Download PDF | (Essential Histories 062) - The Ottoman Empire1326-1699- By Stephen Turnbull, Osprey,2003.
93 Pages
Introduction
In February of the year 1221 Tolui, the son of Genghis Khan, sat on a golden chair on a barren plain in present-day Afghanistan and watched the mass execution of the survivors of the Mongol capture of Merv. Men, women and children were herded together and given to the soldiers to be killed in batches of between two and three hundred each.
It was shortly afterwards, according to tradition, that an Orghuz clan living nearby heard of the atrocities and emigrated to Asia Minor, where the Seljuks gave them land. These refugees were the founders of the Ottoman Empire.
The purpose of this book is to provide a concise, reliable and readable account of the wars of the Ottoman Empire. As the foundation and maintenance of the Ottoman hegemony was such an enormous undertaking in space as well as time this book will concentrate on the period between the establishment of the Ottoman capital at Bursa in 1326 and the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699.
Limitations of space also require a concentration on the Ottoman confrontations with the West, although the important repercussions arising out of campaigns against Egypt and Persia will also be examined. The city of Istanbul, as Constantinople the capital of the Byzantine Empire and from 1453 the capital of the Cttoman Empire. This view is taken looking across the Golden Hom from the Galata Tower.
The rise of the Ottomans
Hulegu Khan, the son of Tolui and grandson of Genghis Khan, died in 1265. His successors were the Ilkhans of Persia, who embraced both Islam and civilisation with equal enthusiasm. As the historian Rashid ad-Din puts it, ‘the Mongols, who until then had only destroyed, now began to build’. But the price of this civilisation was the abandonment of the harsh Mongol heritage leading to consequences warned about by Genghis Khan, and in 1291 a succession dispute among the IIkhans of Persia plunged their outlying territories into a state of anarchy.
Frontier wars with Mamluk Egypt began while rebellions broke out in Asia Minor, where the slow collapse of the Seljuk kingdom, weakened by Mongol inroads, encouraged certain petty rulers to stake their claims to independence. Among these opportunists in north-west Anatolia were the former refugees called the Ottomans, who had originally controlled only a few square miles of pasture and farmland as vassals of the Seljuks.
The political situation in Anatolia was changing rapidly in another way, because as the Seljuk kingdom had begun to break up a different manifestation of militant Islam had risen to power. This was the aggressive fanaticism of independent bands known as ghazis, groups of ‘holy warriors’ who fought to spread the faith and supported themselves through plunder. Without tribal or territorial basis, the ghazis attached themselves to any outstanding leader who promised victory. Such leaders then tended to establish themselves by degree as the lords of the territories they had conquered. The early Ottomans were typical gluzis.
The wider world into which the Ottoman Empire was to be born was also undergoing immense change. The northern shores of the Mediterranean between the Bosphorus and
Granada were almost entirely in Christian hands, while its southern coast fell under the Islamic sphere of influence. The eastern flank was dominated by the Mamluk sultans of
pt. The south and west coasts of Asia Minor formed different Muslim lands apart from the tiny enclaves such as Rhodes that were the heirs of the crusading kingdoms. To the north was the ancient but still powerful Byzantine Empire and its as yet insignificant Muslim neighbours the Ottomans.
The territory of the Ottomans was originally the smallest of the Turkish emirates in western Anatolia. It was also the nearest of all the ghazi lands to mighty Constantinople, capital of the great Byzantine Empire. This proximity to Byzantine lands meant that when they began to expand the Ottomans faced greater resistance compared to other ghazi movements. But relations with the Byzantine Empire also gave their leader Osman the time to build up the social and political structures that would sustain the new acquisitions that his sword had won.
His location too, near ancient and well-established trade routes that no rebellion could erase, put the Ottomans in touch with great traditions of civilisation and good government that would help them flourish in the centuries to come.
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