by Tamim Ansary
In 1452 it jumped to a higher level, a stage that began when a new emperor named Sultan Mehmet took the throne. Mehmet inherited an empire in good shape, but he brought one problem to the throne. He was only twenty-one and tougher, older men circled him hungrily, each one thinking that an older, tougher, hungrier man (like himself) might make a better sultan. Mehmet knew he had do something spectacular to back down potential rivals and cement his grip on power.
So he decided to conquer Constantinople.
Constantinople no longer represented a really important military prize. The Ottomans had already skirted it, pushing into eastern Europe. Constantinople was more of a psychological prize: the city had immense symbolic significance for both east and west.
To the west, an unbroken line ran from Constantinople back to the Rome of Augustus and Julius Caesar. To Christians, this was still the capital of the Roman Empire, which Constantine had infused with Christianity. It was only later historians who looked at this eastern phase of Roman history and called it by a new name. The Byzantines themselves called themselves Romans, and thought of their city as the new Rome.
As for Muslims, Prophet Mohammed himself had once said that the final victory of Islam would be at hand when Muslims took Constantinople. In the third century of Islam, the Arab philosopher al-Kindi had speculated that the Muslim who took Constantinople would renew Islam and go on to rule the world. Many scholars said the conqueror of Constantinople would be the Mahdi, “the Expected One,” the mystical figure whom many Muslims expected to see when history approached its endpoint. Mehmet therefore had good reason to believe that taking Constantinople would be a public relations coup that would make the whole world look at him differently.
The many technical experts now working for the Ottomans included a Hungarian engineer named Urban, who specialized in building cannons, still a relatively new type of weapon. Sultan Mehmet asked Urban to build him something special along these lines. Urban set up a foundry about 150 miles from Constantinople and poured out artillery. His masterpiece was a cannon twenty-seven feet long and so big around that a man could crawl down inside it. The so-called Basilic could fire a twelve-hundred-pound granite stone a mile.
It took ninety oxen and about four hundred men to transport this monstrous gun to the battlefield. As it turned out, the Basilic was too big: it took more than three hours to load, and each time it fired it recoiled so hard it tended to kill more people behind it than in front of it. Besides, at a distance of a mile, it was so inaccurate it actually missed the whole city of Constantinople; but this didn’t matter. The big gun wasn’t an important military asset so much as an important symbolic asset—announcing to the world that this was the sort of weapon the Ottomans brought to the field. In addition to the Basilic they had, of course, many smaller cannons. They were the best armed and most technologically advanced army of their time.
CONSTANTINOPLE: THE WORLD’S MOST IMPREGNABLE CITY
The siege of Constantinople lasted fifty-four days, the city being all but impregnable. Located on a triangular spit of land shaped like a rhinoceros horn, it faced the Bosporus Straits on one side and the Sea of Marmara on another. On these sides it had high sea walls and promontories commanding the narrow straits, from which the Byzantines could bombard any ships approaching the city. On the land side, it had a series of stone walls that stretched across the whole peninsula from sea to sea, each wall with its own moat. Each moat was broader and deeper and each wall thicker and taller than the one before. The innermost wall stood ninety feet high and was more than thirty feet thick; no one could get past that barrier, especially since the Byzantines had a secret weapon called Byzantine fire, a glutinous burning substance that was launched from catapults and splashed when it landed, sticking to flesh. It could not be doused with water—in fact, it was probably some primitive form of napalm.
The Ottomans persisted, however. The cannons kept booming, the janissaries kept charging, the immense besieging army made up of recruits from many different tribes and populations including Arabs, Persians, and even European Christians kept storming the ramparts, but in the end, the battle turned on the fact that someone forgot to close one small door in one corner of the third and most impregnable wall. A few Turks forced their way in through there, secured the sector, opened a larger gate to their compatriots, and suddenly the most enduring capital of the western world’s longest lasting empire was going down in flames.
Mehmet gave his troops permission to loot Constantinople for three days but not one minute longer. He wanted his troops to preserve the city, not destroy it, because he meant to use it as his own capital. From this time on, the city came to be known informally as Istanbul (the formal name change would not occur until centuries later) and the victorious sultan was henceforth called Mehmet the Conqueror.
Imagine for a moment what might have happened if Muslims had taken Constantinople during the prime of Islam’s expansion, if Constantinople rather than Baghdad had been the capital of the Abbasids: straddling the waters linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, possessing all the ports they needed to launch navies across the Aegean and Mediterranean to Greece and Italy and on to Spain and the French Coast and through the Straits of Gibraltar up the Atlantic coast to England and Scandinavia, combined with their proven prowess in land warfare—all of Europe might well have been absorbed into the Islamic empire.
But seven hundred years had passed since the prime of the khalifate. Europe was no longer a wretched continent eking out a meager existence in squalid poverty. It was a continent on the rise. On the Iberian peninsula, Catholic monarchs were busy driving the last embattled Muslims back to Africa and funding sailors like Columbus to go explore the world. Belgium had developed into a banking capital, the Dutch were busy cooking up an awesome business expertise, the continent of Italy was muscling up into the Renaissance, and England and France were coalescing into nation-states. Constantinople (Istanbul) gave the Ottomans a peerless base of operations, but Christian Europe was no longer any pushover. At the time, however, no one knew who was on the rise and who on the decline, and with the Ottoman triumph, Islam certainly looked resurgent to the Muslim world at large.
Istanbul had only about seventy thousand people at the time of the conquest, so Mehmet the Conqueror launched a set of policies such as tax concessions and property giveaways to repopulate his new capital. Mehmet also reestablished the classical Islamic principles of conquest: non-Muslims were accorded religious freedom and left in possession of their land and property but had to pay the jizya. People of every religion and ethnicity came flowing in, making Istanbul a microcosm of an empire pulsing with diversity.6
Now the Ottomans ruled an empire that straddled Europe and Asia with substantial territory in both continents. The greatest city in the world was theirs. Their greatest achievement, however, wasn’t conquest. Somehow, in the course of their fifteen decades of rule, they had brought a unique new social order into being. Somehow, that anarchic soup of nomads, peasants, tribal warriors, mystics, knights, artisans, merchants, and miscellaneous others populating Anatolia had coalesced into a society of clockwork complexity full of interlocking parts that balanced one another, each acting as a spur and check on the others. Nothing like it had been seen before, and nothing like it has been seen again. Only contemporary American society offers an adequate analogy to the complexity of Ottoman society—but only to the complexity. The devil is in the details, and our world differs from that of the Ottomans in just about every detail.
Broadly speaking, the Ottoman world was divided horizontally between a ruling class that taxed, organized, issued orders, and fought, and a subject class that produced and paid taxes. But it was also organized vertically by Sufi orders and brotherhoods. So people separated by their classes might find themselves united in reverence to the same sheikh.
On the other hand, Ottoman society as a whole was compartmentalized into the major religious communities, each with its own vertical and horizontal divisions, and each
a semi-autonomous nation or millet, in charge of its own religious rites, education, justice, charities, and social services.
The Jews, for example, were one millet, headed by the grand rabbi in Istanbul, a considerable community because Jews came flocking into the Ottoman world throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, fleeing from persecution in western Europe—England had expelled them during the Crusades, they had endured pogroms in eastern Europe, they were facing the Spanish Inquisition in Iberia, and discrimination hounded them just about everywhere.
The Eastern Orthodox community was another millet, headed by the patriarch of Constantinople (as Christians still called it), and he had authority over all Slavic Christians in the empire, a number that kept increasing as the Ottomans extended their conquests in Europe.
Then there was the Armenian millet, another Christian community but separate from the Greeks because the Greek and Armenian churches considered one another’s doctrines heretical.
The leader of each millet represented his people at court and answered directly to the sultan. In a sense, the Muslims were just another of these millets, and they too had a top leader, the Sheikh al-Islam, or “Old Man of Islam,” a position created by Bayazid shortly before he was crushed by Timur-i-lang. The Sheikh al-Islam legislated according to the shari’a and presided over an army of muftis who interpreted the law, judges who applied the law, and mullahs who inducted youngsters into the religion, provided basic religious education, and administrated rites in local neighborhoods and villages.
The shari’a, however, was not the only law in the land. There was also the sultan’s code, a parallel legal system that dealt with administrative matters, taxation, interaction between millets, and relationships among the various classes, especially the subject class and the ruling class.
Don’t try to follow this complexity: the complexity of the Ottoman system defies a quick description. I just want to give you a flavor of it. This whole parallel legal system, including the lawyers, bureaucrats, and judges who shaped and applied it, was under the authority of the grand vizier, who headed up the palace bureaucracy (another whole world in itself). This vizier was the empire’s second most powerful figure, after the sultan.
Or was he third? After all, the Sheikh al-Islam had the right to review every piece of secular legislation and veto it if he thought it conflicted with the shari’a, or send it back for modification.
On the other hand, the Sheikh al-Islam served at the pleasure of the sultan, and it was the sultan’s code the grand vizier was administering. So if the grand vizier and the Sheikh al-Islam came into conflict . . . guess who backed down. Or did he?
You see how it was: check, balance, check, balance. . . .
Another set of checks and balances built into Ottoman society involved the devshirme instituted by Bayazid. At first, as I mentioned, this was just the mamluk system by another name. Like the mamluks, the janissaries were trained to serve as the ruler’s bodyguards—at first. But then the janissaries’ function expanded.
For one thing, they didn’t all end up as soldiers anymore. Some were taught administrative skills. Others received cultural training. The sultan began appointing janissaries to top posts in his government as well as his armies and navies. He put janissaries in charge of important cultural institutions as well. Sinon, the Ottoman architect most responsible for establishing that characteristic style of Ottoman mosque—a solid edifice capped with one big dome and many smaller mushroom domes and four pencil-tin minarets at the corners—was a janissary.
Originally, the devshirme took boys only from Christian families in newly conquered territory. But Mehmet the Conqueror instituted another crucial innovation: he extended the devshirme into the empire itself. Henceforth, any family under Ottoman rule, Muslim or non-Muslim, high or low, might see some of its sons sucked into this special form of “slavery,” which was, paradoxically, a route to the highest strata of Ottoman society.
Through the devshirme, the Ottomans crafted a brand new power elite for their society. Unlike the elite of other societies, however, the janissaries were forbidden to marry or have (legitimate) children. They could not, therefore, become a hereditary elite. In fact, the devshirme was a mechanism for constantly turning the social soil. It sought out promising youngsters from all sectors of society, gave them the most rigorous possible intellectual and physical training, and then charged them with running the empire. Naturally, they sucked a good deal of power away from the old, traditional, military, Turkish aristocracy, those families whose ancestral roots went back to central Asia, which was all to the good as far as the Ottomans were concerned. It weakened their potential rivals.
And yet the Ottomans did not eliminate these potential rivals, even though they could have. No, the Ottoman genius for checks and balances kept the old aristocratic families in place and left them some power to serve as a check on the janissaries should the latter ever get any big ideas.
What power was left to the old nobility? Well, for one thing, they remained the biggest landowners in the empire and the major taxpayers. “Landowner” is a bit of a misnomer, however, because officially the sultan owned every scrap of soil in his empire. He only leased out parcels of it to favored people as “tax farms” (timars in Turkish). A timar was a rural property from whose inhabitants the timar holder was allowed to collect taxes. Those inhabitants were, of course, mostly peasant cultivators living on the land. Tax farmers had permission to collect as much as they wanted from these people. In exchange for the privilege, they had to pay the government a fixed fee every year. Whatever they collected beyond that sum was theirs to keep; and there was no limit on how they were allowed to collect. The government’s share did not depend on how much the tax farmer collected but on how much land was in the “farmer’s” care. It was a tax on land, not a tax on income. If a property produced beyond all expectations, the tax farmer benefited, not the government. If a timar did poorly, the tax farmer took the hit. If he could not pay his tax for a number of years in a row, the timar was taken away from him and given to someone else.
After a successful campaign, the sultan might reward his best generals by giving them timars. Typically, of course, except in newly conquered areas, the sultan had to take a timar away from one person in order to reward another. The fact that people could lose their timars meant that the landed aristocracy was only semi-hereditary. Here then was another mechanism that promoted social fluidity and kept the Ottoman world in flux.
You might suppose that this timar system encouraged Ottoman aristocrats to wring peasants dry. After all, they got to keep whatever they extracted after paying the government fee. But the timar holders were not, in fact, free to do as they wished, because the peasants could appeal to the shari’a courts for justice, and these were a whole separate institution, a separate power base in society, controlled and staffed by the ulama. The nobility had no shortcut into it. If a family wanted to “place” a son in this legal system, the son had to go through the same long process as anyone else for joining the ulama, such a long process, in fact, that by the time he made it, his social ties would mostly be with other ulama. So his interests would be aligned with theirs and shaped by the ancient doctrine more than by his clan or family roots.
Despite its pervasive power, however, the clerical establishment did not own the religious life of Muslims in the Ottoman empire. Sufism continued to prosper as the religion of the masses, with most people claiming at least nominal affiliation with one or another of the Sufi orders and a great many actively belonging to some brotherhood. This is not to say that all (or very many) of the common folks in the Ottoman Empire were practicing mystics. It’s more to say that Sufism, for most people, had come to mean folklore, superstitions, shrines, amulets, remedies, spells, and the veneration of Sufi “saints” alleged to possess supernatural abilities.
Besides, these Sufi orders were intertwined with the akhis, the associations of craftsmen and merchants I mentioned earlier. The akhi guilds had their
own autonomous status as social organizations. They set standards for their members, licensed new businesses, collected dues, extended credit, paid out old-age pensions, took care of funeral expenses, offered health care, operated shelters and soup kitchens, gave out scholarships, and also organized fairs, festivals, processions, and other public entertainments. Every guild had its own masters, councils, sheikhs, and internal political processes. Members with complaints could go to guild officials the way modern industrial workers go to their union reps (where unions still exist). If necessary, guild officials represented their members in lawsuits and petitioned the state on members’ behalf. By the same token, the state regulated the guilds, imposing standards of its own and controlling prices in the public interest.
Every craftsman belonged to a guild, and many guild members also belonged to some Sufi brotherhood that might cut across guild lines. The brotherhoods generally had lodges where members could gather to socialize, not just with one another, but also with merchants and other travelers passing through, for the akhi-Sufi lodges actively served as traveler’s aid societies and hospitality centers.
This glimpse into the Ottoman social clockwork does not begin to exhaust its fractal intricacy: look closer and deeper into Ottoman society and you’ll see the same order of complexity at every level. Everything was connected to everything else and connected in many ways, which was fine when all the connections balanced out and all of the parts were working. Centuries later, when the empire entered its decrepitude, all the intertwining parts and intermeshing institutions became a peculiarly Ottoman liability; their intricacy meant that trouble in one place or sphere translated mysteriously to trouble in a dozen other places or spheres—but that came later. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was an awesomely well-functioning machine.
