Ottoman Expansion - 1284-1571
Documentation of the early history of the Ottomans is scarce. According to semilegendary accounts, Ertugrul, khan of the Kayi tribe of the Oguz Turks, took service with the sultan of Rum at the head of a gazi force numbering "400 tents." He was granted territory--if he could seize and hold it -- in Bithynia, facing the Byzantine strongholds at Bursa, Nicomedia (Izmit), and Nicaea. Leadership subsequently passed to Ertugrul's son, Osman I (r. ca. 1284-1324), founder of the Osmanli Dynasty--better known in the West as the Ottomans. This dynasty was to endure for six centuries through the reigns of thirty-six sultans.
Osman I's small amirate attracted gazis from other amirates, who required plunder from new conquests to maintain their way of life. Such growth gave the Ottoman state a military stature that was out of proportion to its size. Acquiring the title of sultan, Osman I organized a politically centralized administration that subordinated the activities of the gazis to its needs and facilitated rapid territorial expansion. Bursa fell in the final year of his reign. His successor, Orhan (r. 1324-60), crossed the Dardanelles in force and established a permanent European base at Gallipoli in 1354. Murad I (r. 1360-89) annexed most of Thrace (called Rumelia, or "Roman land," by the Turks), encircling Constantinople, and moved the seat of Ottoman government to Adrianople (Edirne) in Europe. In 1389 the Ottoman gazis defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo, although at the cost of Murad's life. The steady stream of Ottoman victories in the Balkans continued under Bayezid I (r. 1389-1402). Bulgaria was subdued in 1393, and in 1396 a French-led force of crusaders that had crossed the Danube from Hungary was annihilated at Nicopolis.
In Anatolia, where Ottoman policy had been directed toward consolidating the sultan's hold over the gazi amirates by means of conquest, usurpation, and purchase, the Ottomans were confronted by the forces of the Mongol leader Timur (Tamerlane), to whom many of the Turkish gazis had defected. Timur crushed Ottoman forces near Ankara in 1402 and captured Bayezid I. The unfortunate sultan died in captivity the next year, leaving four heirs, who for a decade competed for control of what remained of Ottoman Anatolia. By the 1420s, however, Ottoman power had revived to the extent that fresh campaigns were undertaken in Greece.
Aside from scattered outposts in Greece, all that remained of the Byzantine Empire was its capital, Constantinople. Cut off by land since 1365, the city, despite long periods of truce with the Turks, was supplied and reinforced by Venetian traders who controlled its commerce by sea. On becoming sultan in 1444, Mehmet II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) immediately set out to conquer the city. The military campaigning season of 1453 commenced with the fifty-day siege of Constantinople, during which Mehmet II brought warships overland on greased runners into the Bosporus inlet known as the Golden Horn to bypass the chain barrage and fortresses that had blocked the entrance to Constantinople's harbor. On May 29, the Turks fought their way through the gates of the city and brought the siege to a successful conclusion.
As an isolated military action, the taking of Constantinople did not have a critical effect on European security, but to the Ottoman Dynasty the capture of the imperial capital was of supreme symbolic importance. Mehmet II regarded himself as the direct successor to the Byzantine emperors. He made Constantinople the imperial capital, as it had been under the Byzantine emperors, and set about rebuilding the city. The cathedral of Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque, and Constantinople--which the Turks called Istanbul (from the Greek phrase eis tin polin , "to the city") -- replaced Baghdad as the center of Sunni Islam. The city also remained the ecclesiastical center of the Greek Orthodox Church, of which Mehmet II proclaimed himself the protector and for which he appointed a new patriarch after the custom of the Byzantine emperors.
Selim I (r. 1512-20) extended Ottoman sovereignty southward, conquering Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. He also gained recognition as guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Selim I's son, Süleyman I (r. 1520-66), was called the "lawgiver" (kanuni ) by his Muslim subjects because of a new codification of seriat [sharia law] undertaken during his reign. In Europe, however, he was known as Süleyman the Magnificent, a recognition of his prowess by those who had most to fear from it. As warlike as his father, Selim, but friendly to the arts, protector of letters, author of the code entitled the Khanounname, Souleiman I. deserved his triple surname of Conqueror, Magnificent, and Legislator. Before him the Ottomans were to the Christians nothing but barbarians who came to impose an execrated religion by the sword. During his reign they took a place among European peoples and filled a role important to European destinies.
It was Francis I who introduced the Ottomans to the politics of Europe. He has been reproached for his relations with the enemies of Christianity as for a crime and they seemed to cause him to blush. In reality the Ottoman empire was less dangerous to Europe than the daily increasing power and ambition of the house of Austria. Besides, although Francis I. obtained the Ottoman alliance, Charles V. had sought it. Finally, religion was the gainer inasmuch as the Eastern Christians, as well as all the merchants who sailed under the French flag, found a certain security in the protection of the French consuls.
Religion lost nothing, for the great conquests of Souleiman over the Christians are antecedent to the treaty concluded in 1534 with the King of France. It was in 1521 that after twelve assaults he captured Belgrade, the bulwark of Hungary ; in 1522 that at the head of 150,000 men and 400 ships he took Rhodes from the the Knights of Saint John despite the heroic resistance of the grand master, Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, who defended himself five months ; finally, in 1526 that he made himself master of Peterwardein and gained the great victory of Mohacz which led to the taking of Buda on the Danube. He had passed the Danube with 200,000 men and destroyed the Hungarian army on that fatal day when perished Louis II, the last of the Jagellons of Hungary.
Vienna was besieged unsuccessfully during the campaign season of 1529. North Africa up to the Moroccan frontier was brought under Ottoman suzerainty in the 1520s and 1530s, and governors named by the sultan were installed in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. In 1534 Kurdistan and Mesopotamia were taken from Persia. The latter conquest gave the Ottomans an outlet to the Persian Gulf, where they were soon engaged in a naval war with the Portuguese.
Under Soliman II. the Magnificent, who reigned between 1519 and 1566, the Ottoman Empire reached the highest pitch of power and splendor. In 1522 he took Rhodes from the Knights of St. John, and by the victory of Mohacz, in 1526 subdued half of Hungary. He exacted a tribute from Moldavia, made Bagdad, Mesopotamia and Georgia subject to him. and threatened to overrun Germany, but was checked before the walls of Vienna (1529). Soliman had as an opponent Charles V of Germany ; as an ally Francis II of France.
When Süleyman died in 1566, the Ottoman Empire was a world power. Most of the great cities of Islam -- Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad -- were under the sultan's crescent flag. The Porte exercised direct control over Anatolia, the sub-Danubian Balkan provinces, Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. Egypt, Mecca, and the North African provinces were governed under special regulations, as were satellite domains in Arabia and the Caucasus, and among the Crimean Tartars. In addition, the native rulers of Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) were vassals of the sultan.
From this time the race of Osman degenerated and the power of the Porte declined.
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