The Ottoman Empire: a Historical Encyclopedia [2 Volumes]
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See also: Battles and Treaties: Tulip Period; Beys and Pashas: Ibrahim Pasha; Empire and Administration: Nader Shah Afshar; Sultans: Mahmud I; Mustafa II; Primary Documents: Document 4; Document 7
Further Reading
Jelavich, Barbara. History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Vol.1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Olson, Robert W. The Siege of Mosul and Ottoman-Persian Relations 1718–1743. London: Routledge, 1997.
Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Roemer, H. R. “The Safavid Period.” In The Cambridge History of Iran, edited by Peter Jackson and Lawrence Lockhart, 6:189–350. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Sajdi, Dana, ed. Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee, Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007.
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Somel, Selçuk Akșin. Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1805. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
Sykes, Sir Percy. History of Persia. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1951.
Bayezid I (1360–1403)
Known by his title, Yildrim (Thunderbolt), Bayezid I was the sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1389 to 1402. He was the son of Murad I (r. 1362–1389), whom he succeeded after the latter was killed in the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389. Bayezid I proved himself to be a dynamic and charismatic leader, expanding and consolidating newly gained Ottoman domains in the Balkans and Anatolia. He intended to conquer Constantinople, transform “the Lower Danube into a safe maritime border,” and seize “Christian and Islamic strategic centers on the western and southern littoral of the Black Sea” (Pienaru: 33).
Shortly after ascending the throne, Bayezid attacked and conquered the Turkoman principalities of Menteșe (Menteshe), Aydin, Saruhan, Hamid, and Germiyan in western Anatolia in 1390. After Ottoman armies annexed northern Bulgaria in 1393, the ruler of Romanian-populated Wallachia, Mircea the Old, was forced to accept the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan in 1395. In 1396 Christian Europe finally mustered sufficient will to organize an anti-Ottoman crusade. At the behest of Pope Boniface IX (1389–1404), the ruler of Hungary, King Sigismund (r. 1387–1437), assumed the leadership of the crusade, which was joined by Christian knights from “England, Scotland, Poland, Bohemia, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland as well as from the lands of southeastern Europe more directly threatened by the Ottomans” (Shaw: 1:33).
The Christian army crossed the Danube in the summer of 1396, capturing the towns of Orsova and Vidin and putting the Muslim population to the sword. Bayezid, who had rushed to the shores of the Danube from Anatolia, routed the crusader army at Nicopolis in present-day northern Bulgaria on September 25, killing thousands.
After his impressive victory at Nicopolis, Bayezid turned his attention from Europe to Anatolia. The sultan viewed the expansion of Ottoman territories in Asia Minor as the first stage of an invasion of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, which were ruled by the Mamluks. Alarmed by Bayezid’s expansionist plans, the Mamluks of Egypt and the Turkoman principalities of Anatolia, particularly Karaman, which had lost significant territory to the sultan, began to search for a powerful ally and protector who would be willing to counter Ottoman power. They found a formidable ally in the Central Asian conqueror Timur, also known as Teymur-i Lang (Timur the Lame) and Tamerlane. Since 1380 Timur had expanded his territory from Central Asia into present-day Afghanistan, Iran, India, and the Arab world. As early as 1393/1394, Timur’s armies had approached eastern Anatolia from the south after capturing Baghdad, Tikrit, Mosul, Kirkuk, Mardin, and Diyarbakir. After several quick victories, however, Timur was distracted by events in Iran and Central Asia and left the region.
In 1399 Timur shifted his attention to Anatolia again, attacking and occupying the southern Caucasus. He also sent a letter to Bayezid, reminding him of his recent conquests and warning the Ottoman sultan against further military aggression against the Turkoman principalities of Anatolia. The response from Bayezid to the insulting and condescending message was a volcanic eruption of abuse and counterthreats. Timur’s army entered eastern Anatolia through Erzurum, capturing Sivas and Kayseri before arriving in Ankara in July 1402. The decisive battle was fought on July 28. The Ottoman army was routed, and Bayezid and his sons were captured. Timur did not execute Bayezid. Instead the Central Asian conqueror treated the defeated Ottoman sultan with respect. Timur also extended his magnanimity to the sultan’s sons, who pleaded for mercy. The humiliation of living as a captive came to an end for Bayezid when he died on March 8, 1403. Timur pushed his conquests all the way to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, capturing Smyrna (Izmir) in December 1402.
By defeating and partitioning the Ottoman Empire, Timur strengthened the Turkoman principalities of Karaman, Germiyan, and Hamid against a possible Ottoman restoration. Mehmed, the prince of Karaman, was particularly favored by Timur, who viewed him as the principal obstacle to the restoration of Ottoman power and thus rewarded him with significant territory and a large army. As a further deterrent, Bayezid’s sons, Süleyman, Isa, Musa, and Mehmed, were all kept alive by Timur, who knew that they would have to fight among themselves before one could emerge as the successor to their father. Thus began a period of 11 years of war among Bayezid’s sons, which came to be known as the Interregnum, or Fetret in Turkish (Alderson: 6).
See also: Empire and Administration: Timur; Sultans: Mehmed I; Murad I
Further Reading
Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600. Translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973.
Marozzi, Justin. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2006.
Pienaru, Nagy. “The Black Sea and the Ottomans: The Pontic Policy of Bayezid the Thunderbolt.” In Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities, and Political Changes, edited by Kemal H. Karpat with Robert W. Zens, 33–34. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Somel, Selçuk Akșin. Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1805. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
Bayezid II (1447–1512)
A sultan of the Ottoman Empire who ruled from 1481 to 1512. Born in 1447, Bayezid was the son of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481), the conqueror of Constantinople. Upon the death of Mehmed II in May 1481, a war of succession erupted between the sultan’s two sons, Cem Sultan (Jem Sultan) and Bayezid. Mehmed and his grand vizier, Karamani Mehmed Pasha, had favored Cem Sultan. However, the janissary units stationed in Istanbul and influential army commanders such as Gedik Ahmed Pasha supported Bayezid (Inalcik: 30). As soon as the death of Mehmed was announced, janissary units stationed in the capital stormed the palace and killed the grand vizier. Pro-Bayezid forces blocked Cem from reaching Istanbul. This allowed Bayezid to rush to the capital and ascend the Ottoman throne as the new sultan. Cem Sultan did not accept defeat. He assembled his supporters in Bursa in present-day western Turkey and declared himself the sultan of Anatolia in May 1481. Cem was willing to divide the empire, taking Anatolia for himself and allowing Bayezid to rule as the sultan of Rumeli or the European provinces of the Ottoman state (Alderson: 7).
After rejecting Cem Sultan’s offer to divide the empire, Bayezid led his troops against his brother, who was defeated at Yenişehir (Yenishehir) on June 20, 1481. Cem fled the battlefield and sought refuge in the Mamluk sultan
ate. Mamluks agreed to provide Cem with financial and military support. The “practice of offering political asylum to Ottoman princes was a longstanding method used by Mamluk sultans to divide and weaken the Ottoman house” (Har-El: 105). Cem was now joined by dispossessed Turkoman princes, including the former ruler of Karaman, who had lost territory as Ottoman rule expanded into central and southern Anatolia.
In the spring of 1482 Cem marched his forces from Syria into central Anatolia, but he suffered a defeat at the hands of Bayezid’s eldest son, Abdullah (Finkel: 83). By July, when Cem reached Ankara, he had recognized that neither the janissaries nor the Turkish aristocracy would rally around his banner (Shaw: 1:71). The collapse of Cem’s last campaign convinced the prince of Karaman to renounce his claims and join the Ottoman ruling elite as a governor. Other Turkoman notables followed suit, setting aside their differences with Bayezid and joining Ottoman service.
The Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II, ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1481 to 1512. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
With the disappearance of Karaman, which had served as a buffer between the Ottoman Empire and the Mamluks of Egypt, a confrontation between the two powerful Muslim states became inevitable. Beginning in 1484, the two sides fought several wars over the control of Dulkadir, the last remaining Turkoman principality in southern Anatolia (Shaw: 1:73). Despite their initial success against the Ottomans, the Mamluks decided to sue for peace in 1491. The peace between the Ottomans and the Mamluks lasted until 1516, when Bayezid’s son and successor, Selim I, invaded and conquered Syria and Egypt.
In southeast Europe Bayezid organized a series of campaigns against the Romanian-populated principality of Moldavia. In 1484 he captured the fortresses of Kilia (Kiliya) in the Danube Delta and Akkerman on the right bank of the Dniester Liman in present-day southwestern Ukraine, thus blocking Hungary, Moldavia, and Wallachia from enjoying access to the mouth of the Danube (Inalcik: 30–31). The sultan’s conquest of Moldavian territory made Poland the new northern neighbor of the Ottoman Empire. Convinced that they would be the next target of the sultan’s expansionist policies, the Poles attacked in 1497, but they were defeated by an Ottoman army in Bukovina and forced to sue for peace in 1499.
During this tumultuous period, as he fought the Mamluks in the south and conquered Moldavian territory to the north, the sultan consolidated his authority within the central government. The conflict between Cem and Bayezid had reflected the tension within the Ottoman system between the old Turkish aristocracy and the kapi kullari (the Christian boys who were trained as slaves of the sultan) who had been recruited through the devşirme system. Bayezid had seized the Ottoman throne with the active support of the devşirme (devshirme), who exercised a great deal of power over him. To free himself from their influence, Bayezid ordered the execution of the grand vizier Gedik Ahmed Pasha and dismissed his father-in-law, Işak Pasha, in 1482, and replaced them with men who owed their new position and power to him (Inalcik: 30). Many of the new appointees were recruited from the ranks of Ottoman ulema who had initially supported Cem Sultan. By allowing them to occupy positions of power, the sultan tried to check the influence of the devşirme on the throne and diminish the power and influence of Cem, who had remained popular among many segments of Ottoman society.
After the collapse of his campaigns in central Anatolia, Cem Sultan fled to Rhodes, where he sought the protection and support of the Christian knights who ruled the island. To neutralize Cem, Bayezid paid the knights 45,000 gold pieces and requested that his brother be transported as far away from the Ottoman territory as possible (McCarthy: 78). Cem traveled to France and from there to Italy, where he met Pope Innocent VIII in 1486. After Rome was attacked and occupied by the French monarch Charles VIII in 1495, Cem was detained and dispatched to France. Before reaching France, however, he suddenly died in Naples, in February 1495 (Shaw: 1:71). As long as Cem was alive, Bayezid had maintained a cautious and conciliatory approach toward the Christian states of Europe (Inalcik: 31). With Cem out of the picture, the Ottomans built a strong fleet to challenge Venetian naval hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean and dislodge their trading outposts and bases in Greece and the eastern Adriatic coast. Thus, during a four-year campaign that began in 1499 and ended in 1503, the Ottoman forces attacked and occupied the Venetian fortresses of Modon, Navarino, Coron, and Lepanto (Inalcik: 31). The peace agreement signed in 1503 allowed Venice to retain some of its ports in the Morea and Albania, but it also confirmed the emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a major naval and economic power with firm control over shipping and trade routes that connected the Black Sea to the Aegean and the Mediterranean.
After the conclusion of peace with Venice, Bayezid began to withdraw from active participation in the day-to-day affairs of the empire, delegating much of his power to his grand vizier. The sultan had always been a great champion of learning and the arts. He preferred spending time with scholars, historians, poets, musicians, and Sufi mystics.
Beginning in the first decade of the 16th century, a new threat from the east began to loom on the horizon. The rise of the Shia Safavid dynasty in Iran reenergized the Turkoman tribes in southern and eastern Anatolia, who opposed the Ottoman government and were drawn toward heterodox religious beliefs. The arrival of pro-Safavid Shia preachers from Iran, who heralded the arrival of a new imam and savior, ignited a popular movement that threatened the power and the prestige of the Ottoman state. The Safavids under the leadership of their shah, Ismail I, who claimed direct descent from the seventh Shia imam, Musa al-Kazim, conquered Baghdad in 1504. Three years later Shah Ismail attacked the principality of Dulkadir, “which lay in the Ottoman sphere of influence,” and occupied Kharput and Diyarbakir in southeastern Anatolia (Inalcik: 30). Safavid agents continued to fan the flames of discontent in Anatolia, where a pro-Safavid revolt erupted in 1511, which was suppressed only with great difficulty.
As Bayezid began to display signs of aging, the contest for succession to the Ottoman throne intensified. The sultan had had five sons, two of whom had died, leaving the contest to the three remaining adult princes, Ahmed, Korkud, and Selim. The eldest and the favorite of Bayezid was Ahmed, who served as the governor of Amasya in northern Anatolia. The second son, Korkud was the most learned, having been educated at the court of his grandfather Mehmed II in Islamic sciences, music, and poetry. The shrewdest son, however, was Selim, who had consolidated his position among the janissaries. By the spring of 1512 Bayezid’s inaction toward Safavid Iran caused the janissary units stationed in Istanbul to rise and force Bayezid to abdicate. While Selim rushed to the capital to assume the reins of power, Bayezid departed Istanbul to live the remaining years of his life in peaceful seclusion. He died, however, before arriving at his destination.
See also: Sultans: Cem Sultan; Mehmed II; Selim I
Further Reading
Alderson, A. D. The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
Finkel, Caroline. Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Har-El, Shai. Struggle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995.
Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600. Translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973.
McCarthy, Justin. The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923. London and New York: Wesley Longman Limited, 1997.
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Wasserstein, David J., and Ami Ayalon, eds. Mamluks and Ottomans: Studies in Honour of Michael Winter. London: Routledge, 2010.
Cem Sultan (Jem Sultan) (1459–1495)
A son of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481). He was born on December 23, 1459. At the age of 10 Cem began to serve as the
governor of Kastamonu in northern Anatolia on the southern shores of the Black Sea. In 1474 he was appointed governor of Karaman in south central Anatolia. After the death of Mehmed II on May 3, 1481, a war of succession erupted between Cem Sultan and his brother, Bayezid, who served as the governor of Amasya in northern Anatolia. Mehmed II and his grand vizier, Karamani Mehmed Pasha, had favored Cem. However, the janissary units stationed in Istanbul and powerful army commanders, who despised the grand vizier, supported Bayezid. Shortly after Mehmed died, the army commanders went into action. They encouraged janissary units stationed in the capital to riot and storm the palace, where they found and killed the grand vizier. The janissary commanders loyal to Bayezid also blocked Cem Sultan and his supporters from reaching Istanbul. This allowed Bayezid to arrive in Istanbul before his brother and declare himself the new sultan. Though he had been beaten in the race to reach the Ottoman capital in time to declare himself as the new ruler of the empire, Cem Sultan refused to accept defeat. He raised an army and marched to Bursa, the old capital of the Ottoman state, where he minted coins and had the hutbe (khutbah) read in his name. Cem proposed to Bayezid that they divide the empire. Cem Sultan would rule Anatolia, while Bayezid kept the Ottoman provinces in Europe.
Bayezid rejected Cem’s offer to divide the empire. Instead, he led his troops against Cem, who was defeated at Yenişehir (Yenishehir) near Bursa in June 1481. Cem and his supporters fled to Konya and eventually sought refuge in the territory of the Mamluk sultanate. He first went to Aleppo and then to Damascus (Gibb: 74). Cem then traveled to Cairo, where he was received with pomp and ceremony by the Mamluk sultan Qayt Bay. To undermine the internal stability of their powerful neighbor to the north, the Mamluks were willing to provide Cem with sufficient support to raise an army.