For sixty years, Constantinople was run as a Latin city. One branch of the Byzantine imperial family, the Comneni, withdrew to Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast, to be succoured by Italian trade and protected for centuries to come by those celebrated towers. Another, the Paleologi, watched its opportunity from Nicaea, until in 1267 they had returned, finding Constantinople half in ruins, its land empire lost forever to a rabble of Frankish lords, Venetian providatores, Genoese mahonas and local strongmen. The city itself stood behind its massive walls; its Orthodoxy was maintained; its rulers were still titular Emperors of the Romans; but the wealth was gone, the menace – half holy, and half martial – which lay behind all its diplomatic genius was dispelled. Evocative as candlesmoke, more valuable than gold leaf, a millennial layer of old myth had been scraped away.
Constantinople mouldered after that. The Italian city states – Venice, Genoa, Florence – used the city as a godown in which to store the fruits of their lucrative Black Sea trade. They housed themselves in Pera across the Golden Horn (‘as may be compared to Sothwarke from London’); from where they could watch, if they cared, Byzantine emperors bow themselves out in a welter of mutual blindings, insults, rebellions and trickery.
The Byzantine Empire, consequently, was in poor shape for its coming encounter with the Turks. Byzantine Bursa fell in 1327, following a decade of harassment and a hard siege which left the city streets strewn with corpses. Nicaea, where the Creed had been regulated in 325, surrendered in 1329, after five years vainly scanning the horizons for the dust-cloud of a relieving army. The Turks moved on with providential ease. Muslim Karesi wrangled with itself, faltered, and slipped into Ottoman hands in 1344–5, giving Orhan, Osman’s son and heir, the southern shores of Marmara. For centuries, where the little Sea of Marmara, swollen with the Black Sea’s overflow, bursts through narrow straits into the eastern Aegean, the fortress at Gallipoli on the European side had guarded the seaward approaches to Constantinople. Asia and Europe almost touch across the Dardanelles, the Hellespont of the Greeks, where Helle of myth, fleeing her jealous stepmother, slipped from the back of the Golden Ram and drowned. The Byzantine Greeks had long since enlisted Turkish warriors to help them fight their civil wars, and in 1354, just across these straits, a Byzantine regent plunged into a rebellion against his young imperial charge. The rebel Cantacuzenos applied to Orhan, the nearest Turkish bey, or general, for troops. It seemed as though the Ottomans, having reached the Hellespont, had only to gaze with a little longing at Gallipoli across the straits before the Byzantines proposed to ferry them into Europe.
Orhan’s warriors crossed from Asia Minor into Europe in 1354, and no sooner had they discovered Thrace than the hand of Providence intervened again. On the night of 4 March 1356, Gallipoli was struck by an earthquake, just as an Ottoman war party was passing by on its way back to Asia. The Greek castle which guarded the straits fell down like a camel sinking to its knees; the Turks promptly occupied the ruins; and henceforward squadrons of Christian ships, Genoese or Venetian or Byzantine, hovered like taxis to carry them back and forth.
Cantacuzenos’ successors were left to cope with the sour fruit of his Ottoman alliance, as a stream of men, women, sheep, children, saints, horses and tents came flooding into Thrace. Flying columns of Turkish horsemen made their way up the Balkan valleys, discovering a shepherd’s paradise of cooling water, greenery and shade. Turkish beys began to set themselves up in Thracian fiefdoms when their Ottoman leader was off the scene, defending his dominions in Asia Minor. Dervishes established themselves in lodges, Turkish peasants awarded themselves farmsteads or grazing grounds, and within a generation Thrace had become a country of Turkish settlement. Edirne, the region’s capital, the Adrianople of the Greeks, fell to them in 1362.
Successive Byzantine emperors made efforts to secure western aid against the encircling menace of the Turks, even to trading their religious principles for it: but the nap had long gone on the velvet glove, and there was no mailed fist underneath. The aid they sought was never very forthcoming, the conversions they promised were never very sincere, and the citizens themselves ignored the complicated submissions made by their Emperor to the Roman Pope. When Cantacuzenos, now Emperor John V, visited Louis the Great in Buda in 1366, in a fruitless attempt to make him fight the Turks, the Bulgars kidnapped him on his way home. When he toured western capitals four years later to raise men and money for the struggle, the Venetians imprisoned him for debt. Orhan demanded a Byzantine princess from him in 1356.
A gala flotilla of thirty ships carried Theodora away to that stylish barbarian wedding only sixty miles from home. Twenty years later, when the Turks conquered Macedonia, the Byzantines came and begged for food.
The Turks were not the only people with designs on the fading Byzantine Empire in Europe. A hotchpotch of local warlords swaggered in its afterglow, dusting off splendiferous old titles which had languished for centuries in hock to the Greeks: khan and kraal, tsar, voivode, ban and despot. They ruled states as multifarious as their titles, from rickety empires to walled cities. All of them marched to the fading drumbeat of Byzantine civilisation, bolstering their pretensions with strong draughts of fantasy. Shortly before the Turks arrived, Steven Dusan, Kraal of Greater Serbia, ‘Emperor of the Rumelians, the Macedonian Christ-loving Tsar’, built up an empire along the old trade routes between Ragusa, Adrianople, Belgrade and Salonica. He pampered the magnates at the expense of the peasants, and gathered in their petty realms, but his empire proved to be as loosely strung together as his title. In 1356, obedient to the call of the Byzantine legend, he set out to conquer Constantinople. He died on the march, and the Greater Serbia he had constructed, short-lived but long-shadowed, fell into a host of tiny statelets and six larger principalities. The Ottomans annihilated two of them in 1371 when they first broke into the Maritsa valley. At Nis in 1387, and at Kosovo in 1389 Serb nobles failed to halt the Turks’ advance, or Serbia’s collapse. The splintered kingdom accepted Turkish vassalage, before it was abolished altogether in 1448.
The Bulgars were fatally driven to pursue the memory of their eleventh-century empire. The Hungarians, sniffing advantage, set up a Ban in the rump of Bulgaria which lasted seven years (although the Hungarians remained the Ottomans’ only serious rivals for influence in the region, until 1526). A decadent fantasy ultimately possessed one of the Peloponnesian Despots to establish a platonic court at Mistra. A brigade of Catalan mercenaries ran amok at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and supposed they could conquer Anatolia. Elsewhere bands of Orthodox monks roamed the countryside who believed they could win their way to heaven by bearing arms, and killing people. Impartially, the Ottomans swept them all aside, philosopher-kings and mailed knights, for the Ottomans lived their dreams out on the spot, sword in hand. ‘There was no prince or leader: there was no redeemer or saviour amongst the people. The brave hearts of heroic men became the weak hearts of women. Rightly,’ wrote a Macedonian monk, with all too real despair, for the Turks stood at the gates of Skopje (Uskub): ‘rightly were the dead envied by the living.’
Native rulers had long lived by shift and negotiation, and they fatally underestimated the Ottomans’ firmness of purpose, discounting the vast reserves of men the Ottomans could draw on across the Hellespont. Balkan rulers greeted the Turks as a useful source of mercenary troops, as indeed they often were; but they generally failed to recognise the dynastic ambitions of the Ottoman family. One by one, as the Ottomans advanced, the Balkan rulers sought vassalage, and learned too late that it was a one-way street. Shishman of Bulgaria took vassalage with Orhan’s son Murad in 1372; but in 1388, encouraged by King Tvrtko’s defeat of an Ottoman army which had come to seize Bosnia, he refused to do homage. Within a year Shishman was attacked, defeated, and thoroughly humiliated; his best troops were sent into Anatolia to do battle against Karaman – using firearms for the first time, according to the tradition; and seven years later the Turks had him executed (although his son bore no grudge, turned Muslim and
became Ottoman governor of Samsun on the Black Sea). As for King Tvrtko of Bosnia, he proved wilier than them all, for though he had won his battle, he conceded victory.
When the Byzantines asked to have Gallipoli returned to them, the Ottoman Prince Suleyman regretted that Islam knew nothing of retreat. Ottoman confidence was infectious. Citizens came tumbling forward with the keys to castles and towns. Soldiers Christian as well as Muslim asked to join up. In Athens, the Latin Duke accused the Orthodox Metropolitan of plotting a Turkish invasion in 1393. In Salonica in 1374 a jealous son of the Byzantine Emperor took up the governorship and adopted anti-Turkism as the chief plank of his policy; but the Salonicans, totting up the cost of his belligerence, promptly threw him out.*
The very presence of the Ottoman frontier had a melting effect on the lands beyond. At the Turks’ approach people fled with all their goods and beasts, leaving behind a sort of frontier wilderness which slid into Turkish hands almost by osmosis. Many of their great victories were reactive, and their advance seemed ordained. Seldom did they pick a vulgar quarrel, or ignore a challenge. Kosovo was the result of a Serb rebellion. Sixty years later, in 1448, the battle was fought again, this time against a Hungarian-backed Serbian army, which had broken a solemn truce and was advancing towards Edirne; Kosovo 1448, like Kosovo 1389, was a far-reaching Ottoman victory.
In 1356 a travelling bishop was shipwrecked on the southern shores of the Sea of Marmara. He was taken to Orhan’s summer camp, and royally entertained; but the Turks told him that they were divine instruments whose good fortune proved the truth of Islam; God was their aid, they explained, as Islam went travelling from east to west. A hundred years later a Venetian visitor was informed by the Sultan himself that ‘times have changed, so that he would go from the east to the west, as the westerners had gone to the east. The empire of the world must be one faith and one kingdom.’ So hypnotic was the Turks’ advance, so rascally, duplicitous and divided were their enemies, so beguilingly gentle was the way they tickled their vassals to the halter, so otherworldly did their success appear, that two centuries later Luther himself made the same deduction, and wondered piously aloud whether they should be opposed at all.
The Ottoman Turks were never assimilated by the people they conquered. They won control too fast, their habits were too engrained, their faith too proud, their organisation too advanced, for Balkan Christianity to have anything left to teach them. As for their own people – that swirl of beys and men obeying a call they could barely have pretended to control – the young Ottoman dynasts soon moved away from the rough old notions of equality that characterised the borderlands, and crabwise, from nothing, made sovereignty for themselves. Osman was named in the Friday prayers, a traditional signal of rulership; and the name of Orhan his son appeared on coins. Their dreams gained currency among the frontiersmen. Osman and Orhan ate with their men, saw to the shoeing of their own horses, and dressed so quietly that as late as the beginning of the fifteenth century a stranger at the funeral of Murad II’s mother had to have the Sultan pointed out to him. But the authority of the Ottoman princes kept pace with the Turkish conquest. The Danishmends, another Turkish clan, which had flourished in the thirteenth century, had been gazis, too, and had conquered Byzantine cities on the Pontic coast; but when Murad, Orhan’s son, had their history translated from the Persian, it was only to hear (for he was illiterate) how they had eventually run themselves into the ground, like a river on the steppe.
Murad I evolved strategies to maintain his rule even while he himself was absent, playing the beys off against each other, moving them on if they showed signs of entrenching themselves in particular regions. Murad consulted experts on rulership, clerics from the old Muslim world.
When the ulema came to the Ottoman princes, they filled the world with all kinds of trickery. Before them nothing had been known of accounts or cadasters. They also introduced the practice of accumulating money and creating a treasury.
So wrote the gazi chronicler, in disgust. Clerics from the older, orthodox Muslim world, teachers and theologians who could smell success as surely as the Turcomans, came flocking into the Ottoman cities, bringing their mosques and medreses, their Arabic script and orthodox pieties. They brought the tools of sovereignty with them, too. All land, they instructed, belonged to the Sultan; a fifth of all booty. The spahi, or horseman, might receive an income from the Sultan’s lands, commensurate with his prowess, but not ownership, and he could be moved on at a nod.
In the years before the Ottoman conquest, Balkan society had been quietly feudalising itself: Dusan of Serbia had let his lords exact two days’ labour a week from their peasants. Under the Ottomans, peasants – the reaya – were only expected to work three days a year for the local spahi; beyond that small impost, and the tithe they paid as Christians amounting to ten per cent of their income, they were undisturbed in either their religion or their cultivation. Those who worked the land were to be protected, like sheep. Peasants came trickling back, if they had ever really left, to discover that all the weight of Balkan feudalism – the requisitions, corvées, serfdom, droit de seigneur – the whole bitter panoply of warriors in their castles and helpless villages clustered at their foot, had been swept away. Turkish overlordship came even to the Orthodox as a kind of liberation.
Between 1300 and 1375 the rank of the Ottoman leader rose from bey to emir, from emir to sultan. Their military renown pulled in fresh Anatolian recruits, eager for plunder and glory under their standard. The Ottomans moved against their Muslim neighbours by marriage, purchase, and often outright war, so that their holdings in Anatolia reached Ankara by the 1380s; they saw to it that jealous emirs in their rear could always be accused, if it came to blows, of undermining the sacred enterprise upon the frontier. Their advance through the Balkans, and against their Anatolian hinterland, pushed them upwards inexorably. They were expected to deal with feudal rulers, and to slap their inky palms to treaty documents,* to marry Balkan princesses, accept emperors as their vassals, and take in defeated Christian troops. When Balkan politicians sought out a representative among the invaders, to deal with this great movement of Islam into the Balkans, it was the Ottoman ruler they forever wooed, the Ottoman ruler whom they made kingly.
Ottoman power in its early days was a family affair, with sovereignty shared, to a degree, by brothers, uncles, cousins and even female relatives; and when Murad I in 1365 founded the janissaries, the jeni ceri, or ‘new troop’, he extended his family in a remarkable way. Osman and Orhan had taken their fifth of booty, as the Koran permits a leader to do, in the form of land and gold; Murad took up his fifth of the captives, too. Slave armies were common in the old Islamic world, and the men of the frontier knew just where to pin the blame. ‘It was a pair of theologians who introduced this innovation,’ says the early Turkish chronicler, gazi to his marrow; and we can almost hear, across the centuries, his windy sigh of exasperation.
By the time of Kosovo, 1389, Sofia and Nis and the outskirts of Varna on the Black Sea coast were in Turkish hands, and Murad’s vassals ruled to the banks of the Danube, their loyalty burnished by the presence of Turkish garrisons at Nicopolis and Sumen.
In the Sultan’s tent at Kosovo in 1389 a Serb called Milosh Obravitch, long since immortalised in ballad, drew a dagger and stabbed Murad, wounding him fatally. Three times the assassin made an effort to regain his horse before they hacked him down. And when Murad’s two sons returned to camp, Prince Bayezit promptly had his brother executed and took up the sultanate on the spot.
* Poor Manuel! For fear of the Turks, the Byzantine Emperor John V in Constantinople refused him shelter within the walls of the ancient city. There was nowhere else for him to go but to the Ottomans themselves, for whom he worked faithfully until 1394.
* The early Ottoman leaders, before Bayezit I, were illiterate. Murad I (r. 1356–89) dipped his thumb and three fingers in the ink, and pressed them to the page. From this simple cognomen, it is said, the Ottomans developed the beautiful callig
raphic emblems of subsequent rulers, the tughras which followed this basic pattern: a large, ballooning oval at the left to represent the thumb, and three wavy lines above, the marks of the fingers. In 1916 the original Ottoman treaty with Ragusa (Dubrovnik), with Sultan Murad’s print on it, could be seen in the museum of the Communal Palace at Dubrovnik.
3
Thunderbolt
Bayezit is known in Turkish history as Yilderim, ‘Thunderbolt’, though whether because of his lightning marches, or the speed with which he seized the sultanate, or his ferocious temper, nobody is sure. He opened his reign with a succession of dazzling exploits. He pushed back a coalition of Anatolian beys. In the Holy City of Constantinople the Byzantine Emperor, now his vassal, gave over one of the churches to be a mosque, surrounded by a Muslim merchant quarter, equipped with its own religious judge, a kadi.
Murad had been the illiterate son of an emir. Bayezit was the son of a sultan. His mother was a Byzantine princess, born of that city where imperial grandeur and its assumptions had been ingrained for a thousand years. The ulema mistrusted him. He named his children after major religions. The Pope opened a correspondence with him, though he might have been surprised by Bayezit’s ambition to make the high altar of St Peter’s a manger for his horse. Bayezit grubbed up the buffer state between his domains and Hungary by executing Shishman of Bulgaria; he dressed like a Greek, practised buggery like one; drank wine; and asked the Caliph in Cairo to make him Sultan of Rum. He seems to have enjoyed having enemies. ‘For this I was born – ’ he told a shrinking Jean de Nevers, hefting his scimitar, ‘to bear arms and to conquer whatever is before me,’ and he bundled emirs from their emirates until he could claim to rule from the banks of the Danube to the far Euphrates.
Lords of the Horizons Page 3
