The Turkish victory at Manzikert was part of the larger creation of the Great Seljuk Empire. When the empire fragmented in the 1090s, the area of Anatolia became the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum (that is, Rome— former Byzantine territory). Between Manzikert and Myriocephalum, a substantial part of the Byzantine population seems to have moved to the European provinces of the empire or to have otherwise declined in the unsettled conditions, and Anatolia received extensive Turkish settlement. The vast majority became farmers, but there were also numerous Turkish townsmen and merchants. Militarily, the most important facet of Turkish settlement was the Turkmen tribes who moved with their herds to the hills and valleys of the Anatolian plateau and maintained their seminomadic lifestyle. Anatolia thus became an important new source of Asian-style horse-archers.
Politically, the Anatolian sultanate began to fragment in the thirteenth century, for much the same reasons the Great Seljuk Empire had. The Turkish notion of collective sovereignty, in which every member of the ruling family had a stake in the state’s authority, and the practice of assigning semiindependent commands in marcher districts to such family members and other important supporters, tended toward the creation of virtually autonomous beyliks (the principality of a bey, or local chief) throughout the sultanate.
Any chance of the sultanate recovering its power and bringing the beyliks to obedience was smashed in the mid-thirteenth century by the Mongols (see Chapter 13). Their incursions and conquests in the Islamic world, starting in the 1230s, seriously altered the patterns of power throughout southwest Asia. Baghdad suffered tremendous damage as a political and cultural center, and the Mongols defeated the Seljuk Sultanate and reduced it to a protectorate. The political and military situation was further complicated by the rise of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, which exerted pressure in Anatolia while disputing control of Syria with the Mongols. But by 1300, the Ilkhan Mongols based in Persia and the Mamluks in Egypt were at most indirect influences in Anatolia. In this political vacuum, the beyliks of the former Seljuk Sultanate began to assert themselves and expand their zones of control.
One of the local powers that began to create an independent polity for itself at the beginning of the fourteenth century was a small group of Turkmen under the leadership of Osman (1290-1326), who would give his name to an empire (“Ottoman,” like “Seljuk,” is a dynastic, not an ethnic, term). The Ottoman state was located in the northwest corner of Anatolia, on the borders with Byzantium. By expanding into Byzantine territory, Osman and his successors were able to attract to their service other nomadic tribesmen and ghazi warriors; principalities in the interior of Anatolia, surrounded by other Muslim powers, had faced earlier limits on their ability to sustain expansion by attracting such supporters. But even the Ottomans would have run out of room to expand in the fourteenth century had they not made the leap across the Dardenelles to Europe.
The Ottomans established a beachhead in Europe in 1345, and by 1360, large-scale Turkish settlement of Thrace was underway. It was this that would truly doom Constantinople by isolating the city completely. The Ottomans steadily extended their hold over the Balkans, defeating the Serbs in 1371 and again, decisively, at Kosovo in 1389. Between 1391 and 1399, they besieged Constantinople for the first time, even as they were annexing more and more of the Turkish beyliks of Anatolia (Figure 11.3). But in 1402, Tamerlane invaded Anatolia and defeated the Ottoman sultan Bayazid at the battle of Angora. This proved a near-fatal setback, and the Ottoman state took several decades to recover fully. But by 1453, the Ottomans were back at the gates of Constantinople. Armed this time with cannon, they took the city and made it their new capital (see Chapter 17).
Figure 11.3 Early Ottoman Expansion
By 1362, the Ottomans had a beachhead in Europe; their expansion thereafter was rapid, encompassing much of the Balkans and Asia Minor.
The Ottoman move into Europe was crucial in a number of ways, aside from making the capture of Constantinople possible. It opened up much more land for Turkish settlement and the support of Turkish cavalry forces. Conquests in the Balkans made available a substantial Christian population from which children could be taken and raised into the elite slave-soldier guards of the Sultan: The Janissaries were founded in 1370, though they would not be a central part of the Ottoman military establishment for another century. The move to Europe also stimulated the Ottoman expansion into maritime warfare and trade; their establishment on the northern shore of the eastern Mediterranean vastly increased their ability to disrupt Christian shipping and project their power westward (see Chapter 15). But this acquisition of sea power came only after the empire was well established on land—unlike the coastal beyliks in Anatolia, the landlocked early Ottomans faced no pressure from Latin naval forces. Ottoman European provinces, untouched by Tamerlane’s depredations, speeded the empire’s recovery from his invasion. Also, becoming a European power put the empire in closer contact with the late medieval west, from which they profitably borrowed the use of cannon and infantry small arms.
The Ottoman military system was rooted in the military capabilities of the seminomadic tribesmen who flocked to their standards. As the state expanded, such warriors were granted iqta' (or timar, to use the Ottoman term) in the new lands, spreading Turkish influence, administration, and settlement and keeping forces available near the frontiers. This was an important consideration, since, like such forces in the Muslim armies of the Crusades, Ottoman tribal cavalry were essentially seasonal warriors. In the fifteenth century, the Janissary corps gained prominence as a permanent, trained infantry imperial guard, which would quite successfully adopt gunpowder weapons. But the bulk of Ottoman forces remained the cavalry. Tactically, this army was by no means invincible, as the decisive defeat inflicted by Tamerlane demonstrates. But especially once the Janissaries provided a solid defensive corps around which the cavalry could maneuver, the Ottoman army would prove tactically formidable. The development of an effective artillery train also proved decisive in sieges and against foes such as the Mamluks who resisted adopting gunpowder weapons. And the sheer size of the forces the empire could raise as it expanded rapidly made it into an important power. The capture of Constantinople only confirmed its world power status.
The Ottomans could raise substantial forces because as they expanded they drew on the Seljuk, Ilkhan, Byzantine, and Mamluk experiences to build a sophisticated administrative and financial system. In this, the spread of the Turkish urban and educated class went hand in hand with the spread of the rural cavalry class, and both depended on a substantial and prosperous farming population. Thus, the Ottomans may be seen to have successfully combined many of the best elements of the military striking power of nomadic warriors such as the Mongols with the staying power and administrative strength of settled civilizations. Nomadic conquerors of settled areas usually followed one (or both) of two paths: assimilation into the conquered population, and consequent loss of their nomadic military advantages (a common result in China, for example); or isolation and eventual expulsion as a foreign elite of tribute-extracting rulers (essentially, the fate of the Mamluks in Egypt). But a combination of luck, policy, and Turkish demographic expansion allowed the Ottomans a creative middle ground. The sultans certainly ruled a large, polyglot empire, but not as foreign overlords (save to the extent that almost all Muslim polities resembled conquest societies): Turkish was the language of a substantial portion of the population as well as of government and culture, and the sultans certainly created a stable, settled government system. But they also consciously retained a nomadic ethos as part of their identity. The sultans lived in tents on campaign every summer, decorated their palaces like tents, and celebrated their heritage in such oddities as jewel- encrusted water bottles—the riches of civilization attached to a symbol of a life lived on horseback. The security of a culture of nomadism may have allowed the Ottomans the flexibility to adopt gunpowder weapons, something the Mamluks, whose identity and institutional structure were tied more specifically to their style of fighting, never accomplished. But the Ottomans also ruled enough territory to maintain a part of their population in at least a seminomadic life, at some cost to the security of their villagers but to the benefit of their military power.
The other key to Ottoman success was good, stable leadership. The early Ottoman sultans—Osman, Orhan and Murad—were remarkable commanders, and their individual talents certainly helped establish Ottoman power. Greater stability came with an Ottoman reinterpretation of the Turkish concept of sovereignty. The Ottomans came to see legitimate power as unitary, residing only in the leader of the ruling family, not in all its members collectively. While this did not prevent succession disputes within the direct line—one of a set of Ottoman brothers would usually succeed to the throne by killing all his sibling rivals—it did prevent the division of the empire by the assignment of semi- autonomous regions to princes of the royal family, the problem that had plagued the Great Seljuk Empire. The Ottoman Empire thus not only grew large but stayed in one piece, drew on the military skills and heritages of its many and varied subjects, and so became one heir to the meeting of military traditions in the eastern Mediterranean initiated by the Crusades. By 1500, the empire was the greatest military power on earth.