The Ottoman Empire
Jutting out from the Middle East proper lies the peninsula known in antiquity as
Asia Minor. When the Turks arrived in the 11th century, they called the land Anatolia, a
word derived from the Greek word for east. Anatolia forms almost a bridge between
Europe and Asia split by the tiny channel of the Bosporus where the Black Sea empties
into the Sea of Marmara and thence to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. The
modern nation of Turkey consists of Anatolia and the small area of Europe known as
Thrace. This area just across the Bosporus contains the famous site of Constantinople,
now Istanbul, and the city of Gallipoli. Just across the Dardanelles on the Anatolian side
lies the ancient site of the city of Troy. One can hardly imagine a more symbolic
“bridge” from the ancient Greek wars, to the besieged capital of Byzantium, to the
modern wars that spanned all of Eurasia. Asia Minor was the stepping stone to greatness
for figures as diverse as Alexander the Great, the Apostle Paul, and more to our topic, the
father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Hittites, Lydians, Persians, Greeks, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuk Turks,
and Mongols all recognized the geographical importance of this spot and in that order.
The last great empire to claim Anatolia as their sacred center was the Ottoman Empire,
named for a mythical figure said to have led their earliest conquests just as the
Renaissance commenced in Italy. Because the people of Osman, or Otman, confronted
Byzantium they were accorded special prestige in the Muslim world. They upheld this
dynamic banner of confrontation and expansion until they were ruined by the Great War,
or World War I. Victories by the Ottoman Turks began as early as 1326 in Anatolia,
where they fought even against the Seljuk Turks, and then by 1354 they invaded Europe.
In a great end run around the apparently impregnable Constantinople they crossed the
Dardanelles and rampaged across the Balkans going so far as to conquer Alexander’s
homeland, Macedonia. Their success was not only military but also commercial as they
forged a trade alliance with Genoa in Italy. The Ottomans owned the bridge and they
capitalized on their good fortune.
The fourth Ottoman ruler to bear the title Sultan, a man named Bayezid I,
extended Ottoman control eastward to all of Anatolia. His forces then crushed European
knights sent on “crusade” at Nicopolis in the Balkans in 1396, but he himself was crushed
and captured by Timur the Lame, the half-Turk, half-Mongol pretender to the legacy of
Genghis Khan. Bayezid was the unfortunate captive to be caged by Timur and abused
along with the women of his immediate family. He committed suicide in despair. His
son, Mehmed I, practiced the Ottoman tradition in succession—fratricidal war. After
subduing all his brothers in 1413, he bent all his will on restoring the Ottoman state. His
son was able to resume control across Anatolia and even continue expansion back into
Europe. A national consciousness arose from this resurgence, and Turkish literature as
well as a dynasty was born.
One of the most curious cultural exchanges of all history drove this success. As
Ottoman Turks conquered Christian lands in Europe, young Christian boys were captured
and raised as Muslims with strict military discipline. As the boys grew into young men
they formed an elite corps of the Ottoman armies which no native-born Muslims could
join until the 1600s. Known as Janissaries from the term for “new troops,” these soldiers
formed a unique class with the power to build up or to tear down sultans. They formed a
Muslim type of celibate fighting order like the Christian Knights Hospitaller. Many of
their most promising members rose in the ranks to attain high administrative power in the
Ottoman government. With their influence stabilizing the frontier, religious authorities
rose up in the heart of the Ottoman Empire to the highest level of Islamic control over
any Muslim state to that point in history. Caliphs and other holy men were trained
academically and graded in a hierarchy in such a way as to be the first real attempt by a
civilized Muslim state to use its wealth and power to establish the Holy Law of Islam as
the law of the land. Ottoman Muslims were Sunni, so Sunni scholars attained
governmental powers and immense status. This combination of dedicated military
service and institutionalized religious devotion was the genesis of Ottoman unity and
power that would last until the Janissaries sought wives, had families, and devoted
themselves to their own purposes. Thus always to empires! First, though, let’s build one.
By 1451, a sultan came along who realized what the Ottomans must do to
consolidate their gains into a lasting empire. Mehmed II observed the eastern and
western halves of his empire to require greater unity so he set his sights, literally, on the
nuisance dividing them—Constantinople. Mehmed drew his army up in 1453 outside
Constantinople and planned his attack. Both sides possessed artillery and began to
pummel each other, but in evidence of how primitive this new terror weapon was, the
largest Byzantine cannon exploded. The Ottomans still had their largest cannon, though,
a gun so big it took 60 oxen to move it. The Ottomans easily crossed the Bosporus with
their fleet, but the Byzantines had placed a great chain across the mouth of the Golden
Horn, the inlet of the Sea of Marmara that flanked their city. The Byzantine fleet
positioned itself astride this chain and the people of Constantinople felt safe behind this
line and their triple-walled fortifications. Mehmed devised a bold plan, however, to get
behind the city. While a massive artillery bombardment, bolstered by his invention of
long-range mortars, kept the defenders pinned down, Mehmed ordered 72 of his smallest
ships slid overland around the chain and the Byzantine fleet and slipped into the Golden
Horn behind enemy lines. The people of Constantinople were forced to totally readjust
their defenses while Mehmed built a pontoon bridge and transferred his forces behind
them. Thus, when the final assault came on May 26, 1453, their lines were dangerously
thin.
While the first Ottoman forces assaulted the walls from land, Ottoman ships
attempted to draw up close enough to the walls nearest them in order to erect scaling
ladders. A second wave of attacks succeeded in breaching part of the defenses of
Constantinople but was driven back. In a last desperate attempt Mehmed committed all
of his reserve troops including the Janissaries. The Janissaries were infantrymen who
carried muskets, and their slow, disciplined advance was said to terrify the defenders who
watched their approach. Fifty soldiers of this third wave made it inside Constantinople
and raised their banner atop the wall, but this display only served to tell the defenders
where to attack. But then Constantinople suffered two great losses. The Italian soldier
commanding the area of the breach was mortally wounded. Then news came that the
Ottomans had come over the wall on the side of the Golden Horn and slain the last
Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, who had died defending the wall. The defense of
Constantinople collapsed, and Mehmed, from then on known as the Conqueror, entered
the city and prayed at the Hagia Sophia. He converted this edifice, one of the most
beautiful churches in Christendom, into a mosque. By the skillful use of both muskets
and cannon, the Ottoman Empire earned a place in history as the Gunpowder Empire. By
capturing the last vestige of Roman power, Mehmed the Conqueror unified his nation and
earned the highest praise from all Muslims, or most of them.
Constantinople was hereafter known as Istanbul (from the Greek for “into the
city”) and became the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. There Christian Greeks and
Muslim Turks (and others) formed a new metropolis where Muslims, Christians, and
Jews lived in peace. Mehmed declared himself to be the new Caesar, and even Greek
scholars said, “Whoever is legally master of the capital of the empire is the emperor.” So
many people migrated to live in the new capital with the new emperor that the Ottomans
were forced to expand their holdings north of the Black Sea in order to acquire enough
farm land with which to feed them. Now the Ottomans replaced the Italians as the
masters of the East/West exchange. With this impetus the Ottomans were able to leap
West beyond the Aegean Sea to the Adriatic and occupy much of the Dalmatian coast.
As a result, they possessed the Silk Road. Preeminence in trade allowed the Ottomans to
sever the commercial strength created between the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and the
remnants of the Mongol Empire, notably the Golden Horde. As the new seat of power,
the Ottoman Empire was able to exact an alliance with their neighboring Mongol khanate
against the Golden Horde as well as against the rising power of Russia.
As a natural boundary and thriving trade were stabilized with Christian Europe,
Ottoman sultans turned back eastward to assert their authority over all Turks. These
neighboring tribes were subdued by 1475, and Sunni Ottoman authority was enforced
over more and more of Shi’a Muslims and over the mystical whirling dervishes
associated with Sufism. Mehmet the Conqueror also sent news of his victories to the
Mamluk sultan of Cairo addressing him as the Defender of the Islamic Holy Places
(Mecca and Medina). Mehmet called himself the Defender of the Islamic Frontier, a
subtle assertion of more active leadership. In the typical rivalry among sons following
Mehmet’s death, his son Cem escaped to Egypt and thus strained the relationship
between the Mamluks and the winning son who became the Sultan Bayezid II of the
Ottoman Empire. By the 1480s efforts to maintain peaceful relations failed, and the
steadily improving Ottoman armies marched on the declining Mamluk powers just as
they were beginning to be harassed from behind by the Portuguese who had sailed around
Africa by the early 1500s. Instead of uniting on a new front against Christians, Bayezid
II decided the Mamluks were past their prime. Some Mamluks armies mutinied, and by
1516 Ottoman armies launched a full-scale invasion and killed the last Mamluk sultan.
Bayezid’s son achieved the title Selim the Grim by crushing the last Mamluk army
outside Cairo, Egypt in 1517. This defeat is said to mark the end of the Medieval Islamic
world.
From these successes the Ottoman Empire reached its peak during the reign of
Süleyman the Magnificent. The new Sultan’s armies swept deeper into Europe going so
far as to lay siege to Vienna in 1529. Ottoman fleets defied the Portuguese in the Indian
Ocean. The Ottoman Empire stretched west from Egypt across North Africa allowing
their naval power to become a presence in the Mediterranean and even out into the
Atlantic where Ottoman vessels raided the coasts of Western Europe. One Elizabethan
historian called the Ottomans, “the present Terror of the World.” In 1571, however, the
Ottomans lost the Battle of Lepanto, a giant naval battle on the Mediterranean Sea
celebrated across Europe as a great Christian victory. A truce was reached for a time in
1606 when a Holy Roman Emperor and an Ottoman sultan met on an island in the river
that marked the boundary between their lands and signed a peace treaty. Peace lasted
until the Turks launched another jihad in Central Europe until a second attempt to take
Vienna failed completely in 1683. Ottoman expansion was over.
European history and society were altered permanently by this East/West clash
that some historians said presaged the standoff between the superpowers of the United
States and the Soviet Union. Muslim populations remain in the Balkans today, and
nationalistic impulses that have made “balkanization,” a term meaning cultural and
political splintering, have their roots in Christian vs. Muslim clashes. Jews, displaced by
the Inquisition and Reconquista in Spain, fled east to peaceful assimilation among the
Ottomans. Even Martin Luther said that he and much of Europe would rather live under
the rule of “honest Musselmans” rather than that of a corrupt Catholic Church. All the
while shrewd merchants on both sides of the religious divide benefitted from the vast
wealth in the open markets crossing the bridge from Asia to Europe. Europeans were so
impressed by the efficiency and military might of the Ottomans at its height that they
sought to imitate them. Süleyman the Magnificent was replaced upon his death,
however, by a sultan that came to be known as Selim the Sot. The last expansive
conquests notwithstanding, the Ottoman Empire went down from there. By the end of
the 17th century, the resulting instability in Ottoman control of its empire became known
as the problematic “Eastern question.” Two centuries later the crumbling Ottoman
Empire joined the Central Powers in what became World War I. The Central Powers
were the losing side, and the Ottoman Empire is one of four destroyed by the Great War.