Download PDF | Colin Imber - The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650_ The Structure of Power (2003).
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Introduction
To write a general history of the Ottoman Empire is a foolhardy undertaking, and one that needs justification. A general history requires a solid foundation of books and articles that cover all aspects of the subject, and a tradition of debate that gives it a shape and a direction. These are things whose existence the historian of western Europe can take for granted. For an Ottomanist, however, the scene is different. It is not that books and articles on the Ottoman Empire do not exist, but rather that they are fewer and their quality more variable. Furthermore, as relatively few people work in the field, research results tend to exist in isolation, with the consequence that the subject as a whole lacks coherence. It is, for the same reason, difficult to talk of debates in Ottoman history, or to perceive an overall direction in which the field is moving. Historians of the Ottoman Empire quickly find that not only have the major questions not been answered, but that more often than not they have never been asked. The sensible thing, therefore, would probably be to wait until the subject has developed before attempting to write a general synthesis.
Nonetheless, there is, I believe, a justification for a general book. The history of the Ottoman Empire is important and, as recent events in the Balkans have shown, sometimes even necessary for understanding contemporary problems. It is, however, difficult for nonspecialists to gain an entry into the field. Most of what is easily available is unsatisfactory, while much of the best work is too specialised or too technical for most readers. A general history can therefore serve to introduce the non-specialist to the field, and to provide a context which makes it possible to read the specialist works. I hope too that it might prove useful to Ottomanists, in giving the straightforward chronology of events which has hitherto been lacking — however unfashionable chronologcal narrative might be, it remains fundamental to historical understanding — and in providing a tentative account of the development of Ottoman institutions.
My approach to the subject is narrow, and arose from a tendency among Ottoman historians no longer to refer to the Ottoman ‘Empire’, but rather to the Ottoman ‘State’. Initially, this term gained currency from its use by nationalist historians in the Republic of Turkey who have popularised the theory that the Turks have a genius for state-creation, and that the Ottoman Empire was one of a number of Turkish states established throughout history. The theory is nonsense, but it does raise a question: what kind of a ‘state’ was the Ottoman Empire? I have tried to answer the question — or to begin to answer it — by describing those institutions through which the Ottoman Sultan projected his power: the dynasty and the means of recruitment to dynastic service; the palace, court and central government; provincial government; the law; the army and the fleet. There should have been a chapter on taxation, but I leave this important topic to someone who, unlike me, understands figures. I have tried to show how these institutions developed and changed over three-anda-half centuries. The study ends in the mid-seventeenth century, at the close of a period of crisis which brought to an end the Empire's expansion and brought changes to the structure of its institutions. The successive crises in the half century from about 1600 mark the end of the period in Ottoman history that it was once customary to designate as ‘the rise of the Ottoman Empire’. It seemed, for this reason, to be an appropriate place to conclude this study.
It is detail and an awareness of primary sources that bring the study of history to life. A general history, however, necessarily omits details and must rely mainly on secondary materials. I have tried, nevertheless, to include some historical details, either to illustrate generalities, or to use them as evidence for assertions. I have tried, at the same time, to keep the reader in touch with the primary sources.
COLIN IMBER
Chronology
The Ottoman Empire in 1650
In 1650, the Ottoman Empire occupied lands in Europe, Asia and Africa. In Europe, Ottoman territory encompassed most of the Balkan Peninsula south of the rivers Danube and Sava, and the lands of central Hungary to the north. The Principalities of Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia and the Crimea which lay between Hungary and the Black Sea were tributaries of the Ottoman Sultan. In Asia, the Empire extended eastwards from the Bosphorus to the mountainous border with Iran, and southwards to the headwaters of the Gulf, and to Yemen in the south-west of the Arabian Peninsula. In Africa, the lands of the Empire comprised part of the western littoral of the Red Sea, the wealthy province of Egypt, and the semi-autonomous outposts of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers. In the Mediterranean, Cyprus and most of the islands of the Aegean Archipelago were Ottoman possessions. By 1669, so too was Crete.
Europeans in the seventeenth century, as they still do, normally referred to the Empire as the ‘Turkish Empire’, and to its people — or at least its Muslim people — as ‘Turks’. These designations are, however, only partially correct. The population of the Empire was heterogenous in religion, language and social structure. As the Faith of the sultans and of the ruling élite, Islam was the dominant religion, but the Greek and Armenian Orthodox Churches retained an important place within the political structure of the Empire, and ministered to large Christian populations which, in many areas, outnumbered Muslims. There was also a substantial population of Ottoman Jews. Following the settlement there of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, Thessaloniki had become the city with the largest Jewish population anywhere in the world.’ Outside these main groups, there were numerous other Christian and non-Christian communities, such as the Maronites and Druzes of Lebanon. Linguistic groups were as varied and overlapping as religious communities. In the Balkan Peninsula, Slavonic, Greek and Albanian speakers were undoubtedly in the majority, but besides these, there were substantial minorities of Turks and romance-speaking Vlachs. In Anatolia, Turkish was the majority language, but this was also an area of Greek and Armenian speech and, in the east and south-east, Kurdish. In Syria, Iraq, Arabia, Egypt and north Africa, most of the population spoke dialects of Arabic with, above them, a Turkish-speaking élite. However, in no province of the Empire was there a unique language. The social structure of the Empire was also varied. The economy of the Ottoman Empire was overwhelmingly agricultural, and the glory of the sultans, as political writers frequently emphasise, rested on the labour of the peasantry. However, the types of agriculture and livestock rearing, as well as the social structure of villages and peasant households, varied with different traditions and with the variations in terrain and climate. In contrast with the peasantry, a part of the Empire’s population led a semi-nomadic, pastoral existence, often at odds with the settled peoples and government. Among these groups were the Bedouin on the desert margins of Arabia, Syria and Egypt, the Vlachs of the Balkan Peninsula and the Turkish-speaking tribesmen of Anatolia, northern Syria and south-eastern Europe.
In the mid-seventeenth century, the political and military élite tended to be of Albanian or Caucasian — that is, typically, Georgian, Abkhazian or Circassian — descent.* The legal and religious figures who staffed the religious colleges, law courts and mosques were more likely to be Turks, in the western Balkans, Bosnians or, in the Arabic-speaking provinces, Arabs. The Ottoman Empire was, in short, multinational. Certain groups certainly enjoyed an advantage in the competition for political office, and rivalry between ethnic factions was an important element in Ottoman politics. In principle, however, discrimination existed only on grounds of religion. Muslims alone could achieve political office or pursue careers in the scribal service, but even here, Muslim descent was not necessary. Many, if not most, political office holders were first or second generation converts from Christianity. It was the judicial offices that were the preserve of old Muslim families. One vital organ of government, however, remained open to non-Muslims. Many of the men who engaged in the risky if potentially profitable activity of tax farming were Christians or Jews.
The Ottoman Empire was not, therefore, exclusively Islamic; nor was it exclusively Turkish. Rather, it was a dynastic Empire in which the only loyalty demanded of all its multifarious inhabitants was allegiance to the sultan. The loyalty demanded of those who did not hold office consisted in no more than not rebelling and paying taxes in cash, kind or services. Even these were often negotiable. It was in the end the person of the sultan and not religious, ethnic or other identity that held the Empire together.
Nevertheless, it is not wholly misguided to refer to the sultan’s — in their Ottoman designation — ‘Well-Protected Realms’ as the ‘Turkish Empire’. By the seventeenth century, literate circles in Istanbul would not identify themselves as Turks, and often, in phrases such as ‘Turkish mischief makers’ or ‘senseless Turks’, used the word as a term of abuse. Nonetheless, Turkish in a refined form was the language of government and the lingua franca of the élite. A vizier might, by origin, be an Albanian, a Croat or an Abkhaz, but for all official and most literary purposes he would use Turkish and not his native tongue. As the language of power, Turkish had prestige throughout the Empire. Furthermore, despite their abuse, the Ottoman élite seems always to have thought of Muslim Turks as the most reliable of the sultan’s subjects. The settlement of Turkish colonies in the Balkans had accompanied the Ottoman conquest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and again, the years after the conquest of Cyprus in 1573 had witnessed the forcible removal to the island of Turks from Anatolia. The deportees were sometimes troublemakers at home, but the intention was that with their removal to a distant territory they would form a nucleus of loyal Ottoman subjects. It should be noted, however, that the sultans also resettled nonTurkish groups, such as the Jewish community implanted on Cyprus after 1573 in order to stimulate the commercial life of the island. The Jews, like the Turks, had a reputation for loyal endeavour.
The reason for the dominance in the Empire of the Turkish language and the important, although unprivileged position of the Turks lies in the Empire’s origins and in the history of Anatolia in the two and a half centuries before its foundation.
Before the Ottomans
The Ottoman Empire came into being in about 1300 in north-western Anatolia to the east of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. It was only one of numerous small principalities which had emerged in Anatolia in the last two decades of the thirteenth century on territory which had previously formed part of the Byzantine Empire. The lords of these territories and their followers were Muslim Turks, and their presence in Anatolia indicates not only a change in sovereignty, but also a change in ethnicity and religion. From being primarily Greek and Christian in the eleventh century, by 1300 Anatolia had become primarily Turkish and Muslim.
The origins of this change lie in the eleventh century. In the midcentury a confederation of Turkish tribes from Transoxania conquered Iran, and in 1055, occupied Baghdad, establishing it as the capital of the Great Seljuk dynasty. The consequence of these events was not simply to establish a new ruler in Baghdad, but also, with the influx of Turks from Central Asia, to alter the ethnic balance of the Middle East. Many of these Turkish incomers were to colonise Anatolia.
A convenient date for marking the beginning of this phenomenon is 1071. In this year the Great Seljuk Sultan defeated the Byzantine Emperor at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. The battle heralded the rapid collapse of Byzantine rule in eastern and central Anatolia, and the establishment in the following decades of the rule of a branch of the Seljuk dynasty. The area of Byzantine sovereignty shrank to the territory in western Anatolia between the Aegean and the central plateau. The collapse of Byzantine defences and the appearance of a Muslim dynasty undoubtedly encouraged the immigration of Turks. So too did geography. It seems that the Turks who had migrated from Transoxania to the Middle East were, in the main, seminomadic pastoralists, and Anatolia was well suited to this way of life. The Mediterranean coastlands and the plain of northern Syria provided them with a warm winter climate, while in the summer they and their flocks could follow the retreating snowline to the upland pastures of the Taurus mountains and the Anatolian plateau. It was perhaps these factors more than the collapse of Byzantine rule that encouraged the first Turkish immigrants into Anatolia. Many, one may presume, were to abandon pastoralism and settle in villages.
The Turks undoubtedly made up an important element in the realms of the Anatolian Seljuks. They did not, however, form a ruling class. The language of government in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was Persian, and there was clearly a sharp divide between the Persian speaking élite of the cities and the Turks in the countryside. It was events in the thirteenth century that were to raise the political status of Turkish speakers in Anatolia. The same events were also to bring about the political fragmentation in Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula that was to make possible the establishment of the principality that was to become the Ottoman Empire, and also to favour its rapid expansion.
The first of these crises affected the Balkan Peninsula rather than Anatolia. In 1204, the army of the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople and established a Latin Emperor in the city. With the capital in their possession the leaders of the Crusade divided Byzantine territory in Greece and the Aegean Archipelago among themselves, forcing the Byzantine government into exile at Nikaia (Iznik) and confining its territories to western Anatolia. During the course of the century, the Byzantine emperor recovered some lands in mainland Greece and the Peloponnesos, but the area still remained a patchwork of small principalities. The most lasting benefit of the Crusade came to Venice, which acquired strongholds in the Pelponnesos and islands in the Aegean, the most important of which was Negroponte (Evvoia) off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland. By the time of the Ottoman invasion of the Balkan Pensinsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the lands to the north had become similarly fragmented. For a while during the fourteenth century they found political unity under the Serbian Tsar, Stephen Dushan (d. 1355), whose lands comprised Serbia itself, as well as much of Macedonia, Thessaly, Epiros and Albania. On Stephen’s death, however, his successors divided the territory into small principalities. The same thing happened in Bulgaria. On the death of Tsar Alexander in 1371, his lands between the Danube and the Balkan mountains divided into three separate principalities. This fragmentation of the Balkan Peninsula, which had begun with the Fourth Crusade, was something which the Ottoman conquerors were later to exploit.
The Fourth Crusade did not, however, upset the equilibrium in Anatolia. The Byzantine Emperor retained control of western Anatolia and remained at peace with the Seljuk Sultan to the east. In the mid-thirteenth century, however, the Seljuk sultanate suffered a catastrophe. In 1243, a Mongol army — part of an invading force which, by 1258, had conquered Iran, Anatolia and Iraq — defeated a Seljuk army at Késedag and reduced the Sultan to the status of vassal. Henceforth, his overlord was the Ilkhan, the Mongol ruler of Iran.
The Mongol conquest did not at once affect Byzantine lands in western Anatolia. It was, however, a factor in the collapse of Byzantine rule in this area. The Mongols were a pastoral people, and needed the grasslands of the newly conquered Seljuk territory not only for their flocks, but especially for the horses that were essential for their military success. It seems very likely, therefore, that competition from the Mongols forced many Turkish pastoralists to seek new lands in the west. They found these in Byzantine Anatolia, where the river valleys lead down from the high plateau to the warmer climate on the shores of the Aegean, a feature of the landscape that was well suited to their summer and winter migration. The Turkish migration to the west became easier after 1261.
In this year, the Byzantine Emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, reconquered Constantinople. It was, as it turned out, a victory with some unhappy consequences. Once established in Constantinople, the Emperor used his resources against enemies in the west, ignoring his apparently secure eastern frontier. As Byzantine fortresses and military organisation fell into disrepair, invasion from the east became easier, and there was a Turkish migration, through the crumbled defences, to the sea. Thus, in the last decade of the thirteenth century, western Anatolia experienced the same transformation in its ethnic composition as central and eastern Anatolia had experienced in the last decade of the eleventh. As in the eleventh century, this change in ethnicity from primarily Greek to primarily Turkish had important political consequences.
These to a large extent mirrored the political changes in the former Seljuk realms. After 1243, the Seljuk sultans lost their power to Mongol governors, their formerly sovereign territory becoming the western outpost of the lands of the Ilkhans of Iran. In 1302, the last Seljuk sultan died. His death coincided with a period of weakening Ikhanid control over Anatolia, making it possible for local governors, lords and bandits to establish themselves as independent rulers. Thus, in the early fourteenth century, what had been Seljuk and Ilkhanid Anatolia broke up into a kaleidoscope of principalities. Of these, the largest, the longest lived and the most fearsome rival of the Ottoman Empire was the emirate of Karaman in south-central Anatolia, with the old Seljuk capital of Konya as a principal city.
The same phenomenon occurred in the former Byzantine lands in western Anatolia. Byzantine rule did not survive the Turkish immigration of the late thirteenth century, and by 1300 Turkish rule had replaced Greek, with a series of Turkish principalities on the former territory of the Emperor. On the south coast, around Antalya, lay the principality of Teke. To the north of Teke and lying inland were the territories of Hamid, around Isparta, and Germiyan, with its capital at Ktitahya. At the southernmost tip of the Aegean coast lay the principality of Menteshe. To the north of Menteshe were Aydin and Saruhan, with Tire and Manisa as their respective capitals. To the north of Saruhan, with part of its shoreline along the Dardanelles, lay the emirate of Karesi. North-west of Karesi, in the former Byzantine province of Bythinia, was the emirate of Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. His lands were to form the nucleus of the Ottoman Empire.*
One feature in particular distinguished the principalities that had emerged on former Byantine and Seljuk territories from the polities which they had replaced. Now the rulers and their followers, and not simply the subject people, were Turks. They were also Muslims. The mosques which they built during the course of the fourteenth century bear witness to their Faith, while the grandiose titles which they adopted for their mosque inscriptions show their wish to emulate the Seljuk sultans and the rulers in the old Islamic world. Nonetheless, the literary fragments which survive in Turkish from fourteenth-century Anatolia suggest that these new Turkish lords were ‘a rude, unlettered folk’, largely ignorant of the tenets of the orthodox Islam which they outwardly professed.
This was the world into which the future Ottoman Empire® emerged: strongly Turkish and tentatively Islamic. As the Empire expanded it became increasingly multinational, both in its subject populations and in its body politic. At the same time, the Islam of the rulers, which expressed itself through the adoption of Islamic law and the imposition of formal Islamic ritual, became increasingly orthodox. Nonetheless, the use of Turkish as the language of government and the Turkish element in the population — both a reflection of the Empire’s origins — gave the state a Turkish character.
The Ottoman Emirate: from triumph to disaster, 1300-1402
Ottoman tradition names Osman son of Ertughrul as the founder® of the Ottoman Empire, and relates how he declared himself a sovereign ruler at Karajahisar, a place which probably corresponds with Byzantine Malagina’ in the lower Sakarya valley. This much of the tradition appears to be true. How Osman and his followers came to settle in this area is a matter for speculation, since later Ottoman accounts are almost certainly myths. It is possible, however, that a natural disaster provided the first impetus. The Sakarya valley was a strategically important area, since it controlled the approach to Constantinople from the east. Despite his preoccupations in the west, the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII reorganised this frontier and, by 1280, had completed a new series of fortifications along the river bank. However, in the spring of 1302 the Sakarya flooded and, as a result of the indundations, changed its course, rendering the new defences useless. It was possibly this event that allowed Osman’s men to cross the river and settle in the Byzantine province of Bythinia.® Within a very short time, Turkish raiders had reached the Sea of Marmara. The contemporary Byzantine chronicler Pachymeres describes how news of Osman’s victories spread and attracted Turks from other areas of western Anatolia to join his following, and how his force was strong enough to defeat a Byzantine army near Nikomedia (Izmit), exposing all Bithynia to his raids. From their base in the Sakarya valley, where Osman had occupied the old Byzantine fortified places, his men plundered the countryside to the west, forcing the inhabitants into the walled towns. These remained secure, since Osman obviously lacked the military skills to undertake formal sieges: his assault on Nikaia failed. At the time of his death in the mid13208, Nikaia, Prousas (Bursa), Nikomedia (Izmit) and Pegai had still not fallen.
It was Osman who was the founder of the Ottoman Empire, and who was to give his name to the Ottoman — or Osmanli — dynasty, but it was under his son Orhan (1324?-62) that the little principality began to acquire a more settled aspect. Osman’s territory had contained no large towns. In 1326, however, the city of Bursa succumbed to starvation and became, from this date, the first capital of the Ottomans. In the next year, following an earthquake which damaged its fortifications, Orhan’s men occupied the Byzantine town of Lopadion (Ulubat), towards the Dardanelles. These disasters persuaded the Emperor Andronikos III to lead an army to Bithynia in 1328, but he turned back when Orhan checked his advance at Pelekanon, two days’ march from Constantinople. With the land route between the city and Bythinia now impassable, the fall of the remaining Byzantine cities was inevitable. Nikaia was the first to succumb, in 1331. Nikomedia followed in 1337, confining Byzantine territory in Asia to a few miles to the east of Constantinople. Ottoman expansion, however, was not only at the expense of Byzantium. In 1345-6, Orhan annexed the Turkish emirate of Karesi, whose lands along the Dardanelles provided a crossing point from Asia into Europe. Less than ten years later, in 1354, Orhan’s son Stileyman Pasha occupied Ankara to the east of his father’s territory but such is the obscurity of this period, that it is not clear from whom he took the city.
It was Orhan, too, who first established an Ottoman bridgehead in Europe. He achieved this by exploiting a civil war in Byzantium between the rival Emperors John [VI] Kantakouzenos and John [V] Palaiologos. Kantakouzenos sought allies among the Turkish rulers of western Anatolia and, in 1346 formed a pact with Orhan by marrying him to his daughter Theodora. The strategy was successful and, in 1347, Kantakouzenos entered Constantinople and proclaimed himself Emperor, with John V as his co-regent. It was, however, Orhan who gained most from this arrangement. In 1352, as war raged between John V and Kantakouzenos’ son Matthew, the father summoned help from Orhan, granting his troops under Stileyman Pasha a fortress on the Gallipoli peninsula.This was the first territory that the Ottomans occupied in Europe. Further conquest followed a natural disaster. In March 1354, an earthquake destroyed the walls of Gallipoli and other towns along the Dardanelles, which Stileyman at once occupied, bringing in as settlers Turks from Anatolia.
In 1354, Kantakouzenos abdicated, leaving John V as sole Emperor. Orhan had no family ties with John V, despite the Emperor's wish to form a marriage alliance, and so had no obligation to relinquish his new European possessions. Instead, he continued for a while to support the claims of Matthew Kantakouzenos to the Byzantine throne, while his men raided and eventually conquered much of eastern Thrace. In 1359 or 1361 — the date is unclear —- Orhan captured Dhidhimoteichon (Dimetoka), clearing a passage along the northern shore of the Aegean towards Thessaloniki.
By the time of Orhan’s death in 1362 his realm had taken on characteristics which were to distinguish the Ottoman Empire into the twentieth century. It comprised lands in both Asia and Europe, cities as well as rural settlements; and the ruler had constructed the first mosques and religious establishments that distinguished his principality as a Muslim polity.
It seems from a short literary reference that Orhan’s son, Murad I (1362-89), came to the throne after a civil war.'’° By the end of the 1360s, he was clearly secure in his rulership and his realms in Anatolia and in Europe began to expand rapidly. In the east he annexed the Turkish principalities that lay in an arc between his own lands in north-western Anatolia and Antalya on the Mediterranean coast. Ottoman chronicles present these annexations as entirely peaceful. Murad acquired, they say, part of the principality of Germiyan as a marriage portion which came with the betrothal of a Germiyanid princess to his son, Bayezid. Hamid to the south of Germiyan, Murad acquired by purchase. In fact, the Germiyanid marriage and the annexation of Hamid probably followed a military campaign. A chronology of 1439-40 tells us that in 1375-6 ‘The Germiyanid and Tatar armies were routed, and Kiitahya, some of the fortresses of Germiyan and the land of Hamid were conquered.’ Eastwards expansion brought Murad into contact with Karaman, the most powerful of the Anatolian emirates, and contact led to war. In 1387, to avenge himself for a previous Karamanid attack, Murad invaded and reduced the lord of Karaman, Alaeddin Ali, to submission.
The control of Germiyan, Hamid and territory to the south gave Murad control of a trade route leading from his capital at Bursa to Antalya, and most probably enhanced his treasury as much as it expanded his realms, but his conquests in Europe were more spectacular.
His reign, however, began with a defeat which might have halted Ottoman conquests in Europe altogether. In 1366, Amadeo of Savoy, the cousin of the Byzantine Emperor John V, captured Gallipoli on the European shore of the Dardanelles, a conquest which should have enabled the Byzantines to block the passage of the Turks across the Straits. Then, in 1369, the Emperor travelled to Rome to procure the assistance of the Pope. Nonetheless, Byzantine success was temporary. The continuing Ottoman advance into the Balkan Peninsula suggests that reinforcements continued to cross from Asia Minor, and no assistance came from Europe. Whatever advantage the Byzantines possessed they lost again in 1377, when the Emperor Andronikos IV ceded Gallipoli to Murad in return for his assistance in a civil war against his father and brothers.
The first of Murad’s great victories in Europe came, probably, in 1369," when Turkish forces occupied Adrianople (Edirne). The city occupies a strategic position at the confluence of the Maritsa and Tundzha rivers, giving access to central and eastern Bulgaria, and to western Thrace. It was probably, therefore, the imminent danger to the lands lying to the west of Edirne that motivated the two Serbian lords of Macedonia to form an alliance against Murad and to attack his forces on the Maritsa river in 1371. Both men lost their lives in the rout which followed and, in the words of a Greek Short Chronicle: ‘From then on the Muslims began to overrun the Empire of the Christians.’
The pressure which these Muslims exerted was both political and military. The Tsardom of Bulgaria became a vassal of Murad following his marriage, at an uncertain date, to Thamar, the sister of Tsar Shishman. The conquest of Thrace and Macedonia, however, was by war. Turkish raids began immediately after the battle of the Maritsa, with Thessaloniki suffering its first attack in 1372. In the same year, Pope Gregory XI tried unsuccessfully to form an anti-Turkish alliance, suggesting that the Latin colonies in central and southern Greece also felt under threat of attack. What had begun as raids, led to permanent conquests. In 1383, an Ottoman army under the Vizier Hayreddin Chandarli captured Serrai and laid siege to Thessaloniki. Four years later, in 1387, the city fell. The blockade of Thessaloniki, however, occupied only a fraction of Murad’s forces. Verroia fell, probably, in 1385-6 and Bitola shortly afterwards, bringing all of southern Macedonia under Ottoman control by 1387. By the 1380s, too, the Turks had begun to make raids south-westwards into Epiros — by 1386, Esau Buondelmonti, the Despot of Epiros, was Murad’s vassal — and southwards to the Peloponnesos. In 1387, in response to an invitation from Theodore, the Byzantine Despot of Mistra, the Turkish lord Evrenos harried lands in the Peloponnesos, attacking not only the rebels against the Despot, but also the Venetian settlements in the peninsula. Meanwhile, to the north, Ottoman expansion continued in the direction of Serbia.
In, probably, 1385 Sofia fell. Nish followed in the spring or summer of the next year, enabling Murad to enter the territory of the Serbian lord, Prince Lazar. This invasion was a failure. Lazar checked Murad’s advance at Ploénik, possibly in the summer of 1386, and forced his withdrawal. For three years Murad did not return to Serbia. His advance in the west had given the emir of Karaman, Alaeddin Ali, the opportunity to attack his lands in Anatolia, and it was against Karaman that Murad campaigned in 1387. Then, during the same year, the Bulgarian Tsar Shishman renounced his allegiance to Murad, unleashing a campaign under the Vizier Ali Chandarli to reduce him to submission. By the summer of 1388, Shishman had again accepted Murad’s overlordship.” But it was another event in 1388 that drew Murad back to Serbia in the following year.
It seems feasible that Murad’s vassal George Stracimirovi¢ Bal3i¢ lord of Zeta to the south of Bosnia, asked Murad for troops to attack Tvrtko, King of Bosnia, and that Murad responded by sending a certain Shahin. In August 1388, Bosnian troops routed Shahin’s men at Bileca, near the Adriatic, and it was perhaps with a view to striking ultimately against King Tvrtko that Murad marched westwards in 1389. His route, in any case, led him into Serbia, and here, on 15 June 1389, he encountered the army of Prince Lazar at Kosovo Polje.3 The outcome of the battle seems to have been a Turkish victory insofar as the Turks held the field, but with great losses. Both Murad and Lazar lost their lives in the battle. According to Ottoman tradition, Murad’s son, Bayezid, succeeded his father in a coup on the battlefield of Kosovo.'4
Fourteenth-century sources suggest that Murad styled himself modestly as ‘emir’ and not yet as ‘sultan’. The emirate that he had established on the basis of his inheritance from Orhan consisted of a federation of lords under Ottoman suzerainty. The lands which he had inherited around Bursa in Anatolia and the lands in Thrace around Edirne probably came directly under the rule of Murad himself or of his appointees. After the Germiyanid marriage of 1375-6, much of Ottoman Anatolia probably came under the rule of his son, Bayezid. Political power in the Balkan Peninsula lay largely with the Muslim marcher lords, whether these, like Evrenos in Macedonia, were of Turkish origin, or whether, like the Mihaloghlu family in north-eastern Bulgaria, they were converts from Christianity. In addition, many of the Christian dynasts of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Esau Buondelmonti of Ioannina, George Stracimirovié of Zeta, Shishman and Ivanko in Bulgaria, and the Byzantine Emperor and his son Theodore of Mistra, were Murad’s vassals. They owed him tribute and provided him with troops, but in return received support against their enemies. The Ottoman Empire was to retain a similar political structure until after 1450.
News of Murad’s death at Kosovo had, in all probability, reached Anatolia in the months after the battle and encouraged neighbouring powers to seize Ottoman lands. A contemporary source mentions in particular that Alaeddin of Karaman had recovered Beysehir, and that the lord of Germiyan had also tried to regain his lost lands. Bayezid’s response came in early 1390. By March of that year he had conquered the three principalities on the Aegean shore of Anatolia — Saruhan, Aydin and Menteshe, retaken Beysehir from Karaman and in this, or a later campaign, seized the lands that remained to Germiyan. The campaign, while extending Bayezid’s territories, did not secure peace. During its course, one of Bayezid’s Anatolian vassals, Siileyman Pasha of Kastamonu, transferred his allegiance from Bayezid to Burhaneddin, the ruler of much of central Anatolia, and Bayezid’s next campaign was against Stileyman Pasha. Its outcome was his execution in 1391 and the annexation of his realms. Next, Bayezid continued eastwards against Burhaneddin, his army strengthened as local lords from northern Anatolia attached their forces to his. He suffered a defeat at Corumlu, but this was clearly not so severe as to prevent his further advance. In December, however, weather, terrain and events in Europe forced him to return westwards. During the course of the campaign he had annexed Kastamonu, and perhaps obtained the allegiance of the lords and clan chiefs of northern Anatolia. The army that he led was very different from that of the first two Ottoman rulers. He now had in his following his vassal, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II with a contingent of Byzantine troops and also, on Manuel’s testimony, contingents of Serbs, Bulgarians and Albanians.”
In 1392, Bayezid’s main concern seems to have been with Serbia. After the battle of Kosovo, Serbia faced a threat of invasion from the Kingdom of Hungary to the north, and from the Ottomans to the south and east. It clearly had to accept the overlordship of one in order to gain protection from the other. A faction in Serbia preferred, it seems, Bayezid to King Sigismund of Hungary, and to formalise the arrangement Bayezid married Olivera, the sister of Lazar’s son and successor, Stephen Lazarevic. Stephen was henceforth Bayezid’s vassal. At the same time Bayezid asserted his suzerainty over George Stracimirovi¢é of Zeta and Vlk Brankovic, lord of Pri8tina. Bayezid’s next concern was Bulgaria. Why he should have invaded Tsar Shishman’s territory in 1393 and captured his capital of Tarnovo is not clear: Shishman had perhaps, for a second time, broken his allegiance to the Ottoman ruler. This was, however, only a preliminary engagement. Two years later, in order presumably to pre-empt the consequences of an anti-Turkish alliance between King Sigismund of Hungary and Voyvoda Mircea of Wallachia, Bayezid led his army to the north of the Danube and encountered the Wallachians in a violent but indecisive battle. On his return he entered Tarnovo and executed Tsar Shishman, exiling other members of the dynasty to governorships in Anatolia.
The establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over Serbia, the extinction of the Tsardom of Bulgaria, and Bayezid’s invasion of Wallachia posed a threat to the Kingdom of Hungary, lying to the north of the Danube. In the face of this danger, King Sigismund renewed his efforts to form an anti-Turkish league. It was not difficult to find allies among those whose lands Bayezid threatened, the first of whom was the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. In 1394, Bayezid had placed Constantinople under siege,’® and it had become clear that the city could not survive without assistance from foreign powers. The Emperor's main hope was Venice whose possessions in mainland Greece suffered from Turkish raids, and whose Aegean strongholds were coming under attack from Bayezid’s ships at Gallipoli. By 1396, Sigismund, the Emperor Manuel and Venice had agreed to contribute troops and ships to a war against Bayezid. A more significant contingent came from France and Burgundy. In 1395, a truce between France and England had released the Franco-Burgundian knights for adventures elsewhere, and a contingent under John of Nevers, the son of the Duke of Burgundy, travelled to Hungary to join Sigismund’s Crusade against Bayezid.
Bayezid encountered the Crusaders in 1396 at Nicopolis (Nikopol) on the Danube in Bulgaria. His lightly armed cavalry, including a contingent under Stephen Lazarevi¢, outmanoeuvred the heavily armed western knights, drawing them into a trap and inflicting a total defeat. The survivors whom Bayezid did not execute, he kept for ransom. Following his victory, Bayezid removed the last independent Bulgarian lord, Sratsimir of Vidin, consolidating Ottoman domination of the lands south of the Danube. Hungary, however, while exposed to raids, did not face the invasion which King Sigismund had evidently feared. In 1397, Bayezid instead led his army to Anatolia.
The reason for his departure from Europe into Asia was the action of the emir of Karaman, Alaeddin, who, while Bayezid encountered the Crusaders at Nicopolis, had attacked and taken prisoner his GovernorGeneral in Anatolia. Bayezid’s response was decisive. In 1397 he invaded Karaman, occupied Konya, its major city, and executed Alaeddin.
Alaeddin was also his brother-in-law and, when he marched south to lay siege to Larende, his sister, Alaeddin’s widow, ordered the garrison to open the gates to Bayezid. With the death of Alaeddin and the removal of his widow to Bursa, Karaman became an Ottoman territory, and a base for further conquest in the north-east. This involved Bayezid in further conflict with Burhan al-Din of Sivas, whom he had first encountered in his Anatolian campaign of 1391. In 1398, he expelled Burhan al-Din from Sivas, annexed the small principalities near the Black Sea coast and then, following Burhan al-Din’s death, occupied Sivas itself. Soon afterwards, probably in 1399, he seized Malatya to the east of Sivas, a northernmost outpost of the Mamluk Sultans of Cairo. By 1401, he had advanced along the Upper Euphrates valley to take Erzincan from its lord, Taharten.
Bayezid’s ambitions in eastern Anatolia had a fatal consequence. The period of his conquests had coincided with the growth of another Empire to the east. Between the 1370s and 1400, Timur’? — or Tamburlaine — had from humble beginnings overrun lands in Central Asia, southern Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan, and out of these created an Empire of vassals, with its capital at Samarkand. By 1400, the westward expansion of Timur’s Empire and the eastward expansion of Bayezid’s led to conflict. The first blow fell in 1400, when Timur sacked Sivas. In 1401, he led his army into Syria, plundering Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Baalbek and Damascus, returning to spend the winter of 1401-2 in Karabagh in the Caucasus. Disputes with Bayezid over the allegiance of vassals provided Timur with an excuse for war and, in 1402, he invaded Bayezid’s realms, camping in July outside Ankara.
Timur’s strategy was as much political as military, exploiting the fragile loyalties of Bayezid’s subjects in Anatolia. In 1390, the lords of the old emirates of Germiyan, Saruhan, Aydin and Menteshe had sought the protection of Timur after Bayezid had annexed their lands. He now placed these men in prominent positions in his army. At the same time, his envoys had negotiated with the tribal chiefs of Anatolia, whose men fought in Bayezid’s army, to desert Bayezid on the battlefield. Furthermore, before the battle began, he had occupied a position which controlled access to the water supplies, exhausting Bayezid’s men even before the conflict. His strategy succeeded. When the battle opened, the cavalrymen from the old emirates, seeing their former lords in Timur’s army, deserted Bayezid. So, as pre-arranged, did the tribal levies. When these men changed sides, the forces under the command of his elder and younger sons, Stileyman and Mehmed, abandoned the field, leaving Bayezid with only his Janissary bodyguard and the contingent from Serbia under Stephen Lazarevi¢. He ended the battle a prisoner of Timur. He died a year later, still in captivity.
Timur followed the battle with a campaign of massacre and plunder in western Anatolia, which lasted until the summer of 1403.'8 He died in 1405, in the early stages of a campaign against China.
The Ottoman Emirate: civil war and recovery, 1402-1451
Timur’s campaign spread devastation in Anatolia, especially in the west. It also altered the political configuration. After the battle of Ankara, Timur re-established the old emirs of Germiyan, Saruhan, Aydin and Menteshe in their former realms, and reinstated the dynasty of Karaman, confining Ottoman rule in Anatolia to the strip of territory running from Amasya in the east to Bursa and the Sea of Marmara in the west. Timur had not touched Ottoman lands in the Balkans, but it was in the aftermath of Ankara that the Christian powers in the region — the Byzantine Emperor, Venice, Genoa and the Knights of St John — forced Bayezid’s son, Siileyman, in a treaty concluded at Gallipoli, to relinquish Thessaloniki to the Emperor and to make some other, less significant concessions.'? The Ottoman lands themselves were divided; Bayezid’s eldest son, Siileyman, ruled in Europe, his youngest son, Mehmed, in Amasya to the north-east of Ankara. A third son, Isa, tried to establish himself in western Anatolia. Another son, Musa, after Timur had released him, came into the custody of Mehmed. Another, Mustafa, disappeared, conceivably as a captive to Samarkand. With no agreed succession to Bayezid, a civil war was inevitable.
In 1403, Stileyman was the most powerful of Bayezid’s successors. He had, in the Treaty of Gallipoli, ceded Thessaloniki and some other territories, but otherwise had inherited his father’s European domains intact. An alliance which Sigismund of Hungary had proposed in 1406 between himself and Stephen Lazarevi¢ of Serbia never materialised. Instead, in 1409, Siileyman’s forces assisted Stephen’s brother, Vik Lazarevi¢ and George Brankovi¢ in devastating Stephen’s realms and establishing themselves as rulers in southern Serbia. Siileyman’s action made him overlord of all three Serbian principalities. In Anatolia, Prince Mehmed faced more opposition to his rule. From the battlefield of Ankara, he withdrew to Tokat in the north-east, where he faced the attacks and rebellions of local dynasts and tribal leaders. It was only when he had averted these dangers that he could travel westwards to challenge his brother Isa for possesion of the old capital of Bursa. Isa offered no effective resistance. He fled to Karaman and ‘disappeared there’. Isa’s flight did not, however, put an end to Mehmed’s troubles. In 1404, feeling his European territories to be secure, Siileyman crossed the Straits to Anatolia and, with his superior forces, occupied Bursa, driving Mehmed back to Amasya and confining his rule to the Ottoman territories to the east of Ankara. For the next five years, Siileyman was master of part of western Anatolia and of the Ottoman Balkans.
The decisive move which Mehmed made against Siileyman was political rather than military. He had in his custody his brother Musa, and in 1409 he set him free. Released from captivity, Musa crossed the Black Sea to Wallachia where he entered into a marriage alliance with the Voyvoda Mircea. Then, with troops from his father-in-law, he crossed the Danube into Siileyman’s territory and, in his brother's absence, overran eastern Bulgaria and Thrace and occupied Gallipoli. The result of Musa’s success was exactly as Mehmed had intended. The need to re-establish his rule in his European territories forced Stileyman’s withdrawal from western Anatolia, allowing Mehmed to occupy the territories which Stileyman had conquered. His victory was complete when, in the summer of 1410, the Byzantine Emperor ferried Stileyman and his men across the Straits to confront Musa.
Stileyman rapidly gained the upper hand, forcing Musa to live ‘like a brigand in the mountains’. Six months later, Stileyman was dead. The cause of his downfall was drunkenness. Early in 1411, Stileyman was in Edirne and as, to quote a Greek Short Chronicle, ‘he lay in stews and drank great cups of wine’, his brother's army approached. Stileyman ignored all warnings until it was too late. As Musa’s faction occupied Edirne, he fled towards Constantinople. Musa’s men caught up with him and strangled him on the road.”°
Musa’s reign was brief. He faced the hostility not only of his brother Mehmed in Anatolia, but also of the Serbian despot who harried his lands in the Morava valley, and of the Byzantine emperor, who set free Stileyman’s son, Orhan, to oppose his rule. It was this hostile act that led Musa, briefly and unsuccessfully, to lay siege to Constantinople in 141. While facing these enemies, Musa also suffered the desertion to Mehmed of several of the powerful marcher lords, apparently because he had seized their money and property, in an effort, presumably, to replenish his treasury at a time when the uncertainties of war and politics had cut off the flow of taxes. Nonetheless, in 1411, he defeated his brother Mehmed and in the following year carried out reprisals against Serbia. In late 1412, when Mehmed attempted to invade for a second time, foul weather forced him to retreat. In 1413, however, after receiving the friendship of Stephen Lazarevi¢é in Serbia and securing his eastern border by a marriage alliance with the lord of Dulgadir, he crossed the Bosphorus for the third time. In July he defeated and killed his brother outside Sofia.
The death of Musa left Mehmed I (1413-21) as the sole ruler of Ottoman territories in Europe and Asia. His inheritance, however, was fragile, with enemies determined to destroy his fractured domains. The first to attack was the emir of Karaman, who had laid siege to Bursa already during Mehmed’s last campaign against his brother. When the Karamanids had withdrawn on Mehmed’s return to Anatolia, the Emperor Manuel tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with Venice for a subvention against the Turks. When this plan failed, he again released from his captivity Stileyman’s son Orhan, with the intention that, in alliance with Mircea of Wallachia, he should overthrow Mehmed. This scheme too was a failure, but in 1414 another possibility arose when a Venetian galley captain at Trabzon took on board the envoy of a man who claimed to be Mustafa, the son of Bayezid who had disappeared at the battle of Ankara in 1402. The Venetians refused to cooperate, as to support Mustafa would upset their relationships with Mehmed. Mustafa, however, was to be useful to other of Mehmed’s enemies.
These, however, did not act immediately, giving Mehmed the opportunity to take vengeance on the emir of Karaman. In 1415, he besieged Konya, forcing the emir to cede the lands in western Karaman which he had taken from the Ottomans after their defeat at Ankara. From Karaman, Mehmed began the pacification of the old western Anatolian emirates, re-establishing his suzerainty and annexing Saruhan and part of Aydin. As governor he appointed Alexander Shishman, a scion of the old Bulgarian dynasty. The year 1415 was thus a year of renewed Ottoman advances.
In the following year, however, Mehmed faced three crises. The first was the consequence of the aggression of his ships at sea, which had begun to attack Venetian and other settlements in the Aegean Archipelago. In April 1416, after diplomacy had failed, a Venetian squadron destroyed the Ottoman fleet outside the Dardanelles. The Ottoman fleet did not present a danger again until after 1450. The second crisis came in August, when the man who had contacted Venice in 1414, claiming to be Mehmed’s brother Mustafa, landed in Wallachia and then, at the head of a force of Turks and Vlachs, crossed the Danube into Mehmed’s realms. The invasion failed. Mehmed defeated Mustafa’s army, compelling Mustafa himself to take refuge in Byzantine Thessaloniki. In response Mehmed laid siege to the city.
It was when he was here that he faced the greatest challenge to his rule, when two revolts broke out simultaneously, the one in the Dobrudja in north-eastern Bulgaria and the other on the Karaburun peninsula, on the Aegean shore of Anatolia opposite Chios. The leader of the Bulgarian revolt was Sheikh Bedreddin, a jurist and mystic, who had served as Musa’s Military Judge in Rumelia between 1411 and 1413.” The leader in Karaburun was Borkltije Mustafa, a charismatic dervish. Ottoman sources plausibly claim that the two men were in collusion. Both rebellions were the consequence of the instability and insecurity that had followed the Ottoman defeat at Ankara in 1402. Ottoman accounts of the rebellion are partisan, but entirely credible in their claim that Bedreddin found much of his support in the Dobrudja from among the officers and fief holders whom Musa had appointed during his reign in Rumelia, and whom Mehmed had dismissed on his accession to power. Bedreddin, who appears to have claimed the sultanate on the basis of his alleged descent from the Seljuks, anounced that, as Sultan he would reinstate the dispossessed. The revolt of Borkliije Mustafa had a different character. It was, it seems, a popular, millenarian rebellion around the person of Borkliije, who preached, according to the Greek chronicler Doukas, the equality of Muslims and Christians and the common ownership of property. Borkltije’s followers, Doukas leads us to believe, were ‘simple country folk’.
Both rebellions failed. The revolt in the Dobrudja collapsed when an agent of the Sultan seized Bedreddin and brought him before the Sultan at Serrai, where, in accordance with the fatwa of a Persian molla, he was hanged in the marketplace. The resistance of Bérkliije’s followers was fiercer. They defeated first the army of Shishman, the governor of Saruhan, and then the army of Ali Bey, another Ottoman governor in western Anatolia. It was only when Mehmed sent against them an army under the Vizier Bayezid Pasha that he was able to crush the rebellion. ‘Bayezid Pasha’, writes Doukas, ‘killed everyone in his path without sparing a soul, young or old, men and women.’ Bérkltije Mustafa and his dervishes he brought to Ephesus and executed. Despite the defeat, memories lingered, and a sect named after Bedreddin survived in the Dobrudja for at least two centuries after his death.
A beneficiary of Mehmed’s troubles had been the emir of Karaman who, when Mustafa invaded the Ottoman realms in Europe, had pillaged Ottoman Anatolia as far as Bursa. As a reprisal, in 1417 Mehmed invaded Karaman, bringing his army almost to Konya. He refrained, however, from attacking the city. Instead, in the same year, he led a second expedition in Anatolia against Isfendyaroghlu of Sinop, a campaign which left him in control of Kastamonu and its copper mines, and confined Isfendyaroghlu to the lands around Sinop. Three years later, in obscure circumstances, the Ottomans also occupied the Genoese colony of Samsun on the Black Sea coast. Mehmed’s conquests in the Balkan peninsula matched those in Anatolia. In 1417, the Venetians were alarmed to hear that an Ottoman force had seized Vloré on the Adriatic coast from Rugina, the ‘Lady of Valona’, and feared that Ottoman ships might appear in the Adriatic to harry Venetian commerce. Instead, in the same year, Hamza Pasha conquered Gjirokastér, the stronghold of the Zenevis clan, Vloré and Gjirokastér together giving the Sultan a substantial territory in southern Albania. This was in 1418. In the same year Mehmed led in person an expedition against Mircea of Wallachia, forcing him into submission and occupying the fortresses which controlled the crossing points on the Danube.
In 1421, Mehmed died. His son, Murad II (1421-51), did not, however, take possession of an undivided realm. In order to exploit the uncertainties of the succession, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II released Murad’s uncle, Mustafa, from custody in Thessaloniki, and it was to take vengeance on the Emperor for this act that in 1422 Murad laid siege to Constantinople. The siege lasted until September, when the Sultan withdrew, not so much in despair at Byzantine resistance, as in consequence of renewed dynastic strife.
The cause was the appearance in October 1422 of his younger brother ‘Little’ Mustafa, and it was only after his defeat that Murad could turn against external enemies. During the time of Murad’s struggles with the two Mustafas, Drakul, the Voyvoda of Wallachia, had crossed the Danube and harried Ottoman Rumelia. At the same time, Isfendyaroghlu of Sinop had recovered the territories in Kastamonu which Mehmed I had seized. After the death of the younger Mustafa, Murad personally led his army to Kastamonu to recover the lost territory and its copper mines, while a Rumelian marcher lord led a destructive expedition into Wallachia. The outcome of both campaigns was to reduce both Drakul and Isfendyaroghlu to vassalage, with Murad marrying an Isfendyarid Princess.
These campaigns restored stability to Murad’s realms, and within twenty years he had, with the exception of Karaman and the upper Euphrates valley, recovered the territories lost after the Battle of Ankara. The most significant loss in Europe at this time had been Thessaloniki and, in 1422, Murad’s forces blockaded the city. A year later, the Byzantines could no longer withstand the assault and ceded Thessaloniki to Venice. In the same year, a series of raids into the Peloponnesos by the Turkish marcher lord Turahan reminded the Christian signatories of the 1403 Treaty of Gallipoli that their political advantage over the Ottomans had evaporated.
While Thessaloniki was under siege, Murad directed his forces against the remaining emirates of western Anatolia. In 1424, he sent an army against Juneyd, the lord of Aydin, obliging him to take refuge in a coastal fortress and to seek assistance from the Venetians in Thessaloniki and from Karaman. These efforts failed. With the help of Genoese ships, the Ottoman besiegers captured the fortress and executed Juneyd with his entire family. By 1425, Murad had in addition annexed Menteshe, bringing all the Aegean coastline of Anatolia under his rule. Three years later, he completed his conquests in Asia by annexing the thickly wooded and mountainous areas along the Black Sea coast to the east of Samsun, and then, in 1428, occupying Germiyan after the death of its last dynastic lord.
During these years, the siege of Thessaloniki continued, forcing the Venetians to seek allies against the Sultan. When they received overtures from the Duke of Athens, Antonio Acciajuoli, and from Theodore, Despot of Mistra, the Venetians procrastinated. Their hope was for an alliance with King Sigismund of Hungary. These plans did not materialise, even though Sigismund and Murad had come into conflict. The cause was the disputed overlordship of Serbia. The elderly Stephen Lazarevi¢ had, it seems, transferred his allegiance from the Ottoman Sultan to Sigismund and had, furthermore, promised to bequeath the Danubian fortress of Golubats to the Hungarian King. An Ottoman advance to the Serbian border seems to have forced Stephen into submission but, in 1427, the old Despot died. This unleashed a war, with Sigismund seizing Belgrade, and Murad retaliating with the capture of Golubats. The Serbian Despot, George Brankovic, found himself squeezed between the King and the Sultan.
By 1430, it had become clear that Venice could expect no help from Hungary in relieving the siege of Thessaloniki, and in March of that year, the Sultan himself encamped before the city. At the end of the month, Thessaloniki fell to a general assault. In the subsequent treaty, Venice ceded the city and agreed to pay Murad an annual tribute for Venetian possessions in Albania. In the same year, the Ottomans conquered Ioannina in Epiros. The occasion for this was the death of the Despot Carlo Tocco in 1429, with no legitimate heirs. The Despotate passed therefore to his nephew, Carlo II, a protégé of the Angevin King of Naples. Murad clearly did not wish to see the implantation of Angevin influence in Greece, and found a reason to oust Carlo II. Carlo I Tocco had no legitimate heir, but he had had six illegitimate sons, who had resided in turn at Murad’s court, and it was in answer to the call of the eldest, Hercules Tocco, that Murad sent Sinan Pasha against Ioannina in 1430. Sinan Pasha occupied the city, but instead of installing Hercules, he placed it directly under Ottoman rule. He next harried Carlo II’s domains in Arta, as a reminder no doubt that he ruled there as a vassal of Murad.
The years after 1430 saw the uncertain establishment of Ottoman rule in central and southern Albania. This began with the seizure of territories to the north of Gjirokastér belonging to the Arianit and Kastriote clans, and then a successful rebellion of the defeated lords and an Albanian siege of Gjirokastér. Ottoman reprisals came early in 1433,when an army under the marcher lord Ali, the son of Evrenos, entered Albania, raised the siege of Gjirokastér and ‘destroyed John Kastriote’s domains’. John Kastriote was to continue to rule at Krujé as an Ottoman vassal, with his son George — the famous Scanderbeg —a hostage at the Ottoman court. With much of Albania under his control, Murad next extended his dominion over Serbia, not this time by force, but by marriage. In 1435, he wed Mara, the daughter of the Despot George Brankovic, establishing her father as his vassal.
The marriage was the first step in the conquest of Serbia. Despite Brankovic’s protected status as a vassal, in 1438 Murad led a campaign which first captured Boraé in the north of Serbia, before crossing the Danube and making a devastating raid into Transylvania. In 1439, he took Zvornik and Srebrenica on the border with Bosnia and, most importantly, the fortress of Smederovo on the Danube, bringing northern Serbia under his control. His final goal, however, was the Kingdom of Hungary. By 1439, with Serbia under his dominion and his eastern border secure after defeating Ibrahim of Karaman in 1437, he was free to act. The moment was propitious. In 1437, soon after the death of King Sigismund, a peasants’ revolt had shaken Hungary. In 1440, Sigismund’s successor, Albert II, died, leaving an infant as his heir. It was at this moment that Murad attacked, laying siege to the strategically vital fortress of Belgrade and sending raiders into the Kingdom.
The siege of Belgrade was a failure, and the defeat marked the beginning of a crisis in Ottoman rule. This was not at first evident. Civil war in Hungary over the succession to King Albert allowed Murad to launch a new raid in 1441, and civil war in Byzantium allowed him to intervene on behalf of the pretender Demetrios. Demetrios, however, failed to secure the Imperial title, and the lord of Transylvania, John Hunyadi, defeated the Ottoman incursion of 1441 and another in the following year. These small victories, together with the election of King Vladislav III of Poland as Vladislav I of Hungary, clearly raised Christian morale. But what threatened Murad most was a new crusading alliance.
In 1439, as the price of receiving military aid from Catholic Europe, the Byzantine Emperor, John VIII, had accepted the union of the Greek and Latin Churches under the primacy of Rome. Pope Eugenius IV had a strong motive for fulfilling his side of the contract and organising a Crusade on the Emperor's behalf. His position as head of the Church was not secure, but a successful Crusade would make his position unassailable. Nor did he have difficulty in raising support for the project. Above all, he was able to enthuse King Vladislav whose kingdom was under attack from the Ottomans. Venice, too, was ready to participate, since a successful Crusade could lead to the reoccupation of Thessaloniki and the acquisition of other territories. So, too, was the Duke of Burgundy. Credentials as a Crusader could lead to his recognition as a king. The other willing participant against his Ottoman enemy was the emir of Karaman. If the emir could attack Murad in the east and draw him into Anatolia, the Venetian, Burgundian, Pontifical and Byzantine galleys could block the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and prevent Murad from crossing the Straits to meet the Hungarian army as it invaded his territories in Europe.
The difficulty with this plan was coordination. In 1443, before the allied fleet was ready, Ibrahim of Karaman attacked Murad’s lands in Anatolia. With no opposition at the Straits from the Byzantine Emperor, Murad crossed to Anatolia and forced Ibrahim into submission before returning to Edirne. Here he learned first of the death of his favourite son, Alaeddin, and then, in late autumn, of an invasion. A Hungarian army under John Hunyadi had entered and devastated Serbia and was advancing towards Sofia, destroying or forcing back the Ottoman forces in its path. The Hungarians had the advantage not only in the size of their army, but also in the new battlefield tactic of creating mobile fortresses out of carts and field artillery, which the Ottoman cavalry were unable to approach. In the end, despite the desertion of his cavalry army, Murad and his Janissaries stopped the Hungarian advance at the Zlatitsa Pass in the Balkan Mountains. In bitter winter weather, both armies retreated.
It was probably the horrors of the winter war that persuaded Murad and Vladislav to make peace. In the summer of 1444 in Edirne, the negotiators agreed on a ten-year truce between Murad and Vladislav,22 and the cession of Golubats, Smederovo and other fortresses to George Brankovic. In August an Ottoman envoy travelled to Hungary to ratify the terms. Then Murad made an extraordinary decision. Saddened, no doubt, by the death of Alaeddin and the events of the winter war, and with all his borders apparently secure, he abdicated in favour of his twelve-year-old son, Prince Mehmed.
This was an opportunity that the Pope did not let pass. To allow the Crusade to continue, he absolved the King of Hungary from his oath and, in the autumn of 1444, King Vladislav and John Hunyadi led the Hungarian army on a destructive march to Varna, on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. In the crisis, the Viziers recalled Murad from his retirement in Manisa. This time, however, the allied fleets did block the Straits. The Sultan, however, chose to cross at the Bosphorus and, as he set up cannon on the Asian shore, the Genoese of Pera established a shore battery on the European side. Under the cover of these guns, and in boats which the Genoese had supplied, his army crossed the Straits. On 10 November 1444, the armies met at Varna, with the Hungarian cannon again driving the Ottoman cavalry from the field. At a crucial point, however, the King broke loose from the ranks, allowing one of the Janissaries around the Sultan to unhorse and kill him. The death of the King decided the battle. The Ottoman victory, in turn, ensured that the largely Orthodox Balkan Peninsula came under the rule of the Muslim Ottomans rather than the Catholic Hungarians.
From Varna, Murad returned to Manisa, but not to a peaceful retirement. During the crisis of 1443-4, Constantine, the Byzantine Despot of Mistra, had seized Ottoman lands in southern Greece and was continuing his raids, while George Kastriote, or Scanderbeg, had recovered the old Kastriote domains in central Albania. However, it was a crisis in 1446 that brought the old Sultan out of retirement. First, a fire devastated Edirne. Next, a Janissary rebellion, which Prince Mehmed could not control, terrorised the city, persuading the Grand Vizier, Halil Chandarli to recall Murad.?3
On his reaccession, Murad turned against his rebellious vassals. In 1447, he invaded the Peloponnesos and reduced Constantine to submission. Next year he attacked Scanderbeg in Albania, but in midcampaign received news that John Hunyadi had again invaded his lands with an army of Hungarians and Vlachs. Abandoning the Albanian campaign he marched northwards and, in October 1448, encountered Hunyadi on the Plain of Kosovo. After a two-day battle, Hunyadi fled the field. The removal of the danger from Hungary left Murad free, in the winter of 1448-9, to seize Arta, the last of the Tocco domains on mainland Greece and, in 1449, once again to attack Scanderbeg, confining him to the fortress of Krujé. Against this stronghold, however, his attacks were unsuccessful.
This was Murad II’s last campaign. He died early in 1451.
The Ottoman Empire: conquest and consolidation, 1451-1512
In 1450, the Ottoman Empire was an important local power, dominating western and northern Anatolia and a large part of the Balkan peninsula. In much of this area, however, the sultan exercised his power through vassals or semi-independent marcher lords. In the context of the Middle East, the Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo was probably more powerful and certainly more prestigious. As rulers of the Holy Cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the Mamluk sultans could claim first place among all Islamic monarchs. In the context of south-eastern Europe, the Kingom of Hungary still counterbalanced Ottoman power. At sea, Ottoman strength was negligible. By 1512, the Ottoman Empire had acquired an imperial capital. Its territories in both Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula had expanded greatly. The power of the marcher lords had diminished, and they were no longer present in the central councils of the Empire. In Europe, south of the Danube, the sultan ruled through his own appointees rather than through vassals, although former Christian dynasties in the area often came, after conversion to Islam, to form part of the Empire’s ruling élite. In Anatolia, it was only in the borderlands that the authority of the sultan still depended on the allegiance of vassals. The institutions of the Empire had also begun to take the forms that would be familiar in later centuries. By now too, the Empire enjoyed a military superiority over the neighbouring powers — Hungary in the north, the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and Syria, and the Safavid dynasty in Iran — but as yet the Ottoman army had not demonstrated this advantage in war. The Empire had also emerged as a naval power, albeit on a small scale.
At the time of Prince Mehmed’s second accession to the throne in 1451 as Mehmed II (1451-81),?4 his immediate goal was to conquer Constantinople. In order first to secure his borders, in 1451 he led a campaign against Karaman whose emir, on Murad’s death, had seized some castles on the Ottoman frontier. The campaign once more forced Karaman to accept Ottoman suzerainty. At the same time, Mehmed concluded treaties with George Brankovié of Serbia, and John Hunyadi, the Hungarian regent. To secure his southern border, in 1452 he sent the marcher lord Turahan on a raid against the Byzantine Despots of the Peloponnesos, Thomas and Demetrios. In the same year, with his borders safe, he began to prepare for the siege by building a castle on the European shore of the Bosphorus, opposite another on the Asian side, which Bayezid I had constructed during the siege of 1394-1402. The cannon from the two fortresses prevented the passage of shipping. In early spring. 1453, Mehmed’s army encamped before the double walls of the city, while his ships anchored in the Bosphorus. Most of the assaults the defenders were able to repel, despite their depleted numbers. They thwarted Ottoman attempts to mine beneath the walls, or to use siege towers to bring the assailants to the level of the ramparts. The Ottoman fleet was unable to prevent Genoese reinforcements coming by sea, or to break the boom which blocked the entrance to the Golden Horn, the estuary that formed a natural moat on one side of the city walls. In the end, the besiegers dragged the ships overland from the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn, but again this did not break the siege. What in the end determined its outcome was the power of the Ottoman artillery against the land walls. On 29 May, with the Janissaries in the vanguard, Mehmed’s army entered the city through a breach in the wall and began a three-day pillage. On the day after the conquest, the Sultan entered the city.> The repopulation and refurbishment of the ruined metropolis was to be a major preoccupation throughout his reign.*°
The conquest of Constantinople gave the Ottoman Empire a capital city at the juncture of its European and Asian territories, on the Straits which linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. It was a city too which enjoyed a special position in Muslim eschatology, and which had been the seat of the Roman Emperor. The imperial, eschatological and geographical prestige of the city enhanced the status of its conqueror in both the Muslim and Christian worlds, and it is for this conquest that Mehmed II remains famous. It was, however, only the beginning of the incessant warfare that marked his reign.
After the fall of Constantinople, Mehmed secured the surrender of Pera, the Genoese city opposite the Byzantine capital, across the Golden Horn. In the following year he attacked Serbia. In two campaigns, in 1454 and 1455, he seized Novo Brdo and the silver mining districts of southern Serbia, confining the Despot George Brankovic’s territory to the north of the country. In 1456, he besieged the Hungarian city of Belgrade, but this time he was unsuccessful. John Hunyadi’s forces not only repelled the attack, but came close to overrunning the Ottoman camp. The victory saved Hungary from a full scale invasion, but did not prevent the final extinction of Serbia. In 1457, George Brankovic died, and his son Lazar soon afterwards, exposing his territory to invasion by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, or by Mehmed II. Mehmed was the first to act. In 1458, an army under the Serbian Vizier, Mahmud Pasha, invaded and, by virtue of Mahmud’s political guile as much as by military force, captured Golubats, Smederovo and other key fortresses, bringing Serbia under Ottoman control, and establishing the Danube as the border between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
The conquests which the Sultan made in the Aegean region during the same years were less extensive but probably more lucrative. The fall of Constantinople had alarmed the Latin rulers in the Aegean region, who rightly feared that their own possessions were now under threat. Venice in particular, fearing for the safety of Negroponte, had annexed the islands of the northern Sporades to form a northern line of defence and, at the same time, pursued negotiations with Mehmed. These resulted in a treaty which allowed them to trade freely and to maintain a colony with a bailo in Istanbul.
It was rather the Genoese colonies that came under attack. In 1455, Mehmed despatched a fleet which seized the two Genoese settlements of Old and New Phokaia on the Anatolian coast, having an eye no doubt on the revenues from the alum mines in the district. Then, in the bitter weather of January 1456, he himself led an army to Enez, a Genoese colony in western Thrace, forcing its lord, Dorino Gattilusio to surrender Enez and its salt-pans, together with the islands of Samothrace, Imbros and Limni. These attacks were clearly premeditated. The capture of Athens, however, was opportunistic. In 1451, the Florentine Duke of Athens, Nerio II Acciajuoli, had died, and both Nerio’s nephew and his widow’s new husband called on the Sultan to support their claims to the city. Mehmed’s response was, in 1456, to send Turahanoghlu Omer to occupy Athens. By now the the Catholic powers in the Aegean were so alarmed at Mehmed’s aggression that, in 1456, Pope Calixtus III and his former employer, King Alfonso of Aragon, assembled an anti-Ottoman fleet that in 1457 captured Imbros and Limni.
The success of Pope Calixtus’s fleet had already alerted Mehmed to the dangers of Latin intervention in Greece and the Aegean, when the possibility of further Latin action grew with the proposed marriage alliance between the daughter of Demetrios Palaiologos, one of the Byzantine Despots of the Peloponnesos, and a grandson of King Alfonso of Aragon. In 1458, Mehmed invaded. By the end of the campaign, much of the Peloponnesos was under his control, while Demetrios had agreed to marry his daughter to Mehmed, and to leave the Peloponnesos, accepting as an appanage lands in Thrace and the recaptured islands of Imbros and Limni. However, he did not move. Instead, he fought with his brother Thomas, provoking another Ottoman attack in 1460. By the end of the year, all of formerly Byzantine Peloponnesos was in Mehmed’s hands, Demetrios had left for his new territory, and Thomas had fled to Rome. Only the Venetian colonies remained independent of the Sultan.
Mehmed’s next targets were the independent enclaves that remained along the southern shores of the Black Sea, divided by mountains from the Ottoman territory to the south. The first of these was the Genoese colony of Amasra, which succumbed without a fight in 1459. Two years later, Mehmed launched a second campaign, sending a fleet along the Black Sea coast, while he led his army overland. His first goal was Sinop, the territory of Isfendyaroghlu Ismail. As at Amasra, the fleet at sea and the army beneath his walls persuaded him to surrender. In exchange for Sinop, he received lands near Bursa. Mehmed meanwhile continued the difficult march to Trabzon, a Greek enclave under the rule of an Emperor of the Comnenes, the dynasty that had ruled in Constantinople before 1204. The fall of Trabzon in 1461 brought to an end the last relic of the Byzantine Empire.
The Sultan’s next campaign, in 1462, was against the rebel lord of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler, who had refused to pay tribute to the Sultan, killed his agent and terrorised Ottoman lands in Bulgaria. Vlad’s flight and the submission of Wallachia brought much of the western shoreline of the Black Sea under Ottoman control, making the Ottoman Empire the dominant power in the area, a position which Mehmed enhanced in the same year with the construction of two fortresses at the Dardanelles to control the passage of shipping between it and the Mediterranean. It was also in 1462 that Mehmed continued his war on the Genoese by conquering the Genoese island of Lesbos and bringing it under direct Ottoman rule.
His next goal was the Kingdom of Bosnia. In 1463, he led his army westwards, and within the year the Kingdom had fallen. The first large fortress to capitulate was Bobovac, and from here the army proceeded to Travnik. Hearing that the King had fled to Jajce, the Sultan sent Mahmud Pasha in pursuit. Mahmud Pasha eventually captured King Stephen at Kljué and, with his execution, the old Kingdom of Bosnia became extinct. Mahmud Pasha continued the campaign by seizing part of the lands of Duke Stephen Vukci¢-Kosaéa in Hercegovina.What lands remained to the Duke, Mehmed seized in 1466. The conquests of Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina now brought the Ottoman border with Hungary along the Sava, and southwards along the Vrbas to the Adriatic.
In 1463, while the Bosnian campaign used most of Mehmed’s resources, war broke out in the Peloponnesos. Early in the year, Turahanoghlu Omer had seized the Venetian town of Argos, and it was this incident that finally led the Venetian Senate, alarmed for some time by Mehmed’s conquests in the Peloponnesos and the Aegean, to declare war.
At first, events seemed to justify Venetian calculations. By the end of 1463, Venice had retaken Argos, occupied Monemvasia and gained control of much of the Peloponnesos. In the Aegean, the Venetian fleet captured Limni. Diplomatically, Venice had constructed an alliance which included the King of Hungary, the Pope, the Duke of Burgundy and, in the east, the Karamanids. The involvement of Hungary produced immediate results. On Mehmed’s withdrawal from Bosnia, King Matthias Corvinus invaded and captured the fortresses of Zvecaj and Jajce, and next year, a Venetian fleet attacked Lesbos. In 1464, however, Venetian plans collapsed. The attack on Lesbos was unsuccessful and, although the Sultan’s expedition to Hungary failed to retake Jajce, his army under Mahmud Pasha thwarted a Hungarian attempt to capture Zvornik. In the same year, too, the emir of Karaman died, undermining Venetian plans for an eastern alliance. So, too, did Pope Pius II, and with him the plans for a Crusade. Nonetheless, the Venetian Senate refused a peace overture from Mahmud Pasha, trusting perhaps that a new ally in the east would destroy the Ottoman Sultan.
This was Uzun Hasan, the ruler of the Akkoyunlu Empire that during the fifteenth century had risen to become a great power in Iran, Iraq and south-eastern Anatolia.’” In 1464, Uzun Hasan had revealed himself to be an enemy of the Ottoman Sultan. The cause of hostility was the succession to the emir of Karaman, who had died leaving six sons by an Ottoman Princess and one, Ishak, by a different mother. In order to block a relative of Mehmed II from the Karamanid succession, Uzun Hasan intervened and established Ishak as emir. At the same time, he sent an embassy to Venice, proposing an antiOttoman alliance. This proposal Venice accepted, leaving Mehmed to face an alliance of Venice and Hungary in the west and Uzun Hasan in the east. When, in 1465, he prepared an expedition to salvage his position, his troops refused to fight. Constant war had left them exhausted and impoverished.
Nevertheless, the allies did nothing. Instead, in 1465, Mehmed sent a small force to Karaman and ousted Ishak, placing his own cousin, Pir Ahmed, on the throne. With the danger to his eastern border lifted, in 1466, the Sultan led an expedition to the west. His target was Scanderbeg — George Kastriote — who had reoccupied his father’s domains in 1444, and since then resisted Ottoman attempts to recapture his lands. By the end of 1466, Mehmed’s army had confined him to the stronghold of Krujé. In the winter, however, he travelled to Italy and, having obtained troops from King Ferrante of Naples, was able to break the siege of Krujé and recapture his lost territory. In 1467, Mehmed invaded again, forcing him to flee. He died in 1468, leaving Krujé to Venice. The Venetians were, in fact, the beneficiaries of Mehmed’s engagement in Albania, using the opportunity in 1466 to seize the island of Imbros and lands around Athens. Mehmed’s response had been to begin the construction of a fleet, perhaps to attack Negroponte, but Scanderbeg’s counter-attack in 1467 undermined these plans.
Nor did he attack the Venetians in 1468. Instead, he prepared a campaign in Asia, whose original goal was perhaps the lands of the Mamluk Sultan in Syria. It transpired, however, that his Karamanid cousin, Pir Ahmed, refused to join the campaign or to act as guide, thwarting any plan to attack the Mamluks, since Karaman lay between their territory and the Sultan’s Anatolian realms. Instead he attacked Karaman, occupying most of Pir Ahmed’s domains to the north of the Taurus mountains, and appointing his son Mustafa as governor. A second campaign in 1469 consolidated his position.
Much as Mehmed’s absence in Albania in 1466 had given Venice the opportunity to seize Imbros and part of Attica, the Karamanid campaign gave the Venetian Captain-General Niccolé da Canal the the opportunity in July, 1469, to pillage Enez on the coast of Thrace. This time, however, the reprisal was quick. In June, 1470, a fleet, which an observer estimated as consisting of four hundred ships, left the Dardanelles, while the Sultan led an army overland. The destination of both was Negroponte, the Venetian island off the east coast of Greece. The Ottoman fleet was too large for da Canal to engage, and he remained an observer as the Ottoman troops crossed a bridge from the mainland, pillaged the island and captured its capital, Chalkis. With the fall of Negroponte, Venice had lost her most important strategic and commercial centre in the Aegean, but this was not the only blow. After the conquest of the island, an Ottoman force under Hass Murad Pasha — a scion of the Byzantine Imperial dynasty — recaptured most of the fortresses in the Peloponnesos that Venice had conquered since 1463.
Nonetheless, despite these disasters, Venice rejected a peace offer which Mehmed made in 1471, hoping no doubt that an alliance with Uzun Hasan would bring a victory over the Sultan. Conflict between Mehmed and Uzun Hasan was indeed inevitable, the issue being who was to dominate Karaman. Despite the Ottoman campaigns of 1468 and 1469, one of the Karamanid Princes, Kasim, had rebelled and, at the time of the Ottoman siege of Negroponte, had attacked Ankara. In reply, in 1471 and 1472, Mehmed sent two expeditions to Karaman, subduing not only the north of the country, but also the mountainous interior down to the Mediterranean coast. It was during the second of these campaigns that Uzun Hasan attacked, claiming that he would restore the fugitive Pir Ahmed to the throne of Karaman, and Kizil Ahmed, son of Isfendyaroghlu Ismail, to Sinop. To coincide with his incursion, the Venetians made destructive raids on the Ottoman ports of Antalya and Izmir. Mehmed’s son, Prince Mustafa, repelled the Akkoyunlu incursion, but only after it had caused much damage and captured the city of Kayseri.
In anticipation of another Akkoyunlu attack in Anatolia, the Venetians, in early 1473, organised a partially successful sabotage of the the Ottoman naval arsenal at Gallipoli, and in the summer landed artillery on the Mediterranean coast ready for Uzun Hasan’s agents to collect. On behalf of the Karamanids, they captured Silifke at the foot of the Taurus mountains. In the meantime, Mehmed prepared an army to fight Uzun Hasan and marched eastwards. In their first encounter, on the upper Euphrates, in early August 1473, the Akkoyunlus defeated a detachment of the Ottoman army but, in a battle near Bayburt, Uzun Hasan fled, terrified by the Ottoman artillery. He had no guns himself, and had never collected the ones which the Venetians had left on the Mediterranean shore.
The defeat of Uzun Hasan allowed Mehmed to attack the allies of the Akkoyunlu Sultan. In 1474, he directed raids from Bosnia into the Venetian mainland, and began a campaign against Venetian strongholds in Albania with an assault on Shkodér (Scutari) in the north of the country. The siege failed, probably through fear of a Hungarian attack. In the same year, Gedik Ahmed Pasha led a campaign against the last Karamanid stronghold within the Taurus range. By 1474, the emirate of Karaman was extinct.
Venice in the meantime continued to believe that it might still be possible to conclude a peace with the Sultan, or to construct an antiOttoman alliance involving the Princes of Italy, the King of Poland, the King of Hungary, or the Grand Duke of Moscow. Hopes increased in early 1475, when Stileyman Pasha, the Ottoman commander at the siege of Shkodér, led his already exhausted men to Moldavia to punish its ruler, Stephen, for not paying the tribute due to the Sultan. Stephen routed Siileyman Pasha’s army, inflicting heavy losses and raising the hopes of the Venetian ambassador to the Sultan that he could negotiate a peace. All he received was a promise that the Ottoman fleet would not engage the Venetians for six months. The Ottomans kept this promise since, in 1475, the fleet sailed against the Genoese town of Caffa (Feodosiya) in the Crimea. The occasion for this was a call for assistance from the Tatar Khan of the Crimea, whose lands surrounded Caffa and who now, as a result of a feud within the ruling family, found himself a refugee in the city. The fleet under Gedik Ahmed Pasha captured first Caffa, and then the Genoese town of Tana (Azov) at the mouth of the Don, and other fortresses in the Crimea. The refugee Khan, Mengli Girey, was restored to the Khanate, but as a vassal of the Ottoman Sultan.
The capture of the Genoese towns in the Crimea and the submission of the Tatar Khan confirmed Mehmed’s already dominant position in the region of the Black Sea, and it was presumably in order to reinforce his control of this area that he led his army in 1476 on an inconclusive campaign against the rebellious Stephen of Moldavia. When his army returned to Edirne in the autumn, he heard that during his absence, the Hungarians had built three fortresses between the Danube and the Morava in order to block access to Smederovo. Despite a threatened mutiny, the Sultan forbade his army to disband, and instead led it through the snow to the Morava. The moats of the forts had frozen, and it was by approaching them over the ice to lay brushwood against the walls, and threatening to set fire to it, that the besiegers forced the garrison to surrender, and so lifted the threat to Smederovo.
The campaigns against the Crimea, Moldavia and the Hungarian fortresses had diverted Ottoman resources away from Venice. In 1477, however, the Sultan attacked the Venetian town of Lepanto (Navpaktos) on the Gulf of Corinth and Scanderbeg’s old citadel at Krujé. Both sieges failed, but the same year saw a raid into the Venetian mainland itself. In 1478, there were renewed assaults in Albania, where the first place to come under siege was Shkodér. It was also the last to fall. Before the Sultan arrived at the town in person, he had already secured the surrender of Krujé. At Shkodér itself, he realised that the citadel would not succumb until he had taken the surrounding places. To this end he sent detachments to capture Zhabljak, Drisht and Lezhé. In the early autumn, the main body of the army departed, leaving Evrenosoghlu Ahmed to continue the blockade. Venetian attempts to send reinforcements to Shkodér failed.
By the beginning of 1479, the Venetian Senate understood that there was no choice but to make peace with the Sultan. Its efforts to form an effective anti-Ottoman alliance had failed, and Venice alone lacked the resources to continue the war. In January it took the decision to surrender Shkodér, and in negotiation which followed, ceded the island of Limni and agreed to an annual tribute of 10,000 gold ducats. The ratification of the treaty in April 1479, brought the sixteen-year war to an end.
It did not, however, end Mehmed’s ambitions of conquest. His thoughts by now had probably turned to the invasion of Italy itself, since his next goal was the seizure of the Ionian islands of Levkas, Cephalonia and Zante. The lord of these islands was Leonardo Tocco, whose wife was a niece of King Ferrante of Naples. His removal therefore was necessary if Ottoman troops were to make an attack on Ferrante’s kingdom in southern Italy. In 1479, therefore, Gedik Ahmed Pasha seized control of the islands and, in the following year, crossed the Adriatic to Otranto on the heel of Italy, where he captured and occupied the fortress. At the same time as Gedik Ahmed’s operations in Italy, the Vizier Mesih Pasha led an attack on Rhodes, the stronghold of the Knights of St John, which enabled them to prey on shipping passing between the Aegean and the Mediterranean. One aim of the attack was perhaps to prepare the way for an invasion of the Mamluk domains in Syria and Egypt, an operation which would be more secure if the Sultan could control the sea lanes between Istanbul and the Levant coast and Egypt.
The siege was a failure. Nonetheless, in 1481 the Sultan set out with his army on a campaign to the east, apparently against the Mamluks. A few days march from Istanbul, he died. His army did not mourn. Instead, the Janissaries returned to Istanbul and subjected the city to several days’ looting until, as a temporary measure, the Viziers placed Mehmed’s grandson Korkud on the throne.
By the end of his reign, Mehmed had consolidated or extended Ottoman territory to comprise, in Europe, most of the lands between the Danube and the Sava in the north and the Peloponnesos in the south. In Asia Minor, he had added to the Ottoman domains parts of the Black Sea coast, the upper Euphrates valley and the old emirate of Karaman. These two blocks of territory in Europe and Asia were in later centuries to form the core of the Ottoman Empire.
The reign of Mehmed II's son, Bayezid II (1481-1512) was to be very different from his father’s thirty years of ceaseless conquest.?8 One of the reasons for the difference was the personality of the new Sultan. In contrast to his father, whom he reputedly hated, Bayezid clearly disliked war. Indeed, some of his subjects discreetly criticised him for his reluctance to lead his army in battle. However, there were also social and political reasons. In the prosecution of his wars, Mehmed had not only driven his men to exhaustion, he had also strained the fiscal resources of the Empire. He had raised taxes on peasant holdings, he had debased the silver coinage and, most controversially, he had seized some private properties and properties belonging to charitable trusts, and redistributed their income as military fiefs. This measure had caused such discontent that one of Bayezid’s earliests acts was to return the properties to their original owners.?9 Finally, the survival and captivity in Europe of his brother Jem meant that the European powers held a hostage who guaranteed Bayezid’s nonaggression against the west.
The new Sultan’s reign began with a civil war between Bayezid and Jem.3° The fighting ended with the flight of Jem to the custody of the Knights of St John, first on Rhodes and later in France, where his presence as a political hostage in the hands of the Knights was to dominate Bayezid’s foreign policies for the first half of his reign. In 1483, he agreed to pay an annual tribute to Rhodes for Jem’s safekeeping, transferring this payment to Rome when, in 1489, Jem came into the custody of the Pope. This agreement with the Knights, and subsequently with the Pope, was crucial in securing Bayezid’s realms from both civil strife and war with Catholic Europe. At the same time, he took other measures to ensure peace. He refused to allow Gedik Ahmed Pasha to return to Otranto, and he ratified the 1479 treaty with Venice, at the same time releasing the Venetians from the obligation to pay tribute. In 1483, after a series of raids and counterraids across the border, he concluded a five-year truce with King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. In 1490, he undertook not to attack Venice, the Papal States or Rhodes. These measure, he hoped, would ensure that Hungary, the Italian states and the Knights of St John did not use Jem as a weapon against the Ottoman Empire. By these means he hoped that his throne would be safe.
The need to secure peace in the west did not, however, mean an absence of war. In 1483, the Governor-General of Rumelia invaded and finally annexed Hercegovina, and in the following year Bayezid led an expedition to Moldavia. The pretext was Voyvoda Stephen’s raids into Bulgaria, his efforts to detach Wallachia from loyalty to the Sultan, and the attacks on Ottoman shipping by pirates operating from the Danube delta. Bayezid’s army captured first Kilia and then Akkerman, both important commercial centres. Stephen counterattacked in 1485, but did not recapture the fortresses, a failure which confirmed Ottoman domination of the Black Sea. The year 1485 also saw the outbreak of a war with the Mamluks.
A conflict between these two Islamic Empires was probably inevitable. The Ottoman annexation of Karaman had brought the Ottomans and the Mamluks into direct confrontation, with the Taurus mountains forming an ill defined boundary between the two powers. The question of who was to secure the loyalty of the Turcoman tribes in the region was to bea source of conflict between them, as was the aid which Bayezid sent to his vassal Alaeddevle of Dulgadir, whose lands abutted on both Ottoman and Mamluk territory. In 1485, war broke out when Bayezid rejected Mamluk peace overtures and the Ottoman Governor-General of Karaman occupied Adana and Tarsus in the Cukurova.}?
In the following year, the Mamluks reversed this success. A Mamluk army recaptured Adana and then, in the battle which followed, captured the Governor-General of Anatolia, Hersekzade Ahmed Pasha, and other Ottoman notables. It was perhaps this defeat that encouraged the Turcoman tribes of the Taurus mountains to raise an anti-Ottoman rebellion around the figure of a Karamanid pretender. This rebellion, the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Daud Pasha, was able to suppress in 1487, but the Ottoman position had nonetheless become precarious. Aware that the Mamluks were seeking Christian allies and also attempting to secure the release of Jem, Bayezid set about preparing a new campaign for 1488. In this year, as Hadim Ali Pasha led an army into the Cukurova, Hersekzade Ahmed —released from captivity in Cairo — prepared to support it with a fleet. This expedition, too, was a disaster, with the Mamluks securing a major victory in the plain between Adana and Tarsus. In the same year, Bayezid’s vassal, Alaeddevle of Dulgadir, defected to the Mamluks. Then, in 1490, as the Mamluks laid siege to Kayseri, Bayezid prepared to go to war in person. This threat, it seems, was enough to persuade the Mamluks, who had never had the resources to exploit their military advantage, to negotiate. By the peace concluded in 1491, the Ottomans renounced their claims to the Cukurova and its towns, restoring the pre-war border between the two powers.
With the end of the war against the Mamluks, Bayezid hoped to take advantage of political instability in Hungary following the death of King Matthias Corvinus and the apparent willingness of the garrison at Belgrade to defect. This plan came to nothing. When he arrived in Sofia in 1492, the political crisis in Hungary had ended with the enthronement of the new king. Instead, he sent raids into Hungary and Transylvania, while he led the army to Albania to suppress the rebellion of John Kastriote who, in the tradition of his family, had not recognised Ottoman overlordship since the death of Mehmed II. The expedition was not wholly successful: the Albanian rebellion continued until shortly after 1500. The expedition did, however, have an unforeseen consequence. As the army returned through Prilep, a ‘naked dervish, bare-footed and bare-headed’ tried to assassinate Bayezid. The terrified Sultan ordered — in vain, as it turned out — the expulsion of all such dervishes from his realms and, more importantly, withdrew to some degree from the public eye. The incident marked a stage in the gradual process of the sultans’ withdrawal from contact with their subjects.
Three years later, in 1495, Bayezid faced the crisis which he had been dreading for fourteen years. In 1494, the French king, Charles VII, invaded Italy, capturing Rome and taking custody of Jem. In January 1495, with Jem as his most potent weapon, he announced a Crusade against the Turks, provoking a panic in Istanbul as Bayezid ordered the strengthening of the city’s fortifications. To protect himself in the west, Bayezid negotiated a three-year treaty with Hungary, and waited for the invasion.
This never happened. In February, Jem died and events forced Charles to evacuate Italy, leaving Bayezid to deal more freely with the European powers. To begin with, he ignored the truce with Hungary, allowing the Ottomans to capture some Hungarian forts in Bosnia. He also responded to the call from his former enemy, Stephen the Great, when King John Albert of Poland, refusing to accept Ottoman suzerainty over Moldavia, tried to replace Stephen with his own brother, Sigismund. At Stephen’s request, Bayezid’s men expelled the King’s troops, and in 1498, Ottoman and Tatar raiders made a devastating razzia into Poland. Bayezid also re-opened hostilities with Venice. He was aware, however, of deficiencies in Ottoman naval power: such successes as his father had achieved at sea had depended on overwhelming superiority in numbers of ships and men. In 1498, therefore, Bayezid both increased the size of the fleet and engaged experienced corsairs as naval captains. Piracy was, in the succeeding centuries, to act as the most important school of seamanship and naval warfare for Ottoman mariners, and the corsairs were to provide the most successful Ottoman admirals. It was Bayezid who established the close link between piracy and the Imperial Ottoman fleet.
Piracy on both sides was also one of the causes of friction which led to war with Venice. In 1499, the repatriation of Jem’s body from Italy and its public burial removed a lingering fear that rumours of the Prince’s survival might still encourage dissent, and in this year, Bayezid declared war. The first Ottoman victory came at the end of August, with the fall of Navpaktos on the Gulf of Corinth. At the same time the Sultan sent raiders into Venetian territory in Dalmatia, and later into Friuli, convincing the Venetians that they should try to end the war by diplomacy. However, the embassy to Bayezid failed and, in 1500, they suffered serious losses with the fall in August of the coastal fortresses of Methoni, Koroni and Navarino in the Peloponnesos.
The losses spurred Venice to further diplomatic action, this time successful. By the end of May, 1501, negotiators had constructed a triple alliance between the Papacy, Venice and Hungary and, in addition, persuaded the Kings of France and Spain to contribute to the war. With the help of these allies Venice began to win victories. In December, 1500, with Spanish reinforcements, she occupied Cephalonia. In 1501, a joint Franco-Venetian attack on Mitylene, the main fortress on Lesbos, failed, but in 1502, with the armed assistance of the Papacy, Venice took the island of Lefkada, establishing, temporarily at least, a dominance in the Ionian islands, with control of Corfu, Lefkada, Cephalonia and Zakynthos. Bayezid, however, offset this loss with the capture in the same year of the Venetian port of Durrés on the Adriatic.
By 1502, the war had ruined Venice, and since Bayezid had achieved his goals, he was prepared to conclude a peace. By the treaty of 1503, while retaining commercial privileges, Venice abandoned Methoni, Koroni, Navpaktos and Durrés, and ceded Lefkada to Bayezid. In the same year, the Sultan concluded a seven-year truce with Hungary. The war had brought Bayezid important gains of territory in Greece. Their encounter with French gunners at the siege of Mitylene had taught Ottoman artillerymen the most up-to-date artillery techniques. Above all, it had established the Ottoman Empire for the first time as a naval power.
The treaty of 1503 marked the beginning of an Ottoman disengagement from Europe that was to last until 1521. In the first two decades of the sixteenth century, it was events in the east that were to preoccupy the sultans. The first sign of these troubles was a revolt in 1500 of the Turgut and Varsak Turcomans of the Taurus mountains, around a Karamanid pretender. The Grand Vizier, Mesih Pasha, was able to suppress the uprising without, it seems, much trouble.This, however, had been a local incident, whereas future revolts in Anatolia were to acquire a far more dangerous, international aspect. The reason for this was the establishment of the Safavid dynasty in Tran.3?
The dynasty takes its name from its ancestor, Safiy al-Din, the leader in the early fourteenth century of a religious order at Ardabil on the Caspian Sea. During the course of the fifteenth century, the nature of the order changed, as the descendants of Safiy al-Din began to claim divinity for themselves and, at the same time, adopted the tenets of Shii Islam. With a claim to divinity went a claim to political power and an active programme of proselytisation not only in Iran, but also in Syria and, above all, in Anatolia. The most active supporters of the Safavid Order were the Turcoman tribesmen of Anatolia, many of whom migrated to Iran. It was the support of these men, known as kizilbash (‘red head’) from their distinctive red headgear, that brought Shah Ismail I to power in Tabriz in 1501. It was they too who fought in the armies which defeated his enemies in Iran and Iraq. In 1501, Ismail took Tabriz and all Azerbaijan; in 1503, he defeated the last Akkoyunlus at Hamadan, and extended his rule into central and southern Iran. In 1504, he conquered the Caspian provinces of Mazendaran and Gurgan. Between 1505 and 1507, he annexed Diyarbekir to the north of Syria. In 1508, he conquered south-western Iran and Baghad. Shirvan followed in 1509, and Khurasan in 1510.3 Within ten years, therefore, Ismail had established a polity which matched the Ottoman Empire in its resources; which, in its adoption of shi‘ism, professed a religion which was hostile to the sunnism of the Ottoman sultans; and whose messianic leader claimed the allegiance of many thousands of the Sultan’s subjects.
Bayezid’s reaction to this new danger was extremely cautious. When Ismail summoned his adherents to Erzincan in eastern Anatolia before his entry into Tabriz, Bayezid sent an army to his eastern border but did not intervene. After Ismail had proclaimed himself Shah in 1501, Bayezid ordered the arrest of Safavid sympathisers in his realms and their deportation to the Peloponnesos. Also, insofar as such a thing was possible, he closed his eastern border.
However, since he did not also stop the caravan trade, Safavid missionaries were able to enter his realms by this route. Bayezid was anxious, however, not to provoke war. He was ready, in 1505, to receive an embassy from Ismail which laid claim to Trabzon and to listen to protests against the raids which the current governor of Trabzon, Bayezid’s son Selim, had made into Safavid territory. In 1507, too, Bayezid allowed Shah Ismail to cross his territory in a campaign against Dulgadir, again simply sending an army to the border as a precaution.
Bayezid’s timidity in the face of the danger from the Safavids was a product in part of his age and infirmity. These too were the causes of another crisis in his later years, the struggle for the succession between his sons, Korkud, Ahmed and Selim.
It was during the course of this conflict, in April 1511, that a terrifying rebellion broke out in Teke, in south-western Anatolia, the area under the governorship of Prince Korkud. Its leader was a certain Shah Kulu — ‘slave of the Shah’, whose father had been in the service of Shah Ismail’s grandfather, Sheikh Hayder. On the death of his father, Shah Kulu had sent agents to proselytise the Safavid cause in the eastern part of Rumelia, while his local adherents in Teke claimed, according to a report to Prince Korkud: ‘He is God, he is a Prophet. The Day of Judgement will be before him. Whoever does not obey him is without Faith.’34 It was not, however, only true believers who joined the rebellion. According to reports, many of his followers were cavalrymen, who claimed that tricksters had defrauded them of their fiefs, leaving them destitute. In the face of the rebellion, Prince Korkud retreated to Manisa, while the rebels defeated a force which he had sent against them and occupied Antalya. Shah Kulu’s next victory as he advanced northwards was against the Governor-General of Anatolia, Karag6z Pasha. As he approached Ktitahya, Karag6z Pasha attacked again but, in a counter-attack, Shah Kulu, defeated and killed him, impaling and — according to Prince Korkud’s report to Bayezid — roasting his corpse. From Ktitahya he advanced to Bursa. It was at an urgent request from Bursa that finally, in June, the Grand Vizier Hadim Ali Pasha and Prince Ahmed led a force against the rebels, forcing Shah Kulu to retreat to Karaman and then to Sivas. Hadim Ali, in the meantime, left Prince Ahmed and went in pursuit with a small detachment of Janissaries. The encounter near Sivas was Shah Kulu’s last victory. He defeated and killed Hadim Ali, but seems himself to have lost his life, leaving the now leaderless rebels to flee across the border into Iran.
The Shah Kulu rebellion had discredited both Bayezid’s rule and the claims to succession of Korkud, who had abandoned Teke to the rebels, and Ahmed, whose pursuit of the rebels had been ineffective. It was clearly with this knowledge that Selim rose in rebellion. In April, 1512, he arrived in the capital, and twelve days later Bayezid abdicated in his favour. The old Sultan died in the following June.
His reign, despite the civil strife at its beginning and end and the defeats in the Mamluk war, marked an important stage in the evolution of the Empire. Ottoman failure against the Mamluks had led the Sultan to improve the weaponry of the Janissaries and to tighten his control over the cavalrymen in the provinces. His reconstruction of the navy and encouragement of corsair captains had produced a fleet that was the equal of Venice’s and had extended Ottoman naval power into the Mediterranean. His conquests, in comparison with his father’s, were limited, but nonetheless significant, extending Ottoman control over the littoral of the Black Sea and the Peloponnesos and pacifying Albania. More important, however, were his institutional innovations. It was Bayezid who initiated the systematic codification of Ottoman customary law which, in essence, regulated the relationship between fief holders and the peasants on their land, and the military obligations of fief-holders. It was thus in Bayezid’s reign, that what have come to be regarded as ‘classical Ottoman institutions’ came to receive their ‘classical’ formulation.
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