short, he had become civilised and these interactions and incorporations were the cultural baggage that he carried to the Christian and antique city of Constantinople to make it, as Istanbul, the greatest city of its day in Europe.

What was a Turk by the time the Turks settled for ever in Istanbul? He had no sense of nationhood or nationality. He was so racially mixed that his forefathers from the empire of the Uighurs on the western edge of China would not, eight centuries on, have recognised their kinship.

They might, but only just, have understood his language which, in 1453, after eight centuries of being a transient population over a crow's flight of 4,000 miles, was as different as ours is from the English of King John; the language of the Ottoman court, Osmanlija, a hybrid of old Turkish intermixed with classical Arabic, the language of law and religion, and the Persian that endowed Ottoman culture with a heritage of poetry, history and romance, would have been beyond their comprehension.

The court was the driving force in cultural matters. The Ottoman emperor might drop unfaithful houris of the harem into the Bosporus in a sack of scratching cats and have all his brothers ceremonially strangled by deaf mutes with bowstrings, but he was at least as likely to be something of a poet, a bibliophile with his own scriptorium, a connoisseur of carpets, ceremonial clothes, embroidery, arms, armour, porcelain and even of paintings by Italian artists.

Suleyman the Magnificent, Sultan from 1520 until 1566, far outdid the connoisseurship of his near contemporaries Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. He spoke demotic Greek as well as Osmanlija, wrote Persian poetry under the pseudonym Muhibbi and was a skilled calligrapher; his library was much enhanced when, on the capture of Buda in 1526, he took the great Renaissance library of Matthew Corvinus - the act of a civilised and cultured man compared with the decapitation of a thousand Hungarian nobles and the display of their heads on poles outside his tent.

His elegant manuscripts of contemporary events, past history, romance and poetry were bound in leather, sharkskin, tortoiseshell, precious stones, jade plaques and gold embroidery; these bindings crossed the bounds of craftsmanship and required the skills of the goldsmith (Suleyman himself commanded these skills, for it was the custom of Sultans to learn a practical craft) and the jeweller as well as the worker with leather, tool and stamp.

All these, Suleyman had in the palace workshops - together with armourers and damasceners, weavers of silk, brocades and carpets, makers of lutes, of marquetry, mirrors, lamps and mounts for exquisitely simple Chinese porcelain - all in permanent employment, but few were Turks. They were from the territories over which the Turkish hordes had swept, pooling the resources of Iran and Egypt, Greece and Hungary, Ukraine, Armenia and all the Balkan states, to develop in every artefacture an Ottoman court style that could be repeated in every regional governor's court within the Empire.

Rather than the hard physical business of the trek itself, it is the aesthetic journey from the steppes of Mongolia to Europe that this exhibition illustrates, and the most important and telling aspect of it, architecture, has no real presence in the Royal Academy - nor could it have, for not even videos can play substitute for the real thing.

Two matters should be borne in mind: the first is that the transition from brick to stone as a building material could not have been effected without the employment of the Armenian masons for whom stone had been a natural and customary material at least since ancient Roman times (I can think of a dozen Armenian churches and monasteries built before the arrival of the Turks that would serve convincingly as mosques and medreses and one, Barhal, that does); the second matter is Selim Sinan, the most prolific and influential of all architects in the 16th century, Michelangelo's younger near contemporary, a man whose extraordinary aesthetic and engineering genius dominated the buildings of the Ottoman Empire in its prime.

Without his architecture the exhibition is a feast of hors d'oeuvres, of wonderful and precious things, most of them of types familiar to travellers who have visited the museums of Istanbul, unevenly spread across the thousand years, weighted in favour of their Ottoman end. Would it be churlish to argue that the other journey, eastward, of the Greeks and Romans, would, in producing far more art than things, have made a more exciting exhibition?

Turks is at the Royal Academy (0870 848 8484, www.turks.org.uk) from 22 January to 12 April. Admission daily 10am-5.30pm (Friday and Saturday until 10pm). Admission £11.