PART II
Introduction to Part II
Continuity and Change in Geopolitics
Historians specializing in regions outside Europe, and especially in the Islamic world, have plenty of reasons to criticize the traditional periodization of European history when it is applied to their objects of studies. The label “modern period,” which designates the eras from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, is the most problematic. Depending on the country, it begins in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and ends in the late eighteenth. The modern period can therefore be distinguished both from the Middle Ages and from the so- called contemporary period, the nineteenth to twenty- first centuries. What meaning can that designation have outside European history? What equivalent could there be, for example, in the Islamic world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to the intellectual, artistic, political, and religious changes that imposed the notions of “Renaissance” and “Reformation” in Western historiography? In many respects, during that same period in the Muslim world, continuity predominated over breaks. For a time, the year 1453 was proposed as the turning point between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But that was less because of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II’s Islamic conquest of Constantinople than because of the flow of scientists and ancient manuscripts from Byzantium into Italy as a result of the threat of that event— or of the event itself. That is, the conquest was seen as one of the sources of the return to antiquity proclaimed by the humanists. As for 1492, which is often preferred as the starting point for the modern period, it is certainly more beholden to Christopher Columbus’s first expedition to America than to the fall of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold surviving in Spain.
Nevertheless, though the sixteenth century did not entail a cultural break in Islam on the same order as that posited for the West, there is one realm where that century was, for Islam as well, synonymous with rupture: that of geopolitics. New political structures appeared at the time within the Muslim world, and new territorial divisions came into being between Islam and Christendom.
The Great Empires of the Modern Age
The sixteenth century witnessed the establishment of the three great empires that transformed the political landscape of Islam and would continue to mark its fortunes in the following centuries. In 1523, the Turco- Mongol Babur, descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, having left his small Afghan kingdom, seized the Punjab and Lahore, the beginning of the empire of the Great Moguls of India. That empire would shine brightest under his grandson Akbar (1556– 1605) and would have its maximum territorial extension under Aurangzeb in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Two decades earlier, in 1501, Shah Esmā‘īl (1487– 1524), the young heir to the Turkoman spiritual leaders of the Safaviyya (the powerful heterodox brother hood from Ardebīl, Azerbaijan), seized Tabrīz and proclaimed himself shah, thus inaugurating the Safavid Empire, which unified Iran and imprinted on it the mark of Twelver Shiism. It was under Shah ‘Abbas the Great (1587– 1629), who made Isfahan his capital in 1598, that this empire would complete its Iranization and reach its apogee.
As for the Ottoman Empire, the third empire of the “modern” period, it had come into being two centuries earlier but it too was at its zenith in the sixteenth century, under the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520– 1566), nearly achieving its maximum extension at that time. For though it benefited from several territorial additions in the following century, these remained relatively minor. The Ottoman Empire was also the most long- lasting of the three, ending only in 1923. Above all, it was by far the most important in the relations of all kinds between Europe and the Islamic world in the period under consideration. It is not enough to say that, of the three empires, it was the closest to Europe, since it was in Europe itself. It occupied a third or a fourth of that continent and, as of the fifteenth century, its capital, Edirne and then Istanbul, was located there. To be sure, these three empires in themselves did not represent the totality of the Muslim world. Other states (the Uzbek khanates of central Asia, for example, or the Sharifian kingdom of Morocco, not to mention the sultanates of sub- Saharan Africa or Indonesia) managed to survive independently, thanks to their geographical distance or as a function of the rivalries between empires that they were able to exploit. But compared to the fragmentation of the post- Abbasid or post- Mongol periods, the political simplification of the Muslim world that these empires introduced— restricting that world almost entirely to a few large units— and the relative unification they represented, despite the intense politico- religious antagonisms (between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, for example), are still striking. These mighty empires, so long as they remained strong and unified, were a rampart against any potential European penetration.
Toward an Islamic- Christian Division
Another characteristic of that “modern” period, closely linked to the preceding, lies in the evolution of the territorial division between Islam and Christianity. In the early Middle Ages, as a result of the great conquests that accompanied the beginnings of Islam, that religion had penetrated deeply into Europe: in Spain and Portugal, the Mediterranean islands (Sicily, Crete, Malta, Cyprus, the Balearics), and southern France. But that presence was relatively short- lived everywhere but in Spain, where the process of reconquista was much more gradual. As a result, the Muslim presence continued there for centuries, until the threshold of the modern age. In eastern Europe, however, in the southern regions of Russia within the part of the Mongol Empire called the “Golden Horde,” Islam arrived much later, as a result of the Islamization of the Golden Horde in the fourteenth century. In that respect, these regions followed an opposite course when compared to the general process of Europe’s resorption of Islam.
European princes and knights went even further in changing the geopolitics of the respective regions, by attempting to seize those in the Near East acquired by Islam from its beginnings, at the expense of Byzantine Christianity. That was the aim of the Crusades, which had initially retaken the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidels between 1099 and 1187, leading to the constitution of the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus, the county of Tripoli, and the principality of Edessa (as well as the formation of a Latin empire of Constantinople). But that shift did not last long in the face of the Muslim reaction, and by 1291 nothing remained of the Latin overseas states except Cyprus. It was now clear that neither of the two great monotheistic religions with universalist ambitions, in competition by their very nature, had managed to eliminate the other. Rather, they seemed to be heading toward a territorial division: to Christianity would fall Europe, which would therefore be identified with Christianitas; to Islam, the overseas regions, that is, the Middle East and the Maghreb. There the effects of the first wave of Muslim expansion would be long- lasting. Christian communities did survive in these regions, which had witnessed the birth of Christianity, but they remained under the domination of the Crescent, and the chasm separating them from Western Christendom, that is, from Rome, only grew wider. To what extent did the modern period confirm that pattern, and in what ways did it contradict it?
Mamluks and Portuguese
Let us first consider the Mashriq, that is, Egypt and Syria. In the last three centuries of the Middle Ages, that essential part of the Muslim world had been saved from the threat of both the Crusaders and the Mongols by the Mamluk regime. With wealth and power behind it, that dynasty had for the same reason been the protective suzerain and benefactor of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina and of the annual great pilgrimage. Nevertheless, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Mamluks had to contend with the ambitions of new rising powers within Islam (the Ottomans, the Ak Koyunlu) and with an infidel peril of a new kind: indeed, when the Portuguese opened the sea route to India circumventing Africa, they dealt a fatal blow to Mamluk finances, diverting spice traffic from the eastern Mediterranean. It has been calculated that, between 1496 and 1506, imports from Alexandria fell by two- thirds and those from Beirut by five- sixths (the Venetian traffic in spices from the Levant would resume later in the sixteenth century).1 But that was not all: the presence of the Portuguese fleet, an infidel force in the Indian Ocean and near the entrance to the Red Sea, was perceived as a threat to the holy sites. In 1505, the Portuguese had appeared outside Jidda. Aided by the Ottomans (who cooperated with them before eliminating them) and by the Venetians (for whom the Portuguese innovation had no less catastrophic consequences), the Mamluks sent a fleet to the Indian Ocean, defeating the Portuguese in Chaul in March 1508 and driving them from the coast of Gujarat. But a fatal setback quickly obliterated the Mamluk success: in 1509, the Portuguese crushed the Egyptian fleet in Diu and earned the cooperation of the sultan of Gujarat. The Mamluks were eliminated from the Indian Ocean.
Ottomans and Portuguese
These developments brought to light the Mamluk decline and thereby the weakening capacity for Islamic resistance in that essential zone. But it did not take the Ottomans long to step into the breach and replace the Mamluks. In the preceding decades, the Ottomans’ rise to power had already introduced friction between them and the Mamluks, and especially, territorial rivalries in the eastern part of Asia Minor.2 Nevertheless, Sultan Bayezid II and his successor, Selim I (early in his reign), had supported the Mamluk resistance against the Portuguese. Whatever their ulterior motives may have been, they were thereby conforming to the imperatives of Islamic solidarity. It was then that Selim I, who in 1514 had defeated the heretical sovereign of Persia, the Shiite Shah Esmā‘īl, at Chaldiran, turned his weapons against his former ally, the Mamluk sultan Kansawh al- Ghawri. The only justification Selim could give for his reversal and for that act of aggression (which in theory was illegal) against an irreproachably religious Sunni coreligionist, was the pretext that the Mamluks had formed a secret alliance with the Persian heretics against him. During a triumphant campaign, marked by the victory of Marj Dabiq (August 24, 1516), which gave him Syria, and then by the victory of Raydaniyya (January 23, 1517), near Cairo, which made him lord of Egypt, the Ottoman took the place of the Mamluk sultans. It appears that he himself was surprised by the relative ease of his successes, attributable in great part to the superiority of his artillery and firearms, or at least to better handling of them. In addition, Selim obtained the support of the sharif of Mecca, who had no other choice, given the persistent aggressiveness of the Portuguese. A few days after the Ottoman victory of Raydaniyya, the Portuguese Lopo Soares left Goa with a fleet that, in mid- April, arrived close to Jidda and hence on the doorstep of the holy sites.3 The only thing the sharif could do was to make official the talks that, in all likelihood, had been secretly initiated several months earlier, by sending his son on an embassy to Cairo to see Selim. Under the terms of the agreement concluded, Selim I became in turn “servant of the two holy sanctuaries,” that is, protector of the holy sites of Islam and of the pilgrimage. His successors took that title very seriously, in terms of both the duties it imposed on them and the justifications it was able to provide for their actions. Selim’s achievement was in fact only the first act in the Ottomans’ takeover of the Arab world. His son, Süleyman the Magnificent, active primarily on the western front, that is, in Europe, continued his father’s work. In his major campaign against his Safavid adversary Shah Tahmasp in 1534– 1536, Süleyman seized Tabrīz and Mesopotamia, along with the former caliphal capital of Baghdad. Subsequently, the Ottomans and Safavids continued to fight over Baghdad and Azerbaijan. The obstacles that the Ottomans’ great rivals mounted against them in these regions did not prevent them from keeping the Portuguese infidels away from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf; they were relatively effective in this regard, or at least fared better than the Mamluks had been able to do before them. They managed by conducting naval campaigns, whose results, as was generally the case for sea ventures, were often uncertain. In 1538, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, the eunuch Süleyman Pasha, who had dreamt for years of fighting the Portuguese fleet, finally set out on the Red Sea with seventy- four ships. He succeeded in seizing Aden and consolidated the Ottoman presence in Yemen, but he failed to fulfill his primary objective, which was to take the new fortress the Portuguese had built in Diu in 1535– 1536. The Portuguese attempted to eliminate that maritime threat by launching an expedition in 1541 in the northern Red Sea. Conducted by Vasco da Gama’s son Dom Estêvão, it was intended to destroy the Ottoman fleet based in Suez. But it was a failure. In 1552, the Ottomans again undertook a maritime expedition against the Portuguese, this time entrusted to Pīrī re’īs, a most experienced seaman who has remained famous for the atlas named after him. On that occasion, he received the lofty title “captain of the Indies.”4 He left Suez with twenty- five galleys and four galleons, taking aboard 850 soldiers, with the aim of capturing Ormuz, a gulf port occupied by the Portuguese since 1515, and also, if possible, Bahrain. Along the way, he pillaged Masqat, then besieged Ormuz. Pīrī re’īs did not succeed in taking the island and failed even to bring back his galleys, a dual setback that resulted in his execution. Another captain, Seydī ‘Alī reīs, was sent out to replace him, leaving Basra in 1554. He sailed down the Persian Gulf without mishap, following the coast of Arabia via Bahrain, then twice clashed with Portuguese ships when he arrived at the Sea of Oman. In the second encounter, in Mascat, he lost several of his galleys, which were ill- suited for navigation in the ocean, conditions being very different there from those on the Red Sea. After that, he endured a terrible storm off the coast of Makran. He finally found refuge in Surat, on the coast of Gujarat, where the remains of his fleet dispersed.
The Ottomans were not content to face the Portuguese in maritime actions, which were always hazardous. Simultaneously, they made territorial advances along the coasts. They did not confine themselves (as the Portuguese would do) to acquiring bases for commercial and strategic purposes, such as Dakhla, Aden, Massawa, Suakin, Beilul, or Mascat. Aided by an expanse of continuous territory, which their Portuguese rivals obviously lacked, they penetrated farther into the hinterland and constituted actual provinces, or beylerbeyilik: for the Red Sea, the beylerbeyilik of Yemen, constituted in 1540, and of Habesh (Abyssinia), formed in 1555; for the Persian Gulf, the beylerbeyilik of Bassora, formed in 1546 following the conquest of the beylerbey of Baghdad, Ayas Pasha; and, on the northeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula, that of Lahsa. The motivations behind these conquests remain hypothetical, at least in part, though it is clear that economic and fiscal interests played a role. So too did religious interests, given the threat that the Zaydis of Yemen, heretics in the Ottomans’ eyes, posed for the nearby holy sites. There are also many indications that these ventures, far from stemming solely from a deliberate plan that the central authority pursued coherently and continuously, were often the result of local initiatives.5 That said, however, in the conflict with the Portuguese, the Ottomans saw territorial conquest as a substitute for naval confrontations and as ultimately more reliable than they. All the same, these two kinds of actions combined did not allow Süleyman and his successors to eradicate the Portuguese presence in the Sea of Oman and northwestern India. They failed to put a definitive end to commercial competition or to assure the freedom and security of the sea routes between Muslim India and the holy sites of the Hejaz. Realistically assessing his relative powerlessness, Süleyman the Magnificent attempted on two occasions to reach a compromise of sorts, first, in 1541– 1544, with King John III, and then, in 1564, with King Sebastian. These negotiations led nowhere, however. Although the ventures were only a partial success, the Ottomans at least succeeded in containing the Portuguese peril. Moreover, in the 1530s and 1540s, a certain flow of Far Eastern spices resumed via the Red Sea and then Damascus, or via the Persian Gulf and then Baghdad. But that traffic remained limited, satisfying only the needs of Mideastern consumption, without giving rise to new exports to the West. These would in turn resume in the years 1545– 1552.6
Christendom and Islam in the Maghreb
In the Maghreb, which directly faced southern Europe and was thus particularly vulnerable to its expansionism at the beginning of the modern age, Muslim rulers nevertheless succeeded in holding onto their positions. The Ottoman presence again played a role in that geopolitical stronghold, but in this case the role was not exclusive and assumed very specific forms.
In the fifteenth century, the Maghreb was divided among local dynasties, which had had their hour of glory but had then weakened: the Hafsids of Ifrīqiya (Tunisia), Abd al- Walid of Tlemcen, the Marinids and then the Wattasids of Morocco. Portuguese and Spaniards had urgently set their sights on that weakened zone. This was, in short, a natural continuation of the reconquista. The Portuguese seized Ceuta in 1415, Arzila and Tangier in 1471. The Spaniards took Melilla in 1497. By the terms of the treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal divided the Maghreb into zones of influence: Morocco for Portugal; Algiers and Tunisia for Castile. The Spaniards seized Tripoli in 1510. In 1530, Charles V entrusted the fortress to the Knights of Malta. That movement undermining Muslim domination in the Maghreb would quickly be halted, however. Against the Spanish threat, the residents of Algiers appealed for aid from two corsair leaders, the Barbarossa brothers, ‘Arūj and Khayr ad- Dīn. ‘Arūj had himself proclaimed sultan and conquered several strongholds in Algeria, including Tlemcen. He died in that city in 1518, besieged by a Spanish army. His brother Khayr ad- Dīn succeeded him, understanding that his salvation depended on protection from the Ottoman Empire, whose Muslim presence was now growing in the east. He gave his states as a tribute to Sultan Selim I, to whom he became a sort of vassal. He continued his progress in Algeria, taking Bona, Constantine, and Cherchell. In 1529, he obtained the surrender of Peñón, a fortress held by the Spaniards on a small island near Algiers. Integration into the Ottoman Empire advanced further in 1553, when Barbarossa became grand admiral of Süleyman the Magnificent’s fleet. At the same time, the seaman was an essential architect of the Franco- Ottoman rapprochement, a complementary aspect of his anti- Spanish policy. Algeria was now an Ottoman province, the Jeza’ir beylerbeyiliği. It would quickly assume a special form, however, one common to the other Ottoman provinces of the Maghreb and which set them apart from the rest of the empire. The power of the governor, or beylerbey, then of the pasha, representative of the central Ottoman state, was soon eclipsed by that of the corps of local Janissaries (some of whom continued to be recruited from the central provinces of the empire) and its leader, the agha. Another entity shared the leadership of that principality of sorts (the Europeans would call them “Barbary regencies”): the guild of corsair captains (ta’ifat al- ru’asā). As of 1671, a higher authority took over, that of the dey, which survived until the French conquest of 1830. Nonetheless, the allegiance to Istanbul was never broken. The Ottoman sultan therefore perceived the French conquest as an assault.
Extending his takeover of the Maghreb to the east, Barbarossa seized Tunis in 1534. But the following year, in a formal expedition in which Charles V personally took part, and which he hoped would have the greatest repercussions possible, the emperor recaptured Tunis. He presented that success as a triumph, an expression of divine will, and as the prefiguration of decisive victories against the Ottomans. For the time being, however, he was content to reestablish the Hafsids under his protectorate, placing the fortress of La Goulette under Spanish control. It was not until the winter of 1569– 1570 that the Ottoman governor of Algiers, Uluj Ali Pasha, advanced overland to Tunis, seized the city, and set up a garrison there, the Hafsid prince having found refuge in La Goulette. John of Austria rushed in with a fleet from Sicily to reestablish Spanish authority in October 1573. But, in July of the following year, Uluj Ali Pasha reappeared outside Tunis, this time accompanied by a large fleet and, after a brief siege, he seized the city, as well as the fortress of La Goulette. That new episode established Ottoman domination in a lasting manner. At that relatively late date, the duel for control of the Maghreb between the Ottomans and Spain— and, more broadly, between Islam and Christendom— was decided in favor of the Muslims.
The evolution of the Tunisian province was rather similar to that of Algiers. Although the bond of allegiance was never broken, Tunis acquired a growing autonomy from Istanbul, to the benefit of the Janissaries and corsairs, who enjoyed a golden age in the first half of the seventeenth century. But, as in Algiers, a higher authority, a principate of sorts, was imposed after some time: by the end of the sixteenth century, it would be the regime of the deys. Later, in the mid- seventeenth century, Murad, a former slave from Corsica, installed the dynasty of the Muradite beys, which lasted until 1702. At that time, the new bey, Husayn bin Ali, founded a dynasty, the Husaynites, which were placed under the French protectorate in the late nineteenth century. Christian power, represented by the Knights of Malta, did not last in Tripoli either. In 1551, the expedition commanded by Koja Sinān Pasha made Tripoli the seat of a new Ottoman province, which evolved like its Maghrebian neighbors. In the seventeenth century, the activities of its corsairs reached their paroxysm, leading to a reaction on the part of the French and English, who bombarded the stronghold in 1676 and 1685. In 1711, the Karamanli dynasty was established with Istanbul’s consent. It lasted until 1835.
The domination of Europe— in this instance, the Iberian states for the most part— was thus kept in check in the sixteenth- century Maghreb. The Spaniards held on to only a few isolated presidios. In their rivalry, neither Islam nor Christendom had formed a united front. Charles V was the ally of the Hafsids against Barbarossa. Morocco defended itself both against the Ottoman advance to the east and against the encroachments of the Christians from the north. When a new dynasty from the region of Sousse, bearing the name chorfa— that is, “descendants of the Prophet,” the Saadians— took up the torch of holy war, they did not look askance at the cooperation of European adventurers and renegades, and they opposed both the Wattassids of Fez and the Portuguese, from whom they recaptured a series of fortresses. In the famous Battle of the Three Kings in Ksar el- Kebir (1578), which marked the elimination of the Portuguese from Morocco and the triumph of the chorfa, the Saadian Ahmad al- Mansūr was victorious over both King Sebastian of Portugal and the king of Fez.
Under the circumstances, it was in Europe itself that the greatest changes in the territorial division between Islam and Christendom took place in the modern period. That was not the case, however, for the western part of the continent. On the contrary, re- Christianization, already well under way in the Late Middle Ages, continued ineluctably. The capitulation of the Nasrids of Granada, the last Muslim sovereigns of Spain, to the the “Catholic monarchs,” Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, on January 1, 1492, was followed more than a century later, after many episodes of discrimination and persecution, by the expulsion of the “Moriscos”: 350,000 Muslims were driven out toward the Maghreb.
In the Northeast: Russians and Tatars
Far away, in the northeastern part of the continent, the successes of the grand prince of Moscow were moving in the same direction. He shook off the tutelage of his Muslim suzerain, the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde, causing a reversal in power relations. The Horde, weakened and falling apart, fragmented into several small independent khanates in the first half of the sixteenth century. Ivan the Terrible, however, conquered two of these khanates, one after the other: the Kazan khanate on the Middle Volga in 1552 and the khanate of Astrakhan at the mouth of that great river in 1556. A third, more southern khanate, Crimea, did manage to resist Moscow. It owed that success to its own strength, which was not insignificant, but also to the protection of the great state whose orbit it had entered in 1475 and which, once again, was none other than the Ottoman Empire.
A New Muslim Wave in Europe
In Europe, not everything was heading in the same direction, however. Another part of the continent, the southeast, had for several centuries been undergoing a diametrically opposed evolution. There the Ottoman conquest had established the political domination of Islam. In that region, the identification of Europe with Christianitas, toward which the entire medieval evolution seemed necessarily to be leading, was belied in the most scathing manner. Let us return to the origins and modalities of a historical process whose paradoxical nature now appears in full: the Ottoman conquest of Europe. The events must be recalled in some detail, for here the history of Islam and that of a part of Europe are completely entangled.
CHAPTER 6
Turks and Muslims in Europe before the Ottomans
During the early Middle Ages, eastern Europe was unaffected by the Muslim expansion, though that part of the continent, an extension of the Eurasian steppe, did not remain completely untouched by the presence of Turkic peoples (whether direct ancestors of the Ottomans or not) or by the Muslim presence. The European parts of the Byzantine Empire had to deal with several of these invaders of the steppe, such as the Pechenegs, the Cumans, and the Uzes, all of whom the Byzantine literati assimilated to the Scythians of antiquity. Byzantium clashed with these peoples or used them against other “barbarians.” Ultimately, in the second half of the thirteenth century, Turkish populations fleeing the Mongol advance in Asia Minor, under the leadership of the Anatolian Seljuk sultan Izz al- Dīn Kaykā’üs, settled south of the Lower Danube, in Dobruja, a Byzantine province at the time. Their spiritual guide, Sarı Saltuk, is still the object of a cult in the popular piety of eastern European Muslims.1 Turkish elements, integrated into the general population and especially the army, had also long been present in Byzantine territory, in Constantinople or other European strongholds. Beginning in the eighth century, Byzantium, like the Abbasid caliphate, put a call out to mercenaries of Turkish origin, some of whom reached the highest ranks. For example, Anna Comnena writes that a lieutenant of Emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081– 1118) by the name of Tatikios “had under his orders Turks living in the region of Achrida [and] was a very courageous and intrepid man in battle.” The emperor gave him the title of “protoproedros.” John Comnenus named another Turk, Axouch, “great servant of the East and West.”2 In addition, the capital of Constantinople counted various Islamized Turks of sorts, whose numbers continued to grow in the eleventh century: these were soldiers but also merchants, beggars, and dervishes, as well as ambassadors of the Seljuk sultans of Anatolia, Seljuk princes in exile, and other visitors. In his correspondence dating to the thirteenth century, the patriarch Athanasius expressed distress that these Muslims of Constantinople had complete latitude to call the faithful to prayer in the very heart of the city. Other Muslim or Christian sources— the latter often tinged with the same indignation— confirm that Muslim presence in the two centuries that followed. There is mention of a Muslim neighborhood in Constantinople, which an Arabic source describes as being walled in. In the late fourteenth century, the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid I, leader of the neighboring power, took the liberty of giving that community a qadi. “It was not fair,” said the sultan, according to the chronicler Dukas, “that the Muslims involved in commerce who frequent Constantinople appear before a court of infidels for lawsuits and disputes.”3 It would fall to the Ottomans to establish a presence in these regions of a completely different nature from the immigration just mentioned: a conquest spread out over three centuries, culminating in a much longer occupation.
The Origins of the Ottomans
The Ottomans’ beginnings were extremely modest. Osman, the founder of the dynasty, to which he gave his name (the Ottomans are Osmanli, “descendants of Osman”), then his son and successor, Orhan, were in charge of one of the many small Turkoman principalities (beylik) that had formed on the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Pontic periphery of the Seljuk sultanate of Konya. The sultanate had weakened and, in 1243, it came under the protectorate of the Mongol Ilkhans of Persia.
Located northwest of Anatolia, in a rich region north of ancient Phrygia on the border of Byzantine Bithynia, the Ottoman beylik initially grew at the expense of the last Byzantine possessions in western Asia Minor, which it bordered, and of the other Turkoman Aegean beyliks, with which it was in competition. A first skirmish with a Byzantine force, the Battle of Bapheus on the southern coast of the Sea of Marmara, is attested for 1326. The Byzantines were defeated. Orhan conquered Brusa (Bursa) in 1326, and it became the capital of the young Ottoman state. In 1327 in Pelecanum, west of Nicomedia (Izmit), Orhan’s archers clashed with the troops of the basileus Andronikos III, who was wounded. In 1331, Nicaea (Iznik) surrendered to Orhan after a siege lasting several years. Nicomedia fell in turn in 1337. Orhan, taking advantage of a dynastic crisis, took over the beylik of Karasi in 1346 and thus acquired the coast of the Dardanelles. That foothold in the strait zone opposite Byzantium and Europe was decisive for the future of the Ottoman state.
That dynasty of humble origins (and which would later endeavor to give more luster to them by inventing prestigious genealogies) was beginning to attract notice. It had only recently become Muslim, and its form of Islam was thoroughly mixed with previous central Asian beliefs and practices, which made it rather unorthodox. It is also clear that these first Ottomans owed a great deal of their success to the cooperation of local Christian elements. Nevertheless, the nascent state, like the other neighboring beyliks, was Islamic. The bey attributed to himself, at a still modest scale, all the characteristics of a Muslim sovereign of the time: he minted money, had his name pronounced at the sermon during the Friday great prayer, established pious foundations (vakf ), named qadis in the conquered cities, and set up Islamic secondary schools (medrese) and mosques there. Some of these mosques were former churches, while others were newly constructed buildings. The oldest Ottoman mosque, Haji Ozbek in Iznik, dates to 1333– 1334.
By virtue of its geographical location, that emirate, like the nearby beyliks, was an integral part of a complex regional policy that combined Christian and Muslim entities. Orhan especially was called on to intervene in the activities of rival Byzantine factions. During the Ottomans’ first inroads into Europe, the Byzantines provided the pretext and the Genoese the ships to cross the Bosphorus.
Inroads into Europe
The Byzantine emperor, John Cantacuzenus (1341–1355), having usurped the throne of John V Palaeologus, whom he had served as minister, sought support among the Turkoman beys. He initially appealed to a bey from the region of Smyrna (Izmir), Umur Pasha of Aydin, but when Umur was busy fighting a Christian coalition, Cantacuzenus had to fall back on Orhan. The emperor brought him to Europe and in 1346 gave him his daughter Theodora in marriage. Close ties were established between the two men, and commercial contacts were made with Genoa, culminating in a first Ottoman- Genoese treaty in 1352. Orhan entrusted his son and putative heir, Süleyman Pasha, with operations in Europe, the “new frontier.” In 1352, Süleyman Pasha went to Adrianople, Thrace, to assist John Cantacuzenus against the Serbs and Bulgarians. A band of “Turks,” previously established by Byzantium, had a stronghold called Tzympe on the Isthmus of Gallipoli near Bolayir, northeast of Gelibolu. (Tzympe has since disappeared.) These Turks joined Süleyman Pasha, who took the opportunity to make the stronghold his first base in Europe. Then, despite Cantacuzenus’s insistence, he refused to evacuate it, instead reinforcing that beachhead with troops freshly arrived from Anatolia. Shortly thereafter, during the night of March 1, 1354, Süleyman Pasha seized Gallipoli (Kallipolis, Gelibolu), thanks to an earthquake that damaged the fortress walls. There he established a garrison. The West realized the gravity of the event. Pope Urban V (who was still in Avignon) reacted by launching a first anti- Ottoman Crusade. The official aim was still holy war, but the real worry was the direct threat posed to the Latin states of Greece and Constantinople. In effect, the conquest of the last Byzantine territories of eastern Europe had begun. But Süleyman Pasha’s achievement was cut short by his accidental death in 1357. When his father, reportedly inconsolable, died in turn in 1362, the Ottomans occupied a good part of southern Thrace, along with Didymoteicho (Dimetoka), which succeeded Bursa as the new seat of the bey. The emirate’s center of gravity had shifted to the north.
First Wave of Conquests in Eastern Europe
Another of Orhan’s sons succeeded him under the name Murad I. The advance into Europe, and simultaneously, Asia Minor, continued under his long reign (1360– 1389). Along with the early Ottomans’ military capacities and diplomatic skill, one of the causes of their success lay in the fragmentation and political weakness of eastern Europe at that time. Powerful states had appeared there more or less recently and were poised to succeed the Byzantine Empire. It had long been in decline, having been dealt a fatal blow in 1204 by the Latin conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. In addition, the divisions among the members of the dynasty, the Palaeologi, offered their adversaries ample opportunities to act. The Bulgarian tsardom had reached its maximum extension in the Balkans and the apogee of its power under the reign of Tsar Ivan Asen II (1218–1241), but it had fallen apart just after his death. The kingdom of Serbia had replaced it in the mid- fourteenth century, spurred on by a great sovereign, Stephen Dušan. He had exploited the rich mining revenues to carve out an empire at the expense of Byzantium. In 1346, in Skopje, Macedonia, Stephen Dušan had himself proclaimed tsar of the Greeks, the Serbs, and the Bulgarians. He attempted to seize Constantinople, considering himself the best suited for providing protection against the Turks, but he died shortly thereafter, in 1354, the same year Süleyman Pasha took Gallipoli. His empire was immediately dismembered, and the pieces passed into the hands of princes independent of one another and divided among themselves.
Of the many dominions that parceled up that section of Europe, which was politically very fragmented— to which should be added the Republic of Venice and the various Frankish principalities, Italian or Catalan in origin, that were present in Greece— only the kingdom of Hungary was able to contain the Turkish advance in a lasting way. That “rampart of Christendom,” as it called itself, did not collapse until the threshold of the modern age.
At first, Murad I was unable to intervene in Europe. Kept occupied in Anatolia by difficulties of succession that remain obscure even today and by an active appropriation policy vis- à- vis the neighboring Turkish emirates— a policy he would continue throughout his reign— he could no longer travel to Europe, where he had lost his indispensable crossing point. In fact, Pope Urban V’s call for a Crusade against the Turks after the fall of Gallipoli, though it fell short in terms of attracting followers, at least spurred on Count Amadeus VI of Savoy, cousin of Basileus John V. He had managed to retake Gallipoli in August 1366. The following May, he also retook Enneakossia (Küçükçekmece) from the Turks. Murad would be unable to set foot again in Europe until 1376–1377, when Basileus Andronikos IV, one of John V’s sons, returned his beachhead, in exchange for his aid in a civil war against his father and brothers. In the meantime, Turkish beys, acting autonomously, continued to fight and to have success in eastern Europe. Murad would be the ultimate beneficiary of these conquests. It is impossible to retrace all these events with perfect clarity, however. The date of the taking of Adrianople (Edirne) is a matter of controversy, though it probably occurred in 1369.4 The occupation of that stronghold dominating the valleys of the Maritsa and Tundzha rivers opened the way to many other conquests in Bulgaria, western Thrace, and Macedonia, with the latter two regions serving as the field of action for one of the most famous of these autonomous Turkish leaders, Evrenos Bey. To repel the danger, Vukašin of Ohrid and Prilep formed an alliance with his brother Ugleša of Serrai (Serres). These two Serbian despots of Macedonia, petty kings who had emerged with the decomposition of Dušan’s empire, attempted to stop the Turkish advance on the Maritsa. A bloody battle known as “Chirmen” or “the Maritsa” unfolded on September 26, 1371, and both Serbian princes perished. Conquests in Macedonia and Serbia followed as a result. As a Byzantine chronicle notes, from that moment on, the Muslims began to invade the empires of the Christians.5 Serres was taken in 1383, Niš in 1386, and Thessaloniki (Salonika) in 1387, though it was not occupied until 1394 and was definitively conquered only in 1430.
In the meantime, Bulgaria had begun to be vassalized. Upon his death in 1362, Tsar Alexander had two successors, his sons Shisman and Stratsimir. It seems that Stratsimir, the prince of Vidin on the Danube, accepted Hungarian suzerainty; as for Shisman, prince of Tarnova, he had to accept the suzerainty of Murad, who forced him to give Murad his sister in marriage. But in the following years, Shisman shook off that tutelage, refusing to send troops to Murad’s army. He was joined in his opposition by Ivanko, son of Dobrotich, the lord of another part of Bulgaria, Dobruja. In 1388, Murad ordered an expedition against these rebels, and Shisman was forced to submit once more and also to give up the fortress of Silistra on the Danube.
Kosovo: The Battle and the Myth
Simultaneously, Murad had run into resistance from another sovereign of the region, Tvrtko, king of Bosnia. Tvrtko’s troops, commanded by one of his generals, Vlatko Vuković, had defeated an Ottoman officer, Lala Shahin, in Bileća, Serbia, northeast of Dubrovnik. That setback may have been the cause of the famous Battle of Kosovo. Murad may have undertaken a campaign against the Serbian sovereign, Knez Lazar, to avenge Belića, suspecting that Lazar was involved in the affair.6 The battle took place on June 15, 1389, on the Kosovo plain (Kosovo Polje), slightly northwest of the city of Priština, at the confluence of the rivers Lab and Sitnica. Serbian national mythology portrays it as a disaster that for several centuries put an end to the unity and independence of Serbia, which was now plunged into the “Ottoman night.” In reality, apart from the fact that Serbia was already fragmented before 1389, almost nothing is known about that battle, how it unfolded, or even its precise outcome. The Serbian side was represented by at least three elements: first, the contingent of Knez Lazar Hrebeljanović, who at the time ruled central Serbia and part of eastern Kosovo and whose army included Hungarians and Albanians; second, that of Vuk Branković, who controlled most of Kosovo; and finally, as in Bileća, Tvrko’s Bosnian troops, commanded by Vlatko. Murad had attached to his troops contingents of his Greek, Bulgarian, and Albanian vassals. It seems that after the battles, which were bitter and bloody, the Turks held the terrain, but their victory did not necessarily extend beyond it. In any case, two events likely to cause a stir marked the encounter. First, Sultan Murad was assassinated by an individual named Miloš Kobilić, about whom little is known. And second, Knez Lazar also perished, having been executed after he was captured, according to tradition: hence the aura of the martyred saint that surrounded him in Serbian history. The immediate consequences of the battle were very limited, however. Murad’s successor, Bayezid, called away to Anatolia by a revolt of neighboring beys, hastily left the site. Lazar’s young son, Stefan, succeeded his father but became the sultan’s vassal only in 1392, on the advice of his mother, Queen Mother Milica. The sultan married Stefan’s sister. Vuk Branković also waited until 1392 to accept the sultan’s suzerainty. He did so with such bad grace, in fact, that he probably ended his days in one of Bayezid’s prison. His two sons, Gregory and George, having come into possession of their father’s personal property, recognized the sultan’s suzerainty.7
Bayezid I, “The Thunderbolt”
Bayezid I continued the Ottoman conquest, both in Anatolia and in Europe, with a speed of execution, determination, and brutality that earned him the nickname “the thunderbolt” (yıldırım). In Europe, he reacted to the insolence of Mircea, voivode (military leader) of Wallachia, who, with the aid of Hungarian protection and his alliance with the bey of Kastamonu, an Anatolian adversary of the sultan, had installed himself on the south bank of the Danube, in Silistra. In 1393, Bayezid crossed the Balkans and took up a position against Mircea. Bayezid defended his private preserve by annexing a part of Dobruja, taken from a local lord, the despot Ivanko, son of Dobrotich. On July 17 of the same year, to stop the raids coming from north of the Danube, he annexed Tirnova, putting an end to the existing small Bulgarian vassal state of Shishman. The following winter, presenting himself as overlord of the Balkans, he assembled in Serres all his Christian vassals, to demonstrate his supremacy to them and to prepare for his fight against the Palaeologi. The members of the ruling Byzantine family were in fact making a show of independence by seeking the support of Venice. In 1394, Bayezid again occupied Salonika, which the Byzantines had previously recovered, and launched raids of privateers (akınjı) into Peloponnesus. To increase the pressure, he even attempted a blockade on Constantinople. Then, resuming the struggle to the north against Wallachia and Hungary, he crossed the Danube for the first time. He personally conducted an expedition that devastated the southern part of Hungary, then penetrated into Wallachia, where he had a great victory over the Wallachian army in Curtea de Argesh. Upon his return, he crossed back over the Danube to Nicopolis and had Shisman, the former king of Tarnova, arrested and executed.
These advances in Europe, particularly in the Lower Danube zone, alarmed the king of Hungary, Sigismund of Luxembourg, who had his sights set on the same region. He put pressure on the two popes, Benedict XIII in Avignon and Boniface IX in Rome, to proclaim a new Crusade. Venice, though it maintained with the Turks the relations necessary for its commerce, was obliged to cooperate. Basileus Manuel II and the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes would also do their part. Alongside these directly affected protagonists, others would join out of loyalty to the medieval ideal of Crusade: Burgundian knights under the leadership of the count of Nevers, the future Fearless John, son of Duke Philip the Bold; English and French knights (the count of Eu, constable of France, Admiral Jean de Vienne, and Marshal Boucicaut), freed by the extension of the truce between France and England; as well as Germans and Italians. A wave of fervor spread across Europe, sustained by preachers, the most famous of them Vincent Ferrer, who brought new life to the “flagellant” movement. Departing from Dijon, that army arrived at Buda. Then all the Crusaders traveled down the Danube, seizing on the way Vidin, which was defended by Bayezid’s vassal, Stratsimir, and then another city, Rahova, whose population they massacred. During this time, the Venetian fleet was guarding the Dardanelles. In early September 1396, the Crusaders laid siege to Nicopolis (Nikopol in Bulgaria, or Niğbolu). Bayezid then abandoned the blockade on Constantinople, which he had undertaken against the besiegers, joined along the way by his Serbian vassal, his brother-in- law Stefan Lazarević. The clash occurred on September 25, 1396. The losses were heavy on both sides, but they hit the Christian knights, who were clumsy, reckless, and undisciplined, especially hard. Crusader prisoners of war were massacred in cold blood. The only ones spared were those for whom a ransom could be expected, such as the count of Nevers; these ransomed captives returned home in 1397. Through that memorable victory, Bayezid consolidated his control over the Balkans and increased Ottoman prestige in the Muslim world. One immediate consequence was the annexation of the last Bulgarian state, Vidin, which was replaced by the two sanjak of Vidin and Niğbolu.
The Battle of Ankara in 1402 and the Great Interregnum
Emboldened by his successes, Bayezid took the war to the Anatolian front, destroying the emirate of Karaman and other surviving Turkoman principalities. Then, pushing farther east, he attracted the Mamluks’ hostility by encroaching on their territory and aroused the resentment of Tamerlane (Timur Lenk) by penetrating into the sphere of influence of that formidable Asian conqueror. That last challenge would prove fatal: Timur decided to come settle the score in Anatolia, benefiting in that undertaking from the support of the Anatolian beys, whom the Ottoman had brutally dispossessed. The battle took place near Ankara on July 28, 1402. Bayezid’s forces, very inferior in number despite the loyal assistance of his contingents of Christian vassals (especially the Serbs), were crushed. The victor took the sultan and one of his sons, Musa, as his prisoners.
That catastrophe marked a counterattack on the Ottoman conquest and placed the state’s very survival in peril. An interregnum lasting about ten years followed, marked by civil war, perils from the outside, and even social and religious subversion.8 Three of Bayezid’s sons, Süleyman, Isa, and Mehmed, had escaped captivity. The eldest, Süleyman, presenting himself as the legitimate heir, took refuge in Europe, and settled in Edirne, accompanied by his father’s grand vizier, Chandarly Ali Pasha, and other high state dignitaries. By the terms of a treaty concluded in Gelibolu in 1403, he had to make concessions to his European vassals to prevent a more serious reversal. The Byzantine emperor, Manuel II, seized the opportunity to recover Salonika and the southwestern coast of the Black Sea.
Having recovered his courage, he went so far as to drive the Ottoman merchants from Constantinople and to order the destruction of the mosque built for them. In addition, Venetians and Genoese obtained commercial concessions in Süleyman’s territories. The empire’s borders reverted to those existing at the end of Murad I’s reign; Bayezid’s conquests were obliterated.
Civil war erupted among the three rival brothers. Isa, based in Bursa, was quickly eliminated. A duel followed between Mehmed, retrenched in the region of Amasya, and Süleyman. Süleyman seemed on the verge of victory, but then Mehmed acquired a new advantage, the reappearance of his younger brother, Musa. After being liberated by Tamerlane in 1403, Musa had been the hostage of the emir of Germiyan, who decided in 1409 to hand him over to Mehmed. Mehmed sent him to Rumelia, where Musa formed an alliance with Mircea, the voivode of Wallachia, and married Mircea’s daughter. He formed a second alliance with Stefan Lazarević of Serbia. These two Christian allies provided him with troops. Musa’s successes in Rumelia forced Süleyman to return hastily from Anatolia and to cross over the Bosphorus. He did so with the aid of Manuel II, who had an interest in prolonging the fratricidal struggle. After several setbacks, Musa managed to have Süleyman assassinated. He was now in control of Süleyman’s possessions in Anatolia and Rumelia. He ruled these territories for two years, conducting a brutal policy against the former elites and an offensive against his neighbors. After Süleyman’s son Orhan took refuge with Basileus Manuel II, Musa attempted a siege on Constantinople in 1411, but without success. A first confrontation between Mehmed’s troops and those of Musa took place in Thrace, near Chatalja. Musa was victorious, compelling Mehmed to return to Anatolia. But Musa’s situation became more difficult. His former allies in Anatolia and Europe abandoned him in favor of Mehmed, who, at least at first, seemed less worrisome. Stefan Lazarević appealed to Mehmed to return to Rumelia to fight and placed his troops at Mehmed’s disposal. Manuel II once again facilitated Mehmed’s crossing of the Bosphorus by procuring the necessary ships and also provided him with troops. The two brothers’ armies faced off in Chamurlu, in the mountains south of Sofia. At the end of the battle, Musa was forced to flee, but one of Mehmed’s officers caught up with him and killed him. As the last man standing, Mehmed was in a position to restore the former unity of the empire under a single scepter.
The Revival under Mehmed I
Mehmed reunited the empire only after overcoming two additional obstacles: his nephew Orhan and a certain Mustafa, known by the designation Düzme Mustafa (the Pseudo- Mustafa). Manuel II tried to use Orhan against Mehmed, but the sultan finally managed to have his nephew blinded, in accordance with Byzantine practice. As for Mustafa, he passed— rightly or wrongly— for one of Bayezid’s sons captured at the battle of Ankara and later liberated by Shāh Rokh, successor of Tamerlane (d. 1405). He was initially defeated but would play a further role under Mehmed’s successor, Murad II. Mehmed also had to deal with a powerful social and religious movement, an expression of the traumas the population had suffered following the Battle of Ankara and the civil wars. This movement was led by Sheikh Bedreddin, an eminent ulema, born to a Greek mother and a Muslim father in Simavna (Kyprinos), southwest of Edirne. Musa had made him his “qadi of the army” (kadi’asker), that is, supreme judge. The sheikh was also a mystic imbued with the doctrine of the “unity of being,” who drew from it subversive conclusions, promoting the suppression of social differences between rich and poor as well as the barriers between the different forms of monotheism. He had thus moved toward a creed of social revolution and of syncretism of the various religions. The movement, born in Rumelia, underwent further development in western Anatolia. That charismatic leader was finally captured and hanged in Serres in 1416.9
With Mehmed I’s premature death, the restored state remained fragile and the early days of his successor, Murad II, were uncertain. He had to eliminate definitively the “Pseudo- Mustafa,” whom the Byzantines had once again attempted to use against his nephew, the new sultan, in the hope of recapturing Gallipoli. To avenge this most recent plot, Murad II mounted another siege on Constantinople (June 2– September 6, 1422). He lifted the siege to go put down a revolt by the Anatolian princes his father had conquered. The rebels were inciting another rival against him, his younger brother, also named Mustafa, whom they enthroned in Iznik. These Anatolian principalities, always ready to seize the opportunity to dispute the Ottoman takeover, were suppressed, with the exception of Jandar and Karaman, saved by the protection of Shāh Rokh, Tamerlane’s successor.
Murad II and the Christian Coalition
Murad II, who had made the city of Edirne in Thrace his capital, was now free to resume the fight in Europe against Byzantium and the other Christian states that had benefited from the Ottoman retrenchment. Byzantium, which had recovered Salonika in 1402, handed it over to Venice, which was better able to hold onto it, in 1423. Murad reacted by waging war on Venice, not without difficulty, hindered as he was by the inadequacy of his fleet. He ultimately retook Salonika in 1430.
Hungary had also turned the Ottoman interregnum to its advantage, asserting its authority over the former Ottoman vassals, Wallachia and the despotate of Serbia, which was in the hands of George Branković. By the terms of the Treaty of Tata (1426), the king of Hungary, Sigismund of Luxembourg, ordered Branković to hand over the fortress of Belgrade, gateway to the Hungarian plain.
As a precaution, Murad postponed the attack on Hungary until the death of Sigismund, emperor and king of Hungary, in 1437. In 1438, Murad personally took his place at the head of his army, which crossed the Danube and advanced as far as Transylvania. Along the way, Murad conquered the despotate of Serbia, which he had vassalized in 1435 upon marrying Mara, Branković’s daughter, and made it an Ottoman province. The next year, he attempted but failed to seize Belgrade. The raids he launched on Transylvania in 1441 and 1442 also met with failure, given the strong resistance of a formidable adversary, the voivode of Transylvania, John Hunyadi (Hunyadi Ianos; Iancu of Hunedoara); Ladislas III, king of Poland and the newly elected king of Hungary, had entrusted Hunyadi with the fight against the Turks. The Turkish victims counted in the thousands. Hungary and Christendom as a whole recovered hope at these setbacks on the sultan’s part, combined with the eruption of a major revolt in Albania, led by Skanderbeg (George Kastrioti), a local lord who had previously joined with the Ottomans. That revolt, lasting twenty- three years, was not quashed until the reign of Mehmed II.10 In 1443, a large Christian army headed by Hunyadi took Niš and Sofia; then, crossing the Balkans, it threatened Edirne. But Murad managed to halt the advance of the army, which was weakened by the cold, at the Battle of Izladi (Zlatica) on November 24, 1443. The sultan, obliged to introduce the enemy’s new military technologies (artillery and firearms) into his own armies, cautiously took the path of conciliation. He concluded a peace treaty with Hungary and with George Branković, promising to restore the Serbian despotate to him. When his old Anatolian adversary, Ibrahim Bey, bey of Karaman, took advantage of the situation to attack him, Murad also signed a treaty with him, ceding the principality of Hamid. Once these gestures of reconciliation had been made, in 1444 Murad abdicated in favor of his son Mehmed II, only twelve years old, who thereby began a first reign. That abdication, unprecedented at the time in the Ottoman dynasty, caused universal surprise. Grand Vizier Chandarly Halil Pasha was assigned to be the young sultan’s guide. The Ottomans’ adversaries— Ladislas, king of Hungary and of Poland; John Hunyadi, voivode of Transylvania, in charge of the war against the Turks; and the pope himself— decided the time was ripe to launch a decisive Crusade against the Turks, even though it meant violating the ten- year truce pledged shortly before by Ladislas and Hunyadi. In early 1443, an encyclical of Pope Eugenius IV had imposed on all bishops and abbots a tithe on their revenues to finance the Crusade. The appeal had little effect in the West, however, where the attention of the princes, the French and English especially, was absorbed by their conflicts with one another. A Hungarian- Wallachian army crossed the Danube, while a Crusader fleet under Venetian command was sent to the Dardanelles to prevent the former sultan Murad II from reaching Europe from Anatolia. George Branković, however, remained outside the coalition, the sultan having promised to restore his state. Branković may even have prevented the Albanian rebel, Skanderbeg, from joining the allies. Given the gravity of the peril, Murad II, urgently called back from his Anatolian retreat of Manisa, managed to cross the Bosphorus with the aid of ships rented from the Genoese, which were equipped with a strong artillery. The Venetians, who were responsible for the surveillance of the Dardanelles, may have been playing a double game. Murad took command of an Ottoman army very superior in numbers to that of the Crusaders. Under the leadership of Hunyadi and the pope’s legate, Giuliano Cesarini, the Crusaders had crossed the Danube, avoiding the dangerous mountain passes of the Edirne route, then headed for the Black Sea, plundering all along the way. They arrived in Vidin and Nicopolis, where they were joined by the voivode of Wallachia, Vlad II Dracul. The confrontation took place not far from Varna, on the Black Sea, on November 9, 1444. King Ladislas and Cardinal Cesarini perished in battle. The stunning victory Murad had achieved, though not without losses, sounded the death knell of Christian attempts to drive the Turks out of Europe.11 After an appeal by the Janissaries, whom Mehmed had alienated through his manipulation of the monetary system, Murad took the throne a second time in May 1446. He thus put an end to that premature and brief first reign of his young son, who only grudgingly allowed himself to be shunted aside. Murad again had to confront Hunyadi, who was seeking to take his revenge at the head of a Hungarian- Wallachian army, in a second battle of Kosovo Polje, on October 18– 19, 1448. Although inferior in firearms, which resulted in great losses, the Ottoman army was superior in numbers (especially since the Wallachian contingent deserted) and ultimately forced Hunyadi to flee. Murad died suddenly a few years later, on February 13, 1451.
The Taking of Constantinople
Ascending to the throne a second time after a disastrous first reign that had ended with a humiliating expulsion, Mehmed II, now twenty- one, needed to impose his authority within his own state.12 The Janissaries had violently rejected him, and from the beginning he attempted to appease them: he granted them a gift of joyous accession in Bursa upon his return from a first Anatolian expedition against Ibrahim Bey of Karaman. He also had to take the upper hand against Grand Vizier Chandarly Halil Pasha, who, in accordance with Murad’s will, had been the young sultan’s guardian during his first reign and had opposed his own advisers, secretly fanning the Janissaries’ opposition. Finally, Mehmed had to assert his control over the empire’s traditional adversaries, who were showing him no regard. Byzantium in particular, with the utmost arrogance, demanded an increase in the pension of Süleyman’s son Orhan, whom the emperor consented to keep with him. A great military feat, a prestigious conquest would serve as the appropriate remedy to what would today be called his credibility gap. In addition, his big idea, the conquest of Constantinople (not a new idea among the Ottomans, and the object of several previous attempts among Mehmed’s predecessors since the reign of Bayezid I), was a strategic necessity. Modest as the remains of the Byzantine Empire now were, reduced to the city of Constantinople— in large part depopulated and in ruins— and a part of Greece, the Ottoman takeover of southeastern Europe remained incomplete. Furthermore, the Byzantine capital controlled an essential point in the strait zone and, as the case of Prince Orhan aptly illustrated, remained an inextinguishable hotbed of anti- Ottoman intrigues, based especially on the “instrumentalization” of members of the dynasty, who could always be incited to oppose a reigning sultan. In addition, the “new Rome,” diminished though it was, was the capital of a millennial empire and had long been the quintessential city. It remained an incomparable symbol in the eyes of both Muslims and Christians. The Muslims had attempted unsuccessfully to take Constantinople several times during the most sacred era of Islam, the first Arab conquests in the seventh to eighth centuries. For them, the capture of the city would win extraordinary glory for its instigator, whose exploit was foretold in Hadith and other prophecies. On this matter, Louis Massignon has spoken of the Muslims’ “transhistorical desire for Constantinople.”13 The conqueror of Constantinople would stand as champion of the “combatants for the faith,” the gāzi of all gāzis. For the Christians, by contrast, the conquest of “the city” by the infidel would be a catastrophe of eschatological dimensions, since in certain discourses the conqueror was assimilated to the Antichrist. Christendom ought therefore to have rushed to the aid of the symbolic city, but instead it set down conditions. Rome required the union of churches, that is, the end of the Great Schism, in actuality the submission of the Eastern church to the papacy. Emperor John VIII, pressured by the urgency of the peril, ultimately consented and, after a year and a half of intermittent discussions, the Council of Ferrara- Florence proclaimed union in July 1439.
The results of that decision remained unsettled, however, since it led to the most vehement opposition of the Orthodox clergy and of a large part of the Byzantine population. Riots broke out in the streets of Constantinople. The patriarchs of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch also disavowed the union. Later, when the city was besieged, the last emperor, Constantine XI, in an ultimate effort to obtain help, handed over the stronghold of Nessebar on the northwest coast of the Black Sea to John Hunyadi, and the island of Lemnos to the king of Naples, Alfonso of Aragon. But neither Hungary nor Naples would intervene. Under the circumstances, the only external aid came from Genoa, which sent troops under the command of Giovanni Giustiniani Longo. The emperor made that shrewd general commander in chief in defense of the city.
All these weaknesses were not sufficient to make the taking of Constantinople an easy operation. Mehmed II prepared for it by constructing, within a brief span of time (between April 15 and August 31, 1452), the formidable fortress of Rūmeli Hisārı, on the European bank of the Bosphorus. It stood opposite the small Anatolian castle (Anadolu Hisārı), previously built by Bayezid I. The chosen site was where Darius had once built a bridge over the Bosphorus. With control of the strait thereby assured, in autumn Mehmed sent Turahan Pasha to conduct a preemptive campaign in Morea: the emperor’s two brothers, the despots Thomas and Demetrios, had to be prevented from coming to the aid of the capital.
The besiegers numbered some 160,000 men, if we are to believe a Venetian account, while the besieged and their Latin auxiliaries totaled only a few thousand. To break down the walls that had braved the centuries, Mehmed had also taken care to equip himself with a powerful artillery, including a formidable cannon cast by a Hungarian renegade. He also ordered the construction of a giant siege tower, higher than the walls. In addition, adopting a bold stratagem, he got his vessels through the Golden Horde, closed off by a boom chain, by having them hoisted up, then brought back down to earth, from the Dolmabahche Valley.
The siege began on April 6 and did not end until fifty- four days later, on May 29, 1453, with a final assault in three successive waves. In conformity with Islamic law, the city, having been taken by force, was plundered. But the conqueror immediately showed that he did not intend to allow the infidel metropolis to disappear. On the contrary, by practicing a systematic settlement and construction policy, he sought to make it a great city once more. Did he immediately conceive the idea of making it his capital, and did he accept at once all the consequences of that decision? A few stumbles and reversals in the first years of the occupation suggest that things occurred more gradually in his mind, or at least, that the sultan threw off his mask only bit by bit. In fact, it was not until winter 1458– 1459 that Mehmed II clearly made Istanbul his capital, abandoning Edirne. The chronicler Enveri wrote on the subject: “The sovereign came to Istanbul because he had made it his capital.”14 Henceforth, Mehmed fully exploited the Byzantine idea that the man in control of that city was the legitimate leader of the empire, styling himself the heir to the Roman Empire. Several Italian princes assented to that claim, hoping thereby to attract his favor, as he moved closer and closer to the peninsula. Some theorized that these princes were acting primarily out of opportunism or Machiavellianism, but that they placed a condition on their recognition of that translatio imperii: the sultan’s conversion to Christianity. That was the thesis of George of Trebizond, a professor at the Pontifical University and an indefectible supporter of the Ottoman sultan (which would cause him some troubles), and especially of Pope Pius II, in his epistle to Sultan Muhammad II— a bewildering text that may actually have been a form of provocation addressed to Christendom itself.15
Mehmed II’s Other Conquests
The brilliant stroke that inaugurated Mehmed II’s reign was followed by a series of further conquests, both in Asia and in Europe. The small Greek kingdom still called the empire of Trebizond would fall in Asia, and the great eastern rival Uzun Hassan, sovereign of the Turkoman confederation of the Ak Koyunlu, would be defeated, though not without difficulty. In Europe, in 1454 and 1455, the conqueror conducted two campaigns against the principality of Serbia, to consolidate its takeover (Murad II had had to restore Serbian independence in concluding the peace of 1444) and to counter the Hungarian influence. In doing so, Mehmed II seized the rich mining district of Novo Brdo. Then, in 1456, he besieged Belgrade, but a relief army commanded by John Hunyadi liberated the stronghold. The Christian troops’ religious zeal had been fanned by the fiery sermons of the monk John of Capistrano. The sultan’s retreat raised enormous hopes in Christendom. But the illustrious Hunyadi, hero of Christendom, died of the plague shortly thereafter. His son, Matthias Corvinus, became king of Hungary. As for the old despot of Serbia, George Branković, he had passed away in 1456, leaving a void in the principality, where a Hungarian party and an Ottoman party were at odds. Michael Angelović, the brother of Mahmud Pasha, Mehmed II’s distinguished grand vizier, headed the Ottoman party.16 After two further expeditions in 1458 and 1459 and the surrender of the Danube fortress of Smederevo, Mehmed put an end to the independence of Serbia, which became an Ottoman province.
The sultan now focused his attention simultaneously on Peloponnesus and Morea, where he was in competition with Venice. Two Palaeologi princes, Demetrios and Thomas, brothers of the deceased emperor Constantine XI, were still installed there. The two were engaged in an inexpiable struggle, with Demetrios supported by the Turks, Thomas by Venice. After two expeditions, in 1458 and 1460, Mehmed II occupied Morea. But Venice retained major bases there: Nauplia, Modon, and Coron, where the Most Serene Republic would build impressive coastal fortresses that could be resupplied by sea. In 1455, a raid by a border governor, Ömer Bey, son of Turahan, wrested Athens from the domination of minor Latin lords, the Florentine family of the Acciajuoli.
Competition with Venice was not confined to Peloponnesus. The threat increased for the republic, this time in the Adriatic, as a result of another of the sultan’s acquisitions, which completed his hold over the Balkans: Bosnia. The king of Bosnia, Stefan Tomašević, until that time the sultan’s vassal but unwilling to pay the obligatory tribute, had finally obtained a fifteen- year truce with Mehmed II. Notwithstanding that truce, Grand Vizier Mahmud Pasha, who had reduced the rebel voivode of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler, the previous year, replacing him with Radu, a more docile vassal, launched a campaign in 1463 that culminated in the conquest of Bosnia. Stefan was put to death, despite assurances that he would be spared. The next year, 1464, the grand vizier seized Herzegovina.
Since these new Ottoman encroachments were detrimental to Hungary (which had designs on Bosnia and Wallachia) as well as to Venice, that republic counted on the cooperation of King Matthias Corvinus and did not hesitate to launch a major offensive against the Ottomans in July 1463. It held the Isthmus of Corinth and managed to retake control of a large part of Peloponnesus, while Matthias invaded Bosnia. That Ottoman- Venetian war lasted intermittently until 1479. At the end of that long conflict, an ordeal for both sides, Venice asked for peace. The sultan was granted the possession of Scutari, Croia, and the islands of Lemnos and Euboea. Venice grieved the loss of Euboea, one of the pearls of its colonial empire. In the meantime, the Ottoman- Venetian conflict had reignited the Albanian rebellion. In 1458, upon the death of his protector, Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, Skanderbeg had prudently placed himself under Ottoman suzerainty once more. But then, having rallied behind Venice, he again chose the path of sedition. Mehmed decided to get rid of him. He launched a first major campaign in 1466, and, in the summer of that same year, within the space of twenty- five days, he had the formidable fortress of Elbasan built on the Albanian plain, on the route of the old Via Egnatia. Then the Ottomans laid siege to the fortress of Krujë, last keep of the resistance. In 1467, Skanderbey managed to lead an army against the besiegers of Krujë. That attack provoked the sultan’s second Albanian campaign, which culminated in the conquest of most of the country, with the Venetians keeping only a few bases on the Adriatic. After taking refuge in Venetian territory, Skanderbey died in 1468. Ottoman control over the mountains of the “land of eagles” would remain indirect and relatively light.
In his desire to secure complete control of the Aegean Sea and also to take advantage of his dominance of the straits to extend his influence over the Black Sea, Mehmed II clashed with another adversary, Genoa. He would take over its last colonial possessions: in 1455, he seized the old and the new Phocea, the center for alum production, as well as Aenos (Enez) in Thrace, at the mouth of the Maritsa in the Aegean Sea. In 1458, the Genoese islands of Lesbos and Chios were obliged to pay him a tribute (like the Venetian island of Naxos). The next year, the sultan reached the Pontic port of Amastris (Amasra) by land and captured it.
The growth of the Ottoman fleet following Mehmed II’s establishment of an arsenal on the Golden Horn, which succeeded the first Ottoman arsenal of Gelibolu, gave a great deal of importance to the naval war in the conquests that followed. In the Black Sea, it was after the maritime expedition commanded by Grand Vizier Gedik Ahmed Pasha in 1475 that the Ottomans took over Caffa and the other ports of southern Crimea, which together had constituted the “Genoese Gazaria.” They were united into the sanjak of Kefe, to which two other bases would be added northeast of the Black Sea: Kopa (Kuba), at the mouth of the Sea of Azov, and Anapa, on the coast east of Crimea. In 1478, moreover, the pro- Ottoman party was victorious in the struggles among the sons of Haji Giray for the succession of the khanate of Crimea. Mengli Giray became khan, and the khanate became a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, as it would remain, with greater or lesser docility depending on the era, until 1774.
In the Mediterranean, Mehmed II launched an expedition in summer 1480 against the island of Rhodes, a possession of the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John of Jerusalem. The knights, who represented the last Latin power in the eastern Mediterranean, were threatening the coasts of southern Anatolia and constituted an obstacle to the sea route to Egypt. Mesih Pasha, a Byzantine renegade, headed the Ottoman fleet. The siege of Rhodes dragged on and on, its walls resisting successive assaults. The arrival of aid sent by the king of Naples, in anticipation of a possible mobilization of Christendom, induced Mesih Pasha to beat a retreat. At the same time, another fleet, also headed by Gedić Ahmed Pasha, successfully landed in Otranto. What did that Ottoman intrusion into southern Italy signify? A desire to strike a blow to the king of Naples, the Ottomans’ old adversary? Or a plan by the sultan, after he had seized the “new Rome,” to march on the old Rome and capture the papal see? Whatever the underlying motivations of the Otranto expedition, it was sufficiently troubling that the pope considered fleeing to France. The sudden death of Mehmed II in 1481, however, removed the threat. On May 3 of that year, the sultan, age forty- nine, had just crossed the Bosphorus to undertake a new campaign. Following his habit, he had not declared its objective, but the assumption was that it would be directed against Egypt. But he unexpectedly expired in his camp. Understandably, poison was suspected, but that suspicion remains hypothetical: complications from his long- deteriorating state of health cannot be ruled out.
Bayezid II and the “Jem Affair”
Under Mehmed’s successor, Bayezid II, the conquests did not continue at the same pace. That sultan was at first hindered in his actions by the struggle for succession with his younger brother, Jem Sultan. Then, Jem asked for asylum from the Knights of Rhodes in 1482 and, as a result, found himself in France and then in Italy. The presence of that rival, liable to be used against him, in the hands of potential adversaries was a sword of Damocles hanging over Bayezid II’s head. In the words of Theodōros Spandouginos, so long as the sultan’s brother was still alive, Bayezid “was never entirely sure of his empire.”17 No military undertaking of any great scope could be considered. The delicate situation caused by Jem’s detention abroad also obliged the Ottomans to learn more about their neighbors to the west and to develop diplomatic relations with them. The first act in Franco- Ottoman relations, destined for such a great future, played out at that time. In any event, to have some peace, Bayezid had to wait until Jem died in 1495 and, to be even safer, until the sultan had recovered Jem’s body, proof that his brother was truly dead. He did so, after a great deal of haggling, only in 1499. But the peace he found on that side was offset by the rival ambitions of his many sons, which would soon overwhelm him with more worries.
Difficulties in succession, which affected that reign more than others, did not entirely prevent continuing hostilities in Europe, albeit in the form of devastating raids in Hungary, Croatia, and even the Austrian provinces (Carniola, Styria, and Carinthia), at the initiative of the border beys. In 1484, moreover, while his brother was still a captive in Europe, Bayezid did not hesitate to personally conduct a campaign against Stephen the Great, voivode of Moldavia. On July 15, 1484, he took from Stephen the city of Kili, on the Danube estuary. Then, on August 9, with the aid of the cavalry of Mengli Giray, khan of Crimea, Bayezid captured the city of Akkerman, at the mouth of the Dniester. Stephen then secured the support of Casimir IV, king of Poland, acknowledging his suzerainty. But the voivode could not recapture his two cities, which, as stops on the major trade routes linking the Mediterranean to northeastern Europe, were of great strategic and commercial importance.18 In 1487, he resolved to send the sultan a tribute once more. As for Poland, in 1489 it concluded a truce with the Turks, which would be extended in 1492 and again in 1494. But shortly thereafter, war resumed with Poland, which refused to have its access to the Black Sea cut off by the establishment of the Ottoman presence between Crimea and the Danube Delta. In the end, the truce would not be renewed until 1499. At that time, Bayezid needed to have a free hand to resume the fight against Venice, which the previous sultan had left unfinished. Many points of friction remained between the two states, both in Morea and on the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts of the Adriatic. The war lasted until 1502, with Venice benefiting from an alliance with the French king Louis XII, and then from a Hungarian alliance. Lepanto, in the Gulf of Corinth, which the sultan besieged in person, surrendered on August 29, 1499. The Turks took Coron, Modon, and Navarino in August 1500. In October 1501, French and Venetian fleets conducted a joint attack against Mytilene that would end in defeat.19 Raids by Ottoman privateers, led by Mihaloğlu Iskender Pasha, reached Friuli and Venetian territory proper, opposite Vicenza. Finally, by the terms of the treaty of December 14, 1502 (ratified in August 1503), Venice gave up Lepanto, Coron, Navarino, and Durazzo; it evacuated the island of Sainte Maura and continued to pay a tribute for the possession of the island of Zante. Conversely, its possession of the island of Cephalonia was ratified and its prior commercial privileges in the Ottoman Empire restored. A new phase had begun in the gradual absorption of the Venetian empire.
Bayezid was forced to abdicate by his son, Selim, the ultimate victor in the competition between brothers to be the sultan’s successor. That abdication came shortly before Bayezid’s demise.
Selim I and the Turning Point for the Near East
Selim I’s brief reign was a turning point in Ottoman history, because of his dazzling conquests in the Middle East. He first overcame Shah Esmā‘īl, the Shiite sovereign of Persia, for whom he felt an antagonism both political and religious, at the battle of Chaldiran, near Tabrīz, on August 23, 1514. He then went on to attack the Mamluks. The underlying conflict between the rising Ottoman power and their venerable Mamluk neighbors focused on the question of Cilicia and the boundary of the Taurus Mountains. It had already erupted twice, under Mehmed II and Bayezid II. After his successes in Azerbaijan, Selim resolved to lance the abscess. A two- year campaign resulted in 1516 and 1517, ending in the conquest of Syria after the Battle of Marj Dabik, near Aleppo, and the death on the battlefield of Sultan Qansuh al- Ghuri on August 24, 1516; the conquest of Egypt immediately followed. The last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay, Qansuh al- Ghuri’s nephew, opted for resistance, despite the compromises proposed by Selim, and he was definitively defeated at the Battle of Ridaniyya on January 23, 1517. Finally captured, he was executed in Cairo on Selim’s order the following April 13. That was the end of the Mamluk regime, which was replaced by the Ottomans. Egypt and Syria became Ottoman provinces, though these were initially entrusted to governors of Mamluk origin. Selim, by contrast, died prematurely on September 20, 1520, having run out of time to deal with the European front. He seems, however, to have been preparing to do so in his last years by constructing a large arsenal in Galata. A plan to finish off Rhodes, which had withstood his grandfather Mehmed II, has been attributed to him, though according to others sources, he judged the undertaking unrealistic.20
Süleyman the Magnificent’s First Successes: Belgrade and Rhodes
Selim’s son and successor, Süleyman, nicknamed “the Magnificent” by Westerners and “the Lawgiver” in the Ottoman tradition, was the most illustrious of the Ottoman sovereigns, and his long reign (1520– 1566) would be remembered as the “golden age” of an empire at the height of its power, wealth, and, for the most part, its territorial expanse. Dark moments were not absent, however, especially in the second part of his reign, beginning in 1540– 1550.
A lawmaker and patron of the arts, Süleyman also distinguished himself through his conquests: on the eastern front, where he personally conducted three campaigns, including that of 1534, which resulted in his conquest of Baghdad and Iraq, and also in Europe, where he conducted no fewer than ten campaigns. It is primarily his European campaigns that I will consider here. Initially setting aside the struggle against Safavid Iran, in which his father had made his mark, Süleyman first sought strategic and symbolic successes to the west. His pretext was the mistreatment inflicted on his emissary Behram Chavush, officially sent to announce his accession to the king of Hungary, but probably also, less officially, to communicate to the king an offer to be vassalized, intended to divert him from his alliance with the Habsburgs. Launching a first campaign in Hungary, Süleyman took Sabac and Zemun, ravaged the regions between Sava and Drava, and above all, succeeded where Mehmed II had failed, seizing Belgrade on August 29, 1521. The next target too corresponded to a defeat on the part of his great- grandfather, a place whose strategic importance for the Ottomans had further increased since the conquest of Egypt: the island of Rhodes, held by the Knights of Saint John and serving as a base for active piracy in the eastern Mediterranean. Süleyman armed a fleet totaling perhaps 235 units and mobilized some 200,000 men. The siege continued into the winter, with the fleet going to seek shelter in the waters of Marmaris. The knights capitulated after five months, on December 21, 1522.
Mohács: The Crushing Defeat of the Hungarian Cavalry
When a second emissary sent to Louis of Hungary in 1524 met with no greater success, a new campaign was launched in April 1526. Louis II’s army recklessly set out to meet the sultan’s troops, who were greatly superior in number. The confrontation took place on August 29 on the Mohács plain, on the banks of the Danube. The Ottoman artillery carved the Hungarian heavy cavalry to pieces. The sultan’s victory was all the more decisive in that the young Louis II drowned during his retreat, leaving no heir. But after occupying Buda, the Hungarian capital, for about ten days, Süleyman decided to return without delay, worried by news that had reached him of serious Turkoman revolts in Anatolia. Under the circumstances, the only result of that success, apart from the rich booty collected in Buda, was the annexation of two comitats south of the Danube, Szerém and Valkó. Thanks to the Ottoman retreat, two candidates in succession were elected king of Hungary by different diets: the most powerful magnate of the country, John Zápolya, voivode of Transylvania, was elected in Székesfehérvár on November 11, 1526; Charles V’s brother, Ferdinand of Habsburg, archduke of Austria and soon the elected king of Bohemia, was enthroned in turn, by a smaller assembly in Bratslava on December 17, 1526. The sultan’s preference quite naturally went to the weaker and therefore more manageable of the two, Zápolya, whom he made his vassal in February 1528.
The First Siege of Vienna: A Concealed Failure
But Ferdinand did not give up his ambitions, and his troops took possession of Buda. Süleyman therefore had to leave Istanbul on May 10, 1529, to begin a third Hungarian campaign, despite the difficulties of such undertakings: the cold and the rain, even in summer; the large waterways to be crossed; and the problems of provisions and logistics, given the great distances from the center of the Ottoman Empire. He reoccupied Buda without difficulty, then headed for Vienna, where, delayed from the outset by obstacles of all sorts, he did not arrive until September 27. So began the first Turkish siege of Vienna. Unable to take the city despite four successive assaults, Süleyman, facing the early arrival of winter, lifted the siege on October 14. The city and all Christendom felt enormous relief. For his part, Süleyman minimized his failure. In the victory report (in Greek) that he sent to the doge of Venice, he denied that he had ever had the intention of taking Vienna: he had simply set out in pursuit of a fleeing adversary, Ferdinand of Habsburg.21
Süleyman and Charles V: The Empire at Stake
The rivalry between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs was at its height: beyond the control of Hungary, the imperial inheritance and hence the claim to universal domination were at stake. The sultan could not allow Charles V to be crowned emperor and his brother to become king of the Romans, since Süleyman believed that he himself was the only legitimate candidate for supreme sovereignty.22 Under the circumstances, Süleyman directed his fourth campaign in Europe against Charles V in particular, who had styled himself the champion of the “Turkish war” at the diet of Ratisbon in April 1532. In the Ottoman tradition, that campaign is known as “Germany’s campaign against the king of Spain.” Modest in its results, that campaign of summer 1532 was marked especially by a laborious siege of the stronghold of Güns (Köszeg) and by devastating raids in Styria and Slavonia. The Habsburgs were sufficiently alarmed to request a truce, which the sultan readily granted them in June 1533, especially since the successes of the enemy fleet, which had seized Coron and Patras on the coast of Peloponnesus in 1532, gave him reason to worry. His attention, moreover, was now turning to Iran. By the terms of the accord, the status quo, that is, the division of Hungary between Ferdinand and Zápolya, was ratified, with the two rivals becoming tributaries of the sultan.
With the Baghdad campaign of 1534– 1536, followed by the execution of Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha, whose influence had heretofore been preponderant,23 the most spectacular phase of the young sultan’s conquests came to an end. But his military activity was not suspended, either on land or on sea.
Admiral Barbarossa and the Franco- Ottoman Alliance
In 1533, the appointment of the corsair Khayreddin Barbarossa, leader of Algiers, to head the large imperial fleet was decisive for sea warfare. Diplomatic activity was occurring at the same time: a first permanent French embassy was sent to Istanbul in 1534, entrusted to Jean de la Forêt, an event that marked the officialization of the Franco- Ottoman alliance against the Habsburgs. The first fruit of the military collaboration between the two countries, which included concerted but separate land campaigns and joint sea campaigns, was a joint naval operation against Naples, a dependent of Spain and hence of Charles V. It took place in summer 1537. Nothing— or almost nothing— went off as planned. Francis I’s fleet joined the sultan’s at Avlonya only after a long delay. Süleyman for his part abandoned the idea of setting off for Naples, turning instead to the island of Corfu, a possession of Venice, with which relations had deteriorated in the meantime. Although the siege of Corfu was a failure, Barbarossa, continuing the struggle against the Most Serene Republic, managed to seize the majority of the Aegean Islands that were still in the hands of Venetian patrician families. In addition, on September 28, 1538, he had a major naval success in Preveza in the Gulf of Arta, putting to flight the joint fleets of Venice and Spain, commanded by the illustrious Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. Venice negotiated, always anxious to safeguard its commercial interests in the East. By the terms of the treaty of October 2, 1540, which Süleyman granted to Doge Pietro Lando, the Most Serene Republic agreed to new territorial sacrifices in the disputed zones between the two states: Nauplia and Monemvasia in Peloponnesus, Vrana and Nadin on the border of Bosnia, as well as a group of Aegean Islands, including Naxos, Paros, Santorini, and Andros.
The Moldavia Campaign
In that same summer of 1538, Süleyman personally conducted a campaign to call to order an intractable vassal, Petru Raresh, voivode of Moldavia. He was suspected of colluding with Vienna and of placing in peril the good relationship between the sultan and Poland. As a matter of fact, he had his sights set on a province claimed by Poland: Pokucia. After occupying Suceava between September 15 and 22, 1538, the sultan named a new voivode, then withdrew from Moldavia, but not without amputating the southeastern part of that country by annexing the zone between the Prut and the Dniester, the Bujak, with the fortress of Bender (Tighina in Romanian). Süleyman thus made his positions north of the Black Sea complete and assured overland connections with another vassal, the khan of Crimea.
Tripartition of the Kingdom of Hungary
In the following years, troubles continued in Hungary as a result of the pressure Ferdinand of Habsburg constantly exerted on his rival, John Zápolya. In 1538, Ferdinand imposed the secret treaty of Várad (Oradea), by which Zápolya pledged to transmit his right to the Hungarian crown to Ferdinand after Zápolya’s death. But shortly thereafter, the wife of Zápolya, Isabella— daughter of Sigismund, king of Poland— whom he had married late in life, gave him a son. Zápolya died a few days later, in July 1540. The widow’s chief adviser, George Martinuzzi- Utiešenović, bishop of Várad, had the then fifteen- day- old baby elected king of Hungary and secured the sultan’s recognition of him. Ferdinand, who had rallied most of the Hungarian lords to his cause, ordered a siege on Buda in May 1541. That situation forced the sultan to intervene once again. Rushing in with his army, he reoccupied Buda in late July. The fumbling that followed attests to his hesitation about the fate to be reserved for Hungary. In the end, he annexed the center of the kingdom, which became an Ottoman province, the beylerbeyilik of Budun. In addition, he granted Zápolya’s young son, for whom the bishop of Várad would serve as guardian, the “land of Transylvania,” that is, not only the voivodate of Transylvania proper but the entire eastern part of the kingdom, including the Banat of Temesvár. But the sultan also recognized the special authority over the Banat of a Serb related to the Zápolyas, Peter Petrovics. In his role as regent, Martinuzzi navigated a careful path between the two parties, each of whom accused him of playing a double game. He was ultimately assassinated on Ferdinand’s order in December 1551. The rest of Hungary, that is, the western and northern parts of the former kingdom, remained in Ferdinand’s possession. It would be called “Royal Hungary.”
The Continuing Advance in Hungary
Subsequently, Süleyman and his successors strove to expand their province and to strengthen its strategic position at the expense of Royal Hungary. In 1543, the sultan launched another major campaign, which required preparations at an unprecedented scale in terms of logistics and supplies. It culminated in the taking of a whole series of important fortresses (Valpó, Sziklós, Pécs, and especially Esztergom and Székesfehérvár, the former royal necropolis). But Ferdinand was still not definitively driven from Hungary. The sultan planned another large- scale campaign for the winter of 1544– 1545, but finally canceled it in favor of a compromise that, after several truces, would lead to a treaty in June 1547. Peace was established for five years; the territorial status quo was maintained; and Ferdinand was to pay the Ottoman Porte a tribute of thirty thousand ducats a year. Süleyman thus had his hands free to conduct a campaign against Tahmasp, shah of Persia, in 1548– 1549. Hostilities resumed to the west in 1551, after Ferdinand sent an army, led by Giovanni Battista Castaldo, into Transylvania and Hungary to fight the Turks. In 1552, the second vizier, Ahmed Pasha, waged another campaign, storming several fortresses of the Banat of Temesvár, which the Ottomans then annexed.
Stabilization of the Ottoman Borders
It was clear in the 1550s, however, that the expansion of the empire was reaching its limits and that its borders were becoming stabilized. That was true both for the eastern front, where the peace of Amasya in May 1555 established the respective zones of influence for the Ottomans and the Safavids, and on the western front in central Europe and the Mediterranean. In Europe, Süleyman had his final naval success in 1560, when his great admiral, Piyale Pasha, drove the troops of Philip II, king of Spain, off the island of Jerba. In 1566, the admiral also seized the island of Chios, the last Genoese possession in the Archipelago. By contrast, the previous year, the huge siege of Malta, where the Knights of Rhodes had found refuge, had ended in bitter defeat.
Szigetvár: The Last Campaign
The following year, the sultan, now a sickly, irascible old man steeped in an austere piety, set out once more on a campaign, which he had not done in ten years. Again taking the Hungarian route, he besieged the fortress of Szigetvár beginning on August 4. He died outside its walls on the night of September 6, 1566; Szigetvár fell the day after his death. His demise was officially kept secret for forty- eight days as the army returned home, until they were approaching Belgrade. Süleyman’s successor, his son Selim II, rushed to take charge of the troops and perhaps to continue the campaign. He was dissuaded by the poor disposition of the army, to which he had rashly refused the gift of joyous accession.24
Final Conquests in Europe in the Late Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
Cyprus
The last part of Süleyman’s reign had been marked by a slower pace of conquests, with more laborious advances leading to more modest and more uncertain acquisitions. That tendency became more pronounced under Süleyman’s successors until the late seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the conquest of the island of Cyprus was a significant addition during the reign of his son Selim II and a further painful amputation of Venetian “Romania,” of which the island had been a part since 1489. The cautious grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha did not support provoking Christendom with such an undertaking, but he clashed with a “war party,” a conflict very indicative of the factional struggles within the Ottoman power at the time. Among other pretexts, these “hawks” portrayed Cyprus as a sanctuary for pirates hindering the movements of pilgrims on their way to Mecca and of merchants. In March 1570, the Venetian senate, called upon to cede the island, responded with a negative vote, trusting in assistance from the outside. By September, the army had landed on the island and seized Nicosia.
The Battle of Lepanto
In reaction, a league was established at the instigation of Pope Pius V between Spain, the papacy, and Venice. The allied fleet, placed under the command of Don John of Austria, illegitimate son of Charles V and therefore the half- brother of Philip II, departed from Messina in September 1571. In the meantime, Famagusta, the second stronghold on the island, fell on August 1 after an eleven- month siege. On October 7, John of Austria’s fleet encountered the sultan’s armada off the coast of Lepanto, in the waters of the Gulf of Patras, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Most of the Ottoman vessels sank or burned, primarily as a result of the superiority of the allied artillery. There were reports that the sea was red with the blood of countless victims. That major Turkish setback caused an enormous stir in Christendom, becoming one of the symbols of the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent. The consequences were almost nil, however, both because of the divisions among the allies, who did not pursue their advantage, and because of the Ottomans’ ability to bounce back. Spurred on by the grand vizier, they reconstituted their fleet over the following winter. Venice again negotiated: it agreed to give up Cyprus and paid a war indemnity of 300,000 ducats.
Hungary—Again
In the decades that followed, Royal Hungary also continued inexorably to be nibbled away. At the turn of the seventeenth century, during the Long War opposing the Habsburgs and the Ottomans (1591– 1606),25 further strongholds were taken: Bihać in 1592 and Györ in 1594. In 1596, restoring the tradition of combatant sultans that his two predecessors had abandoned, Mehmed III personally led his armies, but with limited success. At the most critical moment of the Battle of Keresztes, he put on the mantle of the Prophet, the most holy of relics, to attract the good fortune needed. The conquest of Eger (Erlau) was the only result of his efforts and his sole claim to glory. Finally, Kanizsa was taken in 1600 and Várad much later, in 1660. At the end of the Austro- Ottoman War of 1663– 1664, even though the Ottomans suffered a grave defeat at the Battle of Saint- Gottard (Szentgotthárd) on the Raab, the truce of Varvár granted them favorable conditions, because Emperor Leopold was impatient to conclude the peace. As a result, the Hungarian border defense had to retreat farther, allowing for the constitution of one last Ottoman province in Hungary, the eyālet of Uyvár (Ujvár, Nové Zámky). The Austrians, forced to respond, set in place a new border front in 1665. Its centerpiece, constructed in accordance with the most modern principles of military architecture, would bear Leopold’s name in its Hungarian form: Lipotvár.26
In general, the first decades of the seventeenth century saw a clear slowing of the empire’s external activities: the Long War of Hungary, which dragged on for thirteen years at the turn of the century, culminated in a half- success. The Turks kept their possessions in the Banat of Temesvár and in Hungary, and even added to them somewhat. Their suzerainty over Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania was also confirmed. But the Treaty of Zsitvatorok, which ended the conflict in 1606, marked a relative weakening of their position: again in a rush to have their hands free so as to turn against Persia, they had to negotiate as equals with their adversaries on the battlefield, in Hungary itself. In addition, the sultan consented— at least in the Hungarian version of the treaty— to give the title “Caesar” to the Habsburgs, thereby renouncing exclusive rights to imperial status. He also abandoned the demand for a tribute from the German sovereign.27
Subsequently, once another long war was over— this one with the Safavids (1603– 1619)— the Ottoman government became absorbed in internal problems of all kinds. Fortunately for the Ottomans, Christian Europe could not take advantage of the situation, because it was mobilized by the Thirty Years’ War.
Crete
Ottoman territorial expansion in Europe resumed somewhat in the 1650s, thanks to the recovery spearheaded with singular energy by the first two grand viziers of the Köprülüs: Mehmed Pasha (1656–1661) and then his son Fazıl Ahmed Pasha (1661–1676). In their ventures, they took advantage of the growing weakness of two European states: Venice and Poland.
For Venice, the loss of the “kingdom of Crete,” its last jewel, at the end of a war that had been long and laborious for the conquerors, lasting from 1645 to 1669, sounded the death knell of its colonial empire. It was the end of a centuries- long, always unequal duel for domination of the eastern Mediterranean.28
Southern Poland and the Cossack Problem
The other European border where the situation was evolving in the seventeenth century was that of the steppes of the northern Black Sea, from the southern boundaries of Poland- Lithuania and Moscovy.29 There, on the line between these two states, a new force emerged, which both states strove to control and exploit: the Cossacks. Between 1582 and 1638, they became a great military and naval power, increasingly provoking the Ottoman Empire directly: in about 1600, several of its Pontic ports were the object of surprise attacks by the Cossack fleets. In 1625, the Cossacks penetrated into the Bosphorus, advancing to the doorstep of the Ottoman capital.
Because of that new peril, combined with the persistent rivalry between Poland and the Ottomans for control of Moldavia, the very young and headstrong sultan Osman II decided in 1621 to undertake a campaign against Poland. At the head of his army, he, like his ancestors, crossed the Danube at the ford of Isaqça; then, in August, he laid siege to Chocim (Hotin) on the Dniester. After five fruitless assaults, and facing the arrival of winter and the scarcity of food, he had to turn back. But he left his army deeply disgruntled, a situation that would soon lead to disaster. The peace was concluded with Poland in October 1621.
A few decades later, the second of the Köprülüs, Fazıl Ahmed Pasha, undertook to constitute a buffer zone against the Polish and Russian advances on the coasts of the Black Sea. He wanted to take advantage of the weakness of the sovereign then ruling Poland, Michael Wiśniowiecki (1669–1673), and of the support of the Cossack leader, Peter Doroshenko. Doroshenko had in fact turned to the Turks because he was unhappy about the partitioning of the Ukraine, on which Poland and Russia had jointly agreed in the truce of Andrusovo (1667). The Dnieper served as a border between the respective parts of the two signatory countries.
In August 1672, Sultan Mehmed IV took the unusual measure of commanding the Ottoman armies, which seized the fortress of Kamieniec Podolski. The city’s Gothic cathedral was turned into a mosque, where the sultan participated in the Friday great prayer. On the following October 18, the armistice of Buczacz with Poland ratified the reattachment of the province of Podolia to the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed IV was hailed as “the father of victory,” “who tore down the edifice of unbelief and error.”30 That final conquest would be short- lived: Poland recovered Podolia with the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699).
The First Ottoman Retreats in Europe in the Late Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries
The retreat was slow and discontinuous. Within the chronological framework of the modern period, it also remained limited. It was only during the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth that the structure built up in Europe, primarily by the fourteenth- and fifteenth- century sultans, was truly dismantled.
The War of the Holy League and the Treaty of Karlowitz
A first significant retreat was recorded, however, at the very end of the seventeenth century, following the War of the Holy League (1683–1699), in which the Habsburg Empire, Poland, Russia, and Venice formed a coalition against the Turks and struck hard against them, pushing the Turkish empire to the brink of the abyss. The war began with the second Ottoman defeat outside Vienna. The siege had to be lifted after two months, given the arrival of German and Polish relief armies, which had a major victory under the command of John Sobieski, king of Poland, at Mount Kahlenberg on September 12, 1683. When the conflict was finally over in 1699, the Treaty of Karlowitz (Srmeski Karlovci) stipulated the end of Ottoman Hungary and of the empire’s southern fringes between Sava and Drava. All these regions came under the sway of the Habsburgs. Only the Banat of Temesvár, that is, the territories between the Danube, the Tisza, and the Muresul, remained in the Ottomans’ hands. The end had also come for Ottoman suzerainty over Transylvania, which dated back to Süleyman the Magnificent. In reality, the country had been able to conduct an independent policy with the Protestants within the context of the Thirty Years’ War, under the voivodes Gabriel Bethlen (1613–1629) and George I Rackoczi (1630–1648). But then, under the grand viziership of the Köprülüs, the Ottoman Porte reasserted its authority over its vassal by imposing the voivodes of its own choosing. It was the appointment of Michael I Apafy, rejected by Leopold, that was the casus belli of the AustroTurkish War of 1663–1664. Conversely, the first article of the Treaty of Karlowitz recognized Transylvania as belonging to the Habsburg emperor. Nevertheless, in conformity with the privileges Leopold I had granted to the country during the war (the Diploma leopoldinum of December 4, 1691), Transylvania remained an entity distinct from Hungary, possessing its own institutions— in line with the division made by Süleyman the Magnificent in 1541. In the following years, in fact, the Transylvanian opposition to the overly pro- Catholic policy of the Habsburg regime would seek refuge with the Ottoman Porte.
By the terms of the same treaties of 1699, Poland recovered Podolia; Venice, by way of belated compensation, received Peloponnesus, where it had formerly had large bases. During the war, Francesco Morosini, the same man who had not managed to keep Crete for the republic, had conquered the peninsula. Venice also occupied a large part of Dalmatia.
The first retreat, ratified by the treaties of 1699, did not end there. The dynamic set in motion continued into the first half of the eighteenth century, in conflicts still involving the Habsburgs and Venice but in which Peter the Great’s Russia played an increasing role.
Appearance of the Russian Threat
It was Russia’s designs on the south and on the “hot” waters of the Black Sea that brought the tsar into the game. After a first Russo- Ottoman war in 1695– 1696 and the Treaty of Constantinople that followed, on June 13, 1700, the Ottomans had to give up their sovereignty over the north of the Sea of Azov, and lost the fortress of Azak and its territory, which they had held since the time of Mehmed II. The Russians then built the fortress of Taganrog there. Eleven years later, the Turks found an unexpected opportunity to take their revenge, when in July 1711 a Russian army, accompanied by Peter the Great and his wife, Catherine I, was surrounded on the Pruth by the Ottoman army, its ranks swelled by Tatar and Cossack reinforcements, under the command of Grand Vizier Baltajı Mehmed Pasha. Reduced to complete powerlessness, the tsar faced grave peril but managed to extricate himself under relatively favorable conditions. Catherine is said to have bought off the grand vizier, whose overly accommodating behavior earned him a prison term. In fact, by the terms of the Treaty of Pruth, Peter recovered his freedom, giving up only Azak and Taganrog.
The Treaty of Passarowitz
In Peloponnesus as well, the Ottomans wreaked their revenge, and the Venetians could not hold onto their conquest: the blunders of the Catholic hierarchy vis- à- vis the local Orthodox clergy had weakened their position. By 1715, Grand Vizier Damad ‘Ali Pasha had recaptured the province, as the Treaty of Passarowitz would ratify.
The Austrians, conversely, under the leadership of Prince Eugene, continued their advance. Their overwhelming victory on August 5, 1716, at the Battle of Peterwardein (Petrovaradin), in which Grand Vizier Silahdar Ali Pasha met his death, left the road to Belgrade open to them. They conquered it the following summer. In the meantime, on October 12, 1716, Temesvár capitulated. The Treaty of Passarowitz, on July 21, 1718, ratified these conquests: Austria annexed Belgrade and northern Serbia as well as the Banat of Temesvár and western Wallachia, or Oltenia. Taking advantage of that position of strength, Vienna also obtained a treaty from the Ottoman Porte in 1719 granting its merchants freedom of trade on land and sea in the sultan’s states.
The Peace of Belgrade
The Russians and the Austrians returned to war about fifteen years later, but with less success. This time, the Ottomans mounted a better resistance, and they would benefit from the effective mediation of the marquess of Villeneuve, French ambassador in Constantinople. With the Peace of Belgrade in 1739, Austria lost Belgrade and its acquisitions in Serbia; of its conquests north of the Black Sea, Russia kept only Azak.
The Treaty of Kuchuk Kaynarja
The Russian threat to the integrity of the Ottoman Empire began to come to light in all its gravity with the Russo- Ottoman War of 1768– 1774. The empire’s disorganization and the state of disrepair of its military forces, both on land and sea, now became fully apparent. The fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Chesma, surprised by the Russian ships, which had come into the Mediterranean after an impressive circumnavigation through the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Strait of Gibraltar. The Greeks of Morea rose up in support of the Russians. The Treaty of Kuchuk Kaynarja (1774), which put an end to the conflict, stipulated an enormous war indemnity totaling 4,500,000 rubles, and contained several clauses of great consequence for the future. Crimea became independent, that is, its relationship of vassalage with the Ottomans was severed, a separation that could only favor its annexation by Russia, which in fact occurred in 1783. The Ottoman sultan retained only a religious bond with the Tatars, a situation that led diplomats to spell out and consecrate the notion of an Ottoman caliphate. At the territorial level, Russia recovered Azak and its territory, which would belong “in perpetuity to the Empire of Russia.” Also attributed to Russia was a fortress at the mouth of the Dnieper, the castle of Kinburn (Kilburun) “with an adequate district on the left bank of the river,” as well as a zone between the Dnieper and the Bug. In addition, the treaty recognized the right of the Russians to trade and navigate in the Black Sea and in the straits. Russian consulates were established in the Romanian capitals, Bucharest and Jassy. The treaty also declared the obligations of the Ottoman Porte vis- à- vis the Christians and their churches, in such a way as to establish a right of protection from the tsar (or tsarina) for the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. Catherine II stood as the champion of an Orthodox reconquista in eastern Europe, and Russia as the mortal enemy of the Ottomans.