The Rise of the Ottomans
The Ottoman Turks are first recorded as holding territory in the region of Bursa at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Ottoman beylicate (principality) was one among many beylicates which were established in Asia Minor in the wake of the break-up of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum and the withdrawal of Mongol power from the region. However, there is much that is legendary in the early story of the Ottomans and it is unclear whether the first Ottoman beys were leaders of a natural tribe, or whether the mass of their supporters were ghazis who had joined the Ottomans on the edge of Byzantine territory in order to take part in the jihad and find booty or martyrdom. It is nevertheless plain that the ghazi ethic played a crucial role in some of the other beylicates, particularly the coastal beylicates of Aydin and Menteshe, from whose ports sea-ghazis set out to ravage Christian shipping. In Anatolia, as elsewhere, Sufis played a key part in preaching the jihad, and a later Ottoman source describes one of the emirs of Aydin being initiated into the status of ghazi by a shaykh of the Mevlevi, or Whirling Dervishes; the shaykh presented the emir with a war-club which the latter placed on his head, before declaring: ‘With this club will I first subdue my passions and then kill all the enemies of the faith.’
Bursa fell to Orkhan, the Ottoman bey, in 1326, but for a long time after that the Ottoman capital was wherever the bey’s tent was pitched. Whether they were tribesmen or ghazis, the men who fought for the early Ottoman beys fought in the confidence that God smiled on their struggles. According to Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was a captive of the Turks in 1354, ‘these infamous people, hated by God and infamous, boast of having got the better of the Romans [i.e. Byzantines] by their love of God … They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil … and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves of them.’
Ottoman expansion in north-west Anatolia was rapid under Orkhan (c.1324–60) and Orkhan was the first Ottoman to style himself sultan. His territorial expansion was at the expense of both the Byzantines and the rival beylicates. The maritime beylicate of Aydin was at first perceived in the West as posing a greater danger than the Ottomans, and consequently in 1344 a crusader naval league chose as its target Umur of Aydin’s port of Smyrna. Meanwhile Turkish raiders, only some of whom were in the service of the Ottomans, had crossed the Dardanelles and were operating in the Plain of Adrianople as early as the 1340s. An earthquake at Gallipoli in 1354 or 1355 allowed the Ottomans to occupy that harbour and gave them their first base west of the Dardanelles. Gallipoli was subsequently lost to a crusade led by Amadeus of Savoy, but the Ottoman occupation of Adrianople in 1369 restored their position in Europe and during the reign of Murad I (1362–89) Thrace and Macedonia were conquered.
Although it pleased the Janissaries to describe themselves as ‘the heaven-chosen soldiers of Islam’, the importance of the medieval Janissaries should not be exaggerated. Originally the Janissary (more correctly Yeni Cheri, or New Troops) regiment was recruited from Christian youths captured in the Balkan wars, but, as this source proved inadequate, there was a switch to devshirme from the late fourteenth century onwards. Under the devshirme system, boys aged between 8 and 15 years from Christian villages within the Ottoman empire were forcibly conscripted and taken away to be trained as military slaves. The best of the young men recruited in this manner went into the service of the palace, where they would be trained for high office. The Janissaries were in a sense the rejects in the devshirme system. Throughout the fifteenth century they were primarily a regiment of infantry archers and, although some troops were provided with handguns as early as the 1440s, it was not until the late sixteenth century that most Janissaries were equipped with muskets. There was also a parallel and larger, though less well-disciplined, body of free-born infantry, known as the yaya. The élite of the Ottoman army, however, was furnished by sipahis, freeborn cavalry who did military service in return for assignments of timar : that is estates on which they had the right to collect revenue. Akinjis, or light cavalry raiders who fought for a share of the booty, helped to swell Ottoman ranks.
Murad I’s campaigning in Europe and the advance of his armies to the Danube provoked the formation of a coalition of Christian principalities in the Balkans. However, their combined armies went down to defeat at the battle of Kosovo (1389). Although Murad was killed in the battle, his son, Bayezid I (1389–1402) also known as Yilderim or the Thunderbolt, smoothly took command and reaped the fruits of victory. Victory at Kosovo confirmed the Turkish conquest of Bulgaria, and in the long run sealed the fate of Serbia. In the immediate aftermath, however, Bayezid offered the Serbs easy terms, so that he could deal with a revolt of the Qaraman Turkomans in Anatolia. The Ottomans claimed that the Qaramans, in waging war against them, were impeding the jihad and assisting the infidels. In the years that followed, Bayezid made use of dubiously loyal European vassals to campaign in Asia and vice versa, and seven beylicates in Asia Minor were precariously annexed.
Communications between the sultanate’s eastern and western fronts would always be vulnerable as long as the Christians continued to hold Constantinople. In 1394 Bayazid gave orders that the city should be blockaded. Although the joint French and Hungarian crusade of 1396 aimed among other things to bring relief to Constantinople, it ended in disaster on the battlefield of Nicopolis, as will be seen, and the city’s salvation was to come from a quite different source. Bayezid’s aggressive policy of annexation in Anatolia had brought him up against clients of Tamerlane and provoked the Turco-Mongol warlord to intervene. Much of the army that Bayezid brought to face Tamerlane outside Ankara in 1402 consisted of reluctant tributaries and they lost little time in going over to Tamerlane. Bayezid was taken in the battle and was soon to die in captivity. In the aftermath of the battle, Tamerlane re-established the Turkoman beylicates and the Ottoman empire was further weakened as Bayezid’s sons, Suleyman, Isa, Mehmed, and Musa, fought amongst themselves for the succession. This war ended with the victory of Mehmed I (1413–21).
Under Mehmed and his son Murad II (1421–51) the Ottoman recovery proceeded apace. Although a renewed attempt to take Constantinople in 1422 failed, the Turks had regained all and more than they had lost in 1402. As early as 1432 the Burgundian spy Bertrandon de la Brocquière noted that if the Ottoman sultan ‘wished to exercise the power and revenue that he had, given the slight amount of resistance he would encounter from Christendom, he could conquer a large part of it’. The Hungarian general John Hunyadi won some striking victories against the Turks in 1441 and 1442, but the Varna Crusade of 1444, a Hungarian attempt at joint operations with a western fleet in Black Sea, was unsuccessful and proved to be the last offensive crusade aimed at stemming the Ottoman advance in the Balkans.
In 1451 Mehmed II, who succeeded Murad II, put in hand preparations for the siege of Constantinople. Artillery played a crucial role in that siege. The Ottomans may have been using cannons as early as the 1380s. From the 1420s onwards cannons were regularly used in siege warfare. Guns were captured from Christians in the European wars and more guns were cast by Christian renegades who entered the service of the Turks. Urbanus, a Christian renegade from Transylvania and an expert gun founder, was one of the main architects of the Muslim triumph at Constantinople in 1453.
‘Sultan Mehmed conquered Constantinople with the help of God. It was an abode of idols … He converted its churches of beautiful decoration into Islamic colleges and mosques.’ Mehmed’s conquest of the city had confirmed traditional Islamic prophecies about its fall to the Muslims. But the conquest of the ancient capital of the eastern Roman empire allowed Mehmed to present himself as heir not only to the heroes of the Islamic past but also to Alexander and Caesar. A contemporary Italian observer recorded that Mehmed ‘declares that he will advance from East to West as in former times the westerners advanced into the Orient. There must, he says, be only one em
pire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.’
The conquest of Constantinople had given the sultan possession of a major dockyard and arsenal. The behaviour of the Ottoman fleet during the siege of Constantinople had been cautious and inglorious. After 1453 Ottoman fleets were more aggressive and successful. The Black Sea was turned into a Turkish lake and Mehmed’s army and fleet conducted combined operations in the Aegean and elsewhere. By 1460 the Ottoman conquest of the last outpost of the Byzantine empire in the Peloponnese had been completed. In 1480 the Ottoman fleet set out against Rhodes. In the words of Lionel Butler, Mehmed II ‘was eager to add Rhodes to his collection of famous Greek cities of the Ancient World which he had conquered: Constantinople, Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Trebizond’. Its conquest would also have given Mehmed a key strategic point in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Turkish onslaught was beaten off. Mehmed planned to try again in 1481 and doubtless he also planned to reinforce a Turkish expeditionary force which had landed in Otranto in southern Italy in 1480, but he died in 1481. The Turkish troops stranded in Italy surrendered in September of that year.
Bayezid II (1481–1512) pursued a less aggressive policy with regard to the West. This was in large part due to the fact that he had to defend his throne against his brother, Jem. Defeated in 1481, Jem fled to Rhodes in 1482 and from there he went to France. Under surveillance in Europe, Jem remained a powerful pawn in the hands of Christendom until his death in 1495.
Bayazid made some gains in the Balkans, but he faced greater problems on the eastern front, first with the Mamluk sultanate and then, from 1501 onwards, with the rise in Iran of Shah Isma‘il, the first of the Safavid shahs.
Shah Isma‘il’s Twelver Shi‘ite following seem to have regarded him as the Mahdi and they believed that he was infallible and invincible. The legend of Isma‘il’s invincibility was destroyed in 1514 at the Battle of Chaldiran, when an army under the command of Selim the Grim defeated Isma‘il’s undisciplined following of Turkoman tribal warriors. Even after Chaldiran, Shi‘ism was still seen as threatening the Sunni Ottoman regime, but it was dangerous for Selim to conduct further campaigns against Isma‘il as long as the Mamluk sultanate was a potential threat to his southern flank. The Ottoman occupation of Mamluk lands in 1516–17 unified the lands of the eastern Mediterranean under a single Muslim ruler, and thereafter Constantinople annually collected vast amounts of revenue from Egypt in particular.
Even before Selim had entered Cairo in 1517, he had been presented with the suzerainty of Algiers by Aruj Barbarossa, who had taken the city in the previous year. The exploits of the brothers Aruj and Khayr al-Din Barbarossa inaugurated the great age of the Barbary corsairs. In 1533 Khayr al-Din was put in charge of organizing the Ottoman fleet and in 1534 he took Tunis. Although a force sent by the Emperor Charles V took it back again in the following year, Khayr al-Din won a great naval victory in 1538 at Prevéza against a Christian naval league sponsored by the emperor and the pope, and in the long run Tripoli, held by the Spaniards since 1510, was retaken by the Muslims (1551) and the whole of North Africa except for Morocco was annexed to the sultanate.
The Ottoman Empire under Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–66) can be seen as the Muslim equivalent of the universal Christian empire of Charles V. Suleyman’s war in the Mediterranean and the Balkans was really an imperial war fought against the Habsburgs, rather than a holy war against Christendom. Suleyman’s propagandists preferred to stress the necessity of jihad against the heterodox Safavids in Iran and Iraq. At first, fortune consistently favoured Suleyman’s armies: the capture of Belgrade (1521), the capture of Rhodes (1522), victory over the Hungarians at the battle of Mohacs (1526) and the consequent destruction of the Hungarian kingdom. Suleyman did fail to take Vienna in 1529, but this reverse did not seem so significant at the time, as the attempt to take it had only been the result of an afterthought towards the end of a season of campaigning. Even so, as Suleyman’s successors would discover, Vienna was situated at the extreme limit of Ottoman logistical capability. In the course of the sixteenth century Muslim expectations of ever-continuing conquest declined and the ghazi ethic fell into abeyance. The Turkish failure at Malta in 1565 delivered a further check to Ottoman ambitions and in the following year Suleyman died.
However, the Ottomans continued to make conquests, and in 1570 their occupation of most of Venetian Cyprus provoked the formation of yet another Christian naval league. The Christians hailed their victory at the Battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth in 1571 as a mighty triumph over the infidel. Although Turkish losses in that battle were heavy, and thousands of skilled mariners and archers were lost, Ottoman resources were vast and the battle changed nothing. Allegedly, when Selim II (1566–74) asked his vizier how much it would cost to replace the lost fleet, the vizier replied: ‘The might of the empire is such that if it were desired to equip the entire fleet with silver anchors, silken rigging, and satin sails, we could do it.’ Indeed the Ottomans did swiftly build a new fleet, their occupation of Cyprus was not seriously challenged, and they raided at will in the western Mediterranean, sometimes making use of friendly French ports to do so.
In a renewed round of fighting in the Balkans (1593–60) Ottoman troops performed poorly. Ottoman armies copied the military technology of the Europeans, but not their tactics. Turkish observers might admire the discipline of western armies, as well as their skilful deployment of cannons and muskets, but Turkish armies could not emulate the Christians in these areas, and Turkish generals still placed their faith in sword-wielding sipahi cavalry. The sultanate was also weakened by fiscal problems and rebellions in Anatolia.
Philosophically-minded Ottoman officials analysed the problems and some of them resorted to the theories of Ibn Khaldun in order to do so. What is striking about their memoranda is that the sultan’s chief duty was no longer seen as being the leadership of the jihad. Instead, they tended to argue that the sultan’s chief duties were to maintain justice and assure the prosperity of his subjects. In 1625 a certain Omer Talib wrote: ‘Now the Europeans have learnt to know the whole world; they send their ships everywhere and seize important ports. Formerly the goods of India, Sind, and China used to come to Suez and were distributed by Muslims to all the world. But now these goods are carried on Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships to Frangistan (Europe) and are spread all over the world from there.’ Others shared Omer Talib’s feeling that the sultanate was threatened by its lack of access to the vast resources of the Americas.
Not only was a final Ottoman attempt to take Vienna in 1683 a failure, but it provoked the War of the Holy League (1684–97) and led to loss of Buda and Belgrade. By the Peace of Karlowitz (1699) the Ottomans were obliged to cede Hungary and Transylvania to Austria, while Venice and Poland secured other territories. The Ottoman tide of advance had been clearly stemmed. Moreover it was, for the first time, unambiguously the defeated power and actually yielding territory to the Christians. The Age of Jihad had passed and the long process of dismembering the Ottoman empire had begun. Even if Gibbon was correct in calling the struggle between Christianity and Islam in the eastern Mediterranean the ‘world’s debate’, it had been a debate between the deaf and it was not until the midnineteenth century that Arabs even coined the term Hurub al-Salibiyya to refer to the Wars of the Crusades.
11
The Crusading Movement
1274–1700
NORMAN HOUSLEY
AS it neared the end of the first two centuries of its existence, the crusading movement was in a condition of crisis. Recent successes in Spain, Prussia, and Italy had been staggering, but they could not compensate for the fact that the defence of the Holy Land stood on the edge of calamity in the face of the Mamluk advance. Given the nature of crusading, the crisis was bound to be one of faith as well as military strategy: as the Constitutiones pro zelo fidei, the crusade decrees of the Second Lyons Council, expressed it in 1274, ‘to the greater shame of the Creator, and the injury and pain of all who confess the Christian fa
ith, they [i.e. the Mamluks] taunt and insult the Christians with many reproaches—“where is the God of the Christians?” ’ (cf. Ps. 115: 2). The crisis did not end in 1291 because few contemporaries accepted the loss of Palestine as final: indeed, arguably it was not until after the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337 that hopes for recovery were marginalized to an optimistic few. There are good reasons for beginning a survey of the later crusades by focusing on the fertile yeast of ideas, and the consolidation of methods of organization and finance, which the Second Lyons Council either initiated or furthered, and which spanned the decades on either side of 1300. These changes were not alone responsible for the survival of crusading for many generations to come; but they aptly displayed the qualities of engagement, resilience, and adaptability which underpinned that survival.
A History of the Crusades Page 30
