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THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE ended on a particular day, but its beginnings are shrouded in myth.
On 29 October 1923 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was declared president of the Turkish Republic, a state whose legitimacy was based on popular sovereignty within finite, internationally-recognized frontiers. Turkish republicans had already demoted the Ottoman Sultan – on 1 November 1922 – so that he retained only his religious role as caliph, and on 3 March 1924 they abolished that office too, thereby abandoning altogether the notion that the state they were creating owed its existence to dynastic politics or to divine right.
Between the 15th and the 20th of October 1927 Mustafa Kemal set out in a lengthy address to parliament – so famous that it is known in Turkish simply as ‘The Speech’ – the reasons his generation had rejected the nation’s stale and unprofitable Ottoman past. His first years in power were dedicated to a series of reforms, which he called revolutions, designed to oblige the Turkish people to abandon their imperial heritage, escape the tyranny of clerics, and embrace the modern world.
It is only more recently that Turks have been able to see their own history as something other than the story of the rise and terrible decline of an Islamic empire that at its height in the sixteenth century might have rivalled the might of ancient Rome, but that owing to some inherent flaw failed to keep pace with the Christian West. For centuries Ottoman military might intimidated the armies not just of Europe but of Iran and other Muslim states; Ottoman architects built the great mosques which dominate the skylines of Istanbul and provincial cities; the empire’s legal system continued to juggle the ethnic complexities of the Balkans and the Middle East. To discover exactly how the Ottomans managed to finance and administer an empire of this scale, modern historians of an independent mind began to decipher the architects’ account books and to examine the legal records; a new generation of scholars began to read between the lines of chronicles commissioned by victorious sultans, to see how the history of empire was not simply the history of its ruling family; and, perhaps most importantly, they began to look critically at the histories written – sometimes with all the sophistication of western scholarship – in territories that had once been under Ottoman rule, and discovered that they were partial and incomplete because, seeing through a glass darkly, their authors presented national myth as historical fact, and made assumptions about the nature of the Ottoman Empire without listening to the Ottoman voice.
So by the time the Turkish Republic celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of its creation in 1998, it had the confidence to plan festivities on the eve of the second millennium to commemorate the founding 700 years earlier of the Ottoman Empire. But why should 1299 CE be considered the founding date of the empire? – there were no famous battles, no declarations of independence or storming of a bastille. The simplest explanations are often the most convincing: that year corresponds to the years 699–700 in the Islamic calendar.* By rare mathematical coincidence, the centuries turned at the same time in both the Christian and Islamic calendars. What more auspicious year to mark the founding of an empire that spanned Europe and the Middle East?
The early Ottomans, struggling to plant their authority, were less concerned with the date of the founding of their state than with the vision that underpinned their right to rule. To them, empire began quite literally with a dream. One night, the first sultan, Osman, was sleeping in the house of a holy man called Edebali when:
He saw that a moon arose from the holy man’s breast and came to sink in his own breast. A tree then sprouted from his navel and its shade compassed the world. Beneath this shade there were mountains, and streams flowed forth from the foot of each mountain. Some people drank from these running waters, others watered gardens, while yet others caused fountains to flow. When Osman awoke he told the story to the holy man, who said ‘Osman, my son, congratulations, for God has given the imperial office to you and your descendants and my daughter Malhun shall be your wife’.1
First communicated in this form in the later fifteenth century, a century and a half after Osman’s death in about 1323, this dream became one of the most resilient founding myths of the empire, conjuring up a sense of temporal and divine authority and justifying the visible success of Osman and his descendants at the expense of their competitors for territory and power in the Balkans, Anatolia, and beyond.
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No one could have predicted the achievements of the Ottomans over the succeeding centuries. Around 1300 they were only one of many Turcoman, or Turkish, tribal groups of Central Asian origin vying for control in Anatolia – the land between the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the Aegean. This had been part of the Eastern Roman Empire, which evolved into the Byzantine Empire following the split between East and West. Constantine the Great, after he came to power in 324 CE, had founded his new imperial capital, Constantinople, on the Bosporus, and the city had continued as capital of the eastern empire. Byzantium at its height had included the Balkans and extended east across Anatolia into modern Syria and beyond, but never recovered from the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, nor from the ensuing Latin occupation of the city between 1204 and 1261. By the early fourteenth century the empire was reduced to Constantinople itself, Thrace, Macedonia and much of modern Greece, and a few fortresses and seaports in western Anatolia.
Turcoman tribes had been bold raiders on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire for centuries, long before the Ottomans came to prominence. Most successful of the earlier wave of Turcomans were the Seljuk Turks, who had gradually moved westward from Central Asia as part of a prolonged migration of pastoralist nomads into the Middle East and Anatolia at a time when Byzantium was weakened by internal disputes far away in Constantinople. The Seljuk Turks met with little opposition and in 1071, under their sultan Alparslan, they defeated a Byzantine army commanded by Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes at the battle of Malazgirt (Manzikert), north of Lake Van in eastern Anatolia, opening the way for the Turcoman migrants to move westwards practically unhindered.
Islam arrived in predominantly Christian Anatolia with the Seljuk Turks; individuals of Turcoman stock had embraced Islam from the ninth century when they came into contact – often as mercenaries – with the Muslim dynasties of the Arab heartlands; mass conversion of Turks in Central Asia was only about a century old, however. Their migration into Anatolia was a momentous event. Under Alparslan’s successors the Seljuks established themselves in Anatolia, making their base not far from Constantinople, at İznik (Nicaea), until the capture of that city by the soldiers of the First Crusade in 1097 forced them to withdraw to Konya (Iconium), in central Anatolia. At around the same time the Danishmendid emirate, initially more powerful than the Seljuks, controlled a wide swathe of territory across north and central Anatolia; in the north-east, the Saltukids ruled their lands from Erzurum and the Mengucheks from Erzincan; and in the south-east were the Artukids of Diyarbakır (Amid). The Anatolia into which these Turcomans moved was ethnically and culturally mixed, with long-established Kurdish, Arab, Greek, Armenian and Jewish populations in addition to the Muslim Turcomans. Byzantium lay to the west, and in Cilicia and northern Syria were the Armenian and Crusader states, bordered to the south by the Muslim Mamluk state with its capital at Cairo. Over the course of the next century the Seljuks absorbed the territories of their weaker Turcoman neighbours, and in 1176 their sultan Kilijarslan II routed the army of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus at the site known as Myriocephalum, to the north of Lake Eğridir in south-west Anatolia. No longer confined to the interior of the Anatolian plateau, the Turcomans began expanding towards the coasts, gaining access to the trade routes of the surrounding seas.
The early thirteenth century was the heyday of the Seljuks of Rum as they called themselves (the geographic marker ‘Rum’ signified the lands of ‘Eastern Rome’, the Byzantine Empire) in distinction to the Great Seljuk Empire in Iran and Iraq. Stable relations between the Byzantines and the Seljuks of Rum allowed the latter to concentrate on securing their eastern borders, but this equilibrium was shattered when another wave of invaders swept in from the east: the Mongols, led by the descendants of the fearsome conqueror Genghis Khan, who sacked the lands of the various successor states of the Great Seljuk Empire that lay in their path. As the Seljuk victory at Malazgirt in 1071 had hastened the collapse of Byzantine rule in Anatolia, so a Mongol victory over a Seljuk army in 1243 at Kösedağ, near Sivas in north-central Anatolia, spelled the end of independence for the Seljuks of Rum. Their once-powerful sultan in Konya now became a tribute-paying vassal of the Mongol khan whose seat was far away at Karakorum in inner Asia. The subsequent years were turbulent as the sons of the last independent sultan Kay-Khusraw II disputed their patrimony, supported by various Turcoman and Mongol factions. Although during the last quarter of the century the Mongol Ilkhanid dynasty imposed direct administration, Ilkhanid control in Anatolia was never very strong for they, like the Seljuks, were locked in internecine struggle. The Turcomans of Anatolia resisted the Ilkhanids, and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria made inroads into the Ilkhanid domains from the south. But the Ilkhanids were more concerned with securing the profits to be earned from customs dues on the valuable trade between India and Europe, which passed along the routes through north-east Anatolia, and all but abandoned their ‘far west’ to the Turcoman marcher-lords on the north-western fringes of the former Seljuk lands.2
By the early years of the fourteenth century Anatolia had become home to a new generation of Muslim Turcoman emirates. They often formed strategic alliances, but inevitably came into conflict as each developed its own distinct economic and political goals. In the south around Antalya (Adalia) was the emirate of Teke, in south-west Anatolia was Menteşe, with Aydın to its north; the inland emirate of Hamid centred on Isparta, Saruhan had Manisa as its capital and northwards towards the Dardanelles lay Karesi. Germiyan’s capital was Kütahya, while north-central Anatolia was the territory of the house of İsfendiyar. The emirate of Karaman occupied south-central Anatolia with its capital at first deep in the Taurus mountains at Ermenek, then at Karaman and finally at the former Seljuk seat of Konya. By mid-fourteenth century, Cilicia was home to the emirates of the Ramazanoğulları, centred in Adana, and the neighbouring Dulkadıroğulları, based to the north-east at Elbistan. In north-west Anatolia, bordering what remained of Byzantium, was the emirate of Osman, chief of the Osmanlı – known to us as the Ottomans.
We first hear of the Ottomans around 1300 when, so a contemporary Byzantine historian tells us, there occurred in 1301 the first military encounter between a Byzantine force and troops led by a man called Osman. This battle – the battle of Bapheus – was fought not far from Constantinople, on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara: the Byzantine forces were routed.3 Many years were to elapse, however, before the power of the Ottomans could be said to rival that of the Byzantines and many myths would arise to explain the origins of a dynasty that seemed to have sprung from nowhere.
Why did the family of Osman come to dominate its neighbours and, over the succeeding centuries, how did the Ottoman emirate, only one among many in the borderlands between Byzantine and Seljuk–Ilkhanid territory, become the sole inheritor of both these states and develop into a great and long-lived empire expanding into three continents? These questions continue to fascinate historians – and to elude conclusive answer. One reason is that the history of medieval Anatolia is still rather little known. Another is that contemporary annalists of the settled states of the region – Seljuk, Armenian, Byzantine, Mamluk and Latin – were preoccupied with their own fate: details of those against whom they fought or with whom they concluded treaties enter their accounts only fortuitously. The traditions of the Anatolian Turcomans were oral and it was only once most of their rivals had been erased from the map that the Ottomans wrote down the story of their origins, emphasizing their own history at the expense of that of long-gone challengers and their doomed endeavours to found permanent states.
There are further questions to be considered. Was the Ottoman emirate motivated above all by commitment to ‘holy war’4 (jihād) – the struggle against non-Muslims that was a canonical obligation upon all believers? For Muslims the world was notionally divided into the ‘abode of Islam’, where Islam prevailed, and the ‘abode of war’, the infidel lands that must one day accept Islam – and ‘holy war’ was the means to bring this about. ‘Holy war’ had, after all, motivated the Muslim community in its early years as the new faith sought to expand and, like the proclamation of a Christian crusade, had provided inspiration to fighters down the ages. Or was it the fluid character of frontier society at this time which enabled the Ottoman emirate to gain control over extensive territories? Was the Ottoman emirate’s ability to win out over rival dynasties and states due to a favourable strategic location in the march-lands of the poorly-defended Byzantine Empire, or was Ottoman expansion a consequence of political acumen and good luck? Modern historians attempt to sift historical fact from the myths contained in the later stories in which Ottoman chroniclers accounted for the origins of the dynasty, with the help of clues contained in contemporary inscriptions, coins, documents and epic poems, as well as in works in languages other than Turkish. Wherever the answers to questions about Ottoman success may lie, the struggle of the Ottomans against their Anatolian neighbours was hard fought over almost two centuries.
The geographical and climatic features of the Anatolian land mass which was home to the Turcoman emirates played a significant role in shaping their history and in the success or failure of their efforts at carving out territorial enclaves. Most of Anatolia is high, forming an elevated central plateau ringed, except in the west, by mountains rising to 4,000 metres. The terrain is gentle in the west, where the foothills of the plateau fall to the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara leaving a wide, fertile coastal plain. In the south-east the mountains give way to the deserts of Iran, Iraq and Syria. In the north and south the coastal strip is narrow and deep valleys penetrate the mountains between steep, rugged peaks. The steppe grasslands of the plateau provide rich grazing for flocks and herds but experience extremes of climate: Turcoman pastoralists – like many Anatolian husbandmen today – moved their animals to high pastures for the summer months. They traded with the settled agriculturists of the western lowlands and the coastal fringes, where soils are more productive and the climate less severe; the people of the coastal lands in turn looked to the sea for their livelihood. Thus were goods exchanged and alliances established.
The Ottomans were not the first of the post-Mongol wave of Muslim Turcoman dynasties to appear in the historical record. We hear of the Germiyan house in 1239–40,5 well before Osman’s battle against the Byzantines in 1301, while the Karamanids, named after one Karaman Bey, first appear in 1256.6 As they began to claim permanent lands, these emerging dynasties sought to make themselves visible in new ways, for instance by building monuments to impress would-be supporters. This, a practice of settled folk, not of nomadic pastoralists or subsistent agriculturists, can be seen as indicating the ambitions of former nomads to found a sedentary state. Evidence for the building activity of the Turcoman dynasties survives in dated inscriptions: from the mosque of the minor dynasty of Eşrefoğulları at Beyşehir in the lake district of south-west Anatolia of the year 696 of the Islamic calendar (1296–7 CE),7 and from the now-demolished Kızıl Bey mosque in Ankara where the pulpit was repaired by the chiefs of Germiyan in 699 (1298–9).8 The Great mosque built by the Karamanid leader Mahmud Bey in Ermenek dates, according to its inscription and foundation deed, from 702 (1302–3).9 The earliest dated Ottoman structure of which we have record is the Hacı Özbek mosque in İznik where the foundation inscription is dated 734 (1333–4).10
Ottoman tradition recounts that a tribal chief called Ertuğrul settled in north-west Anatolia in the marcher-lands between the Seljuk–Ilkhanid and Byzantine Empires, and that the Seljuk sultan at Konya awarded him lands around the small settlement of Söğüt, north-west of modern Eskişehir (Dorylaeum), with the right to summer pastures for his flocks in the highlands south-west of Söğüt. If the only artefact which has come down to us from the time of Osman – an undated coin – is genuine, it suggests that Ertuğrul was an historical personage, for it bears the legend ‘Minted by Osman son of Ertuğrul’.11 And since the minting of coins was a prerogative accorded in Islamic practice – as in western – only to a sovereign, it indicates Osman’s pretensions to be a princely ruler rather than a mere tribal chief, demonstrating that he had accumulated sufficient authority to challenge Ilkhanid claims to suzerainty over him and his people: the Turcoman emirates did not mint coins in the names of their own emirs while they remained under the nominal suzerainty of the Ilkhanids. The oldest surviving dated Ottoman coin is from 1326–7, however, after Osman’s death, and some see this as the earliest the Ottoman state can be considered to have been independent of the Ilkhanids.12
The Ottomans were fortunate in their geography. Osman’s lands were close to Constantinople, bringing him into contact with the governors of the Byzantine towns in north-west Anatolia, with whom he competed for influence as well as for pasture to satisfy the flocks of his followers. This proximity to Constantinople offered the promise of great rewards should that city fall, but also put the Ottomans under pressure from the Byzantine army as it sought to protect what remained of its beleaguered territory. Osman’s earliest advances against Byzantium seem to have been concentrated against small settlements in the countryside rather than against the towns. It may be that the towns were difficult to capture while the countryside offered resources which were of greater value to him and his men. The representation of this area by a contemporary Byzantine historian as prosperous, populous and well-defended is borne out by archaeological evidence.13 Even before his first datable victory over Byzantine forces in 1301, Osman seems to have assumed control of lands lying between his father’s pastures around Söğüt and İznik although he failed, despite a lengthy siege between 1299 and 1301, to take İznik itself.14
After his victory over Byzantine forces in 1301, Osman was impossible to ignore. The Byzantine emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus thought to make a radical alliance against the growing threat he represented by offering one of the princesses of his family in marriage to Osman’s nominal overlord, the Ilkhanid khan Ghazan (whose seat was at Tabriz in north-west Iran) and then, when Ghazan died, to his brother. But the anticipated reciprocal help in men and materials was not forthcoming and in 1303–4 Andronicus employed the Spanish adventurers of the crusading Catalan Grand Company to protect his domains from further Ottoman advance. Like so many mercenary groups, the Catalans turned to raiding on their own account,15 calling upon Turcoman fighters – though not necessarily those under Osman’s control – to join them in pursuit of their own objectives across the Dardanelles Straits in the Balkans. Only an alliance between Byzantium and the kingdom of Serbia16 checked this Turcoman–Catalan advance.
The arrival of the Turcomans in Anatolia disturbed the equilibrium of the older states. The administrative hand of the once-great Byzantine and Seljuk–Ilkhanid Empires did not reach with any authority into the region of uncertainty lying between them. But it was not exclusively warriors who inhabited these marches. The opportunities they offered undoubtedly attracted adventurers, but also people who followed the frontier simply because they had nowhere else to go. The milieu of these frontier lands where the Ottoman state had its beginnings has been described as:
. . . criss-crossed by overlapping networks of nomads and seminomads, raiders, volunteers on their way to join military adventurers, slaves of various backgrounds, wandering dervishes, monks and churchmen trying to keep in touch with their flock, displaced peasants and townspeople seeking refuge, disquieted souls seeking cure and consolation at sacred sites, Muslim schoolmen seeking patronage, and the inevitable risk-driven merchants of late medieval Eurasia.17
The presence of dervishes, or Muslim holy men, was one of the most striking features of the marches. Like Christian monks, some wandered the countryside while others lived in communities of their adherents and their deeds and piety were recounted in epics and hagiographies which formed part of a long oral tradition. The links of the first Ottoman rulers with dervishes are attested to by the earliest extant document of the Ottoman state, the grant in 1324 by Osman’s son Orhan of land east of İznik for a dervish lodge.18Such lodges, like the tombs of Christian saints, formed a nucleus which attracted settlement into new areas and were an inexpensive means of securing the loyalty of the common people; dervish lodges symbolized the popular expressions of Islam which flourished in Anatolia alongside the Sunni Islam of Seljuk imperial culture. Osman may not himself have been well versed in the ways of Sunni Islam, but Orhan adopted its forms for the foundations of his state: theological colleges were built during his lifetime19 to promote the learned form of religion to which he aspired, and the language and style of the 1324 land-grant document show that his administrators were thoroughly familiar with classical Islamic chancery practice.20 The Ottoman sultans who followed Orhan were invariably affiliated to one of the dervish orders: coexistence and compromise between different manifestations of religious belief and practice is one of the abiding themes of Ottoman history.
Many dervish lodges were founded in north-west Anatolia. But the fluid conditions of the marches attracted the restless energies of dervishes of a non-contemplative bent, and after the mid-fourteenth century, when the Ottomans began to colonize the Balkans, they played a particularly significant role. Dervishes carried Turco-Islamic culture with them as they fought alongside the warriors of the marches, urging them on, to be rewarded with grants of vacant land or lands won from the fleeing population.21 The variety of dervish orders is as bewildering as the history of their formation and re-formation. Among the best-known is the Bektaşi order, originally a minor sect, which later came to prominence in its connection with the sultan’s elite infantry troops, the janissaries.
The devotional practices of mosque-goer and dervish could be accommodated side by side in one building, and many mosques today associated with Sunni Islamic observance once had a wider function, as a refuge for dervishes as well as congregational prayer-hall. Indeed, the mosques built in Bursa by the second Ottoman sultan Orhan and his son and successor Murad are referred to in their endowment deeds as dervish lodges.22 The earliest surviving Ottoman structure in Europe, the public kitchen of Gazi Evrenos Bey in Komotini in present-day Greek Thrace, was built, like very many other similar establishments of the time, with small domed rooms to the side where dervishes could gather.23
Orhan’s land-grant of 1324 shows that Islam was a component of the public identity of the chiefs of the Ottoman emirate from the start, for in an indisputably Islamic formulation he designates himself ‘Champion of the Faith’, while his late father, Osman, is styled ‘Glory of the Faith’.24 No document survives to tell us how Osman referred to himself, but already in the later thirteenth century the rulers of some other western Anatolian emirates had adopted Islamic epithets for themselves – ‘Victor of the Faith’ or ‘Sword of the Faith’, for instance.25 The first Turcoman chief of this period to identify himself as a ‘Warrior for the Faith’, a gāzī, was of the house of Aydın in an inscription recording the construction in 1312 of a mosque in Birgi in western Anatolia. By the 1330s, both the emir of Menteşe and Orhan himself styled themselves ‘Sultan of the Gazis’ in inscriptions.26
The term gāzī, denoting one who undertakes gazā, meaning ‘war for the faith’, or ‘war against infidels’, or ‘holy war’ (gazā may be considered almost a synonym for jihād), had been accorded to Muslim fighters in Seljuk times and before, but did not, in the early fourteenth century, have a confrontational, anti-Christian connotation. The term was widely used by the Ottomans, and when their chronicles and poems honoured Osman and his cohorts as gāzīs the word meant ‘warrior’ or ‘raider’, but with no more religious injunction than was inherent in the incumbent duty of every Muslim to fight against infidels.27 Fortuitously, the Ottoman emirate bordered a Christian state, but there are no grounds for asserting that it was unique among its neighbouring emirates in embracing the ideology of ‘holy war’, nor does embrace of the ideology of ‘holy war’ provide sufficient account for its achievements. A recent reconsideration of the widely-accepted view that the raison d’être of the Ottoman emirate was the pursuit of ‘holy war’ has concluded that it was, rather, a ‘predatory confederacy’ comprising Muslim and Christian warriors alike, whose goal was ‘booty, plunder and slaves, no matter the rhetoric used by its rulers’.28 In this confederacy, the hypothesis continues, Turcoman fighters were in the minority: the rapid pace of conquest required willing and indiscriminate acceptance of large numbers of Christians into the Ottoman fold to meet the shortage of manpower available to create and administer the fledgling state.29
The religion of the early Ottoman Muslims was not exclusive: oral traditions which sang the deeds of the heroes of the marches recorded not only that co-operation between Muslim fighters and Byzantine Christians was frequent, but that intermarriage was not uncommon.30 That the Christian population of the north-west Anatolian marches continued to practise their religion freely is attested to in the letters of Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, who travelled through the area in 1354 as captive of theOttomans.31 Eminent Byzantines, moreover, found employment at the Ottoman court, both in Orhan’s time and into the early sixteenth century.32 Later Ottoman chroniclers, writing in a period of prolonged warfare with the Christian states of the Balkans and beyond, emphasized a religious inspiration for the early conquests of the dynasty, representing the Turcoman frontiersmen as motivated solely by a desire to spread Islam. Writing at a time when the political environment was quite different, an imperial and theocratic state of which Sunni Islam was the official religion, they attributed militant piety to these frontiersmen: it seemed appropriate to assert that it had always been thus, that the state had been created by the tireless efforts of Muslim warriors struggling against their supposed antithesis, the Christian kingdoms of Byzantium and Europe. Modern historians have too often been willing accomplices in accepting the chroniclers’ version of the Ottoman past.
By the time the story of the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire came to be written down, they were a distant memory. The early years of dynasties that subsequently achieve spectacular success are often shrouded in mystery, and later traditions greatly embellish meagre truths in an attempt to provide legitimacy. Osman was described in his own time as one of the most energetic of the Turcoman chiefs threatening Byzantium, and although he failed to take İznik, his siege of this important city and his military success over a Byzantine army in 1301 must have won him prestige and renown, encouraging many warriors to throw in their lot with him and his men. However, changing times demanded legitimization of Ottoman claims both to territory and to pre-eminence over the other Turcoman dynasties of Anatolia, and it became necessary that the personal fame won by Osman in his lifetime be bolstered with more compelling grounds for Ottoman supremacy.
Many challenged Ottoman power over the centuries and it was vital that the dynasty demonstrate its rule as the natural order of things. The legend of Osman’s dream proved inadequate to neutralize all challenges, however, and a more tangible legacy was needed to address the place of the nascent Ottoman state in the political history of the region. By the late fifteenth century popular epic was claiming that Osman’s father Ertuğrul had been granted his land near Söğüt by the Seljuk sultan of Rum himself, a claim bolstered by a story that the Seljuk sultan had presented Osman with insignia of office – a horsetail standard, a drum and a robe of honour – as marks of his legitimacy as heir to the Seljuks. A century later still, in 1575, an Ottoman chancellor forged documents purporting to be a record of the presentation of these insignia.33 Such stories addressed the question of the Ottoman right to inherit the Seljuk mantle, but Ottoman sovereignty also called for a nobler lineage than that of its rivals. From the early fifteenth century, then, in the face of competing states – the Timurids, and the Akkoyunlu (‘White Sheep’) Turcoman tribal confederation which had moved west after the wave of migration which brought Osman’s clan – the Ottomans were furnished with Central Asian descent from the Turkic Oğuz tribe and their illustrious ancestor the Prophet Noah, who was said to have given the East to his son Japheth.34 There are hints in texts that have come down to us that Osman’s family had a less than romantic past, that he was, in fact, a simple peasant. Another tradition describes his forebears as Arabs of the Hijaz, indication, perhaps, that the Ottomans at one time thought such a fictive genealogy would best assert their legitimacy.35 This claim disappeared early but the dream legend, by contrast, was repeated down the ages, even until the later years of the very Ottoman Empire it had portended.
Beyond the likelihood that the first Ottoman sultan was a historical figure, a Turcoman Muslim marcher-lord of the Byzantine frontier in north-west Anatolia whose father may have been called Ertuğrul, there is little other biographical information about Osman. But his dream incidentally provides one more detail which is corroborated by documentary evidence: early Ottoman land deeds suggest that a holy man known as Sheikh Edebali lived at the same time as Osman, and there is some evidence that Osman married his daughter as one of his two wives.36
At the heart of Ertuğrul’s lands at Söğüt is a small mosque bearing his name, and a tomb, said to have been built for him as an open structure by his son Osman and later enclosed by Osman’s son Orhan.37 However, since both mosque and tomb have been rebuilt so often that nothing of their original architectural form remains, no surviving buildings can with confidence be ascribed to Osman. Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth century, when Sultan Abdülhamid II sought to bolster his faltering regime by identifying it more closely with the great deeds of his illustrious forebears, he found it convenient to promote Söğüt as the Ottoman heartland and created there a veritable cemetery of the first Ottoman heroes. He rebuilt Ertuğrul’s mausoleum and interred his purported remains in a marble sarcophagus, and added a grave for Ertuğrul’s wife, one for Osman – even though he had been reburied in Bursa by his son Orhan – and graves for 25 of Osman’s fellow warriors.38 To the present day Söğüt remains a shrine and the site of an annual festival to commemorate the earliest days of the Ottomans.
Osman probably died in 1323–4, having secured for his heirs substantial territory in north-west Anatolia, stretching from his headquarters at Yenisehir, the ‘New City’ (Melangeia), to Eskişehir, the ‘Old City’, with Söğüt at its centre. Yenişehir was strategically situated between İznik and Bursa, two places he had intended but failed to capture.39 In 1326 his son Orhan captured Bursa and this important city became the new hub of Ottoman power. Like İznik and İzmit (Nicomedia), Bursa had for some time been isolated from Constantinople as a result of Osman’s control of the surrounding countryside; Orhan continued his father’s blockade of the city and starved the inhabitants into submission. The Moroccan traveller ibn Battuta reported that Orhan was the foremost and richest of the several Turcoman chiefs whose courts he visited during his sojourn in Anatolia in 1330–32. He further noted that Orhan never stayed in one place for long but moved constantly between the hundred or so fortresses he commanded, in order to make sure they were in good repair. When he visited newly-Ottoman Bursa, ibn Battuta found a city ‘with fine bazaars and wide streets, surrounded on all sides by gardens and running springs’.40 Here Orhan buried his father – or, rather, reburied him having moved his remains from Söğüt to this, his new capital – and his mother (who was probably not the daughter of Sheikh Edebali, but another woman). He was himself later buried here, together with his wives Asporça and Nilüfer and various family members,41 as was his son and successor, Murad, who was killed in 1389 at the battle of Kosovo Polje in Serbia. Bursa always held a special place in Ottoman dynastic memory and continued for some generations to be the favoured place of burial for members of the royal house, even after the court moved first to Edirne (Adrianople) and later to Constantinople.
In 1327 the western Thracian frontier of Byzantium was invaded by the Bulgarian tsar Michael Shishman, whose army twice came within sight of Edirne before a negotiated settlement was reached. Relieved at having been able to withstand this danger, Emperor Andronicus III Palaeologus (grandson of Andronicus II) and the commander-in-chief of his army, Grand Domestic John Cantacuzenus (later to rule as John VI), in 1329 turned to deal with the more threatening situation to the east. They met an army under the command of Orhan at Pelecanum, west of İzmit. Orhan declined to engage in full battle on the steep northern slopes of the Gulf of İzmit, but sent a force of archers to attack the Byzantine troops. Seeing that the Ottomans would not fight, the Emperor prepared to retreat; but he delayed and was wounded, his army was forced to turn to fight the pursuing Ottoman troops, and the confrontation ended in stalemate.
In 1331 İznik surrendered to an Ottoman siege begun some years earlier. Many of its inhabitants had already deserted the city for Constantinople, and seven months after its fall ibn Battuta found it ‘in a mouldering condition and uninhabited except for a few men in the Sultan’s service’.42 The loss of İznik brought it home to Emperor Andronicus that he would not necessarily be able to ensure the survival of what remained of his empire – and most critically of Constantinople – by military means, and in 1333 he demeaned himself by going to meet Orhan who was then besiegingİzmit. This first diplomatic encounter between a Byzantine emperor and the upstart leader of a new state was momentous: it resulted in once-proud Byzantium agreeing to pay the Ottomans in return for a guarantee that the Emperor be allowed to retain the little territory he still held in Anatolia.
The defences of İzmit were sound: like İznik and Bursa, it was able to withstand a long siege, and it was not until 1337 that its inhabitants succumbed to the blockade of the approaches to the city. The very length of these sieges demonstrated the strength of the Ottomans: they did not yet have gunpowder technology but they could field enough men to maintain control of territories already won, and also assign an army to remain camped outside the walls of a city over a significant period of time. The raiding tactics of Osman’s forces had been appropriate to their nomadic origins: Orhan was gradually adopting the techniques of a sedentary army sustained by a settled population.
Not only the Ottomans and the Bulgars were threatening Byzantium, however. The emirate of Karesi was almost as close to Constantinople as the Ottomans, and by the 1330s had occupied territory on the north Aegean coast of Anatolia west of a line running from the Sea of Marmara to the Gulf of Edremit. Its long coastline and access to the sea gave it a strategic advantage over the Ottomans who remained as yet an inland power. Karesi’s control of the Dardanelles Straits posed a real danger to the remaining Byzantine enclaves in the Balkans and on two occasions in the 1330s the Karesi Turcomans crossed over to Thrace with their horses and raided inland before the Byzantines were saved by the arrival of crusading galleys which destroyed the Karesi fleet.43
The Orthodox Byzantines and their Church had been branded as schismatics by the Catholic Latins since 1054; moreover the Latin occupation of Constantinople between 1204 and 1261 was still a vivid memory, and in the difficulties in which the Emperor now found himself this old rivalry flared again. Intimation that the common Christian faith of Orthodox and Catholic counted for nothing came in 1337 when the Genoese, from their trading colony at Galata (also known as Pera) across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, made contact with Orhan in support of his plans to attack the Byzantine capital. The Emperor sent a mission to the Pope indicating that he might be willing to give ground on the contentious matter of Orthodox–Catholic religious differences if help were forthcoming against the Ottomans.44 So sensitive was the issue of Byzantium’s refusal to renounce the Orthodox faith and reunite its Church with Rome, and so wide the breach between successive popes and emperors, that there had been very little communication between them for some fifty years before this approach.
The death of Emperor Andronicus III in 1341 plunged Byzantium into civil war. Emir Umur Bey of Aydın and the Emir of Saruhan had earlier helped him with their navies to ward off Latin attacks on Byzantine possessions in the Aegean and Umur Bey now took the side of Andronicus’ successor and regent for his young son, his trusted adviser John VI Cantacuzenus. Umur Bey’s growing military and naval power and alliance with John enabled him to raid into the Balkans. This prompted a western crusade which in 1344 burnt his outlet to the sea, the fortress and port of İzmir (Smyrna).45 The Ottomans also formed an alliance with the new emperor when Orhan married John’s daughter Theodora in a splendid ceremony in 1346.46
Political correctness in its most literal sense set in early among the Ottomans: their chroniclers mention neither Orhan’s alliance with the Christian Byzantine emperor John VI, nor his marriage to Princess Theodora. To have done so would have been to undermine their picture of an Islamic empire in the making. By contrast, a fifteenth-century Ottoman chronicler of the house of Aydın (which had by then vanished) did not scruple to reveal that John had had to call upon the help of Umur Bey and had also offered him one of his daughters.47 Similar fluidity of alliances between Ottomans and Christians was characteristic of the final century of Byzantium and continued once Byzantium was no more. Just as the first Ottoman warriors formed strategic alliances regardless of religious considerations, so the mature Ottoman Empire entered coalitions with one Christian state against another as realpolitik demanded. The pervasive notion of permanent and irreconcilable division between the Muslim and Christian worlds at this time is a fiction.
By the same token, as the Ottomans made alliances with one Christian state or another, so they attacked their own co-religionists and annexed their lands. Yet conquest of their Muslim neighbours in Anatolia posed a thorny problem. Campaigns against and conquest of Christian states required no justification, for these states were considered the ‘abode of war’, non-Muslim regions whose absorption into the Islamic lands, the ‘abode of Islam’, was only a matter of time. The chroniclers were at pains, however, to avoid having to justify canonically-questionable aggression against fellow Muslims, and the motives for Ottoman expansion at the expense of their Muslim rivals were traditionally disguised. The annexation of Karesi, the first of the rival Turcoman emirates to be taken by the Ottomans, is a case in point: Orhan took advantage of factionalism inside the emirate of Karesi in the mid-1340s, but the episode is portrayed by the chroniclers as a peaceful submission by the inhabitants.
After 1350 Ottoman activities began for the first time to impinge directly on the interests of European states. Between 1351 and 1355 Genoa and Venice were involved in a war over control of the lucrative Black Sea trade. Soon after the arrival of the protagonists of the Fourth Crusade at Constantinople in 1204, Venice had acquired a colony at Tana (Azov) at the head of the Sea of Azov, while Genoa had a number of colonies on the Black Sea shores, including at Caffa (Feodosiya) in the Crimea. These colonies were entrepôts for the export to the west of raw materials such as furs, silk, spices, precious stones and pearls. Orhan took the side of Genoa in the conflict with Venice, supplying both its fleet and its trading colony at Galata, and in 1352 concluded a treaty with his ally; his forces also assisted the Genoese when Galata came under attack from Venetian and Byzantine troops.48
The Genoese provided Orhan’s forces with boats to ferry them across the Bosporus,49 but it was the beleaguered John Cantacuzenus who unwittingly helped the Ottomans establish a permanent presence in Thrace. In 1352, at John’s invitation, a band of mercenary soldiers referred to in the texts as ‘Turks’ garrisoned the Byzantine fort of Tzympe in the vicinity of the town of Bolayır, north-east of Gelibolu (Gallipoli) on the north shore of the Dardanelles. Shortly thereafter, these ‘Turks’ offered their allegiance to Süleyman Pasha, son of Orhan, and the Ottomans acquired their first stronghold in the Balkans.50 The establishment of Ottoman bases in Thrace was the decisive event of Orhan’s reign and its treatment by the Ottoman chroniclers is instructive. Concerned to represent the Ottoman expansion into Thrace, of which Süleyman was the architect, as proceeding from the favour of God and Ottoman skill and valour, they conveniently obscured the crucial part played by the men of the former lands of the Karesi emirate who had fought alongside him.51
The chroniclers were not even prepared to accord the forces of nature a role in the Ottoman conquests. Byzantine sources refer to an earthquake in 1354 – two years after the initial Ottoman forays across the Straits – which destroyed the walls of Gelibolu and ruined a number of other towns on the north-west coast of the Sea of Marmara; these were then occupied by Ottoman and other Turkish forces. The Byzantine chroniclers made much of the earthquake as an excuse for their weakness in the face of a superior foe – but there is no reference to it in Ottoman sources.52
These events in Thrace precipitated the abdication of Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus in favour of his son Matthew, who ruled briefly before being succeeded by Andronicus III’s son John V Palaeologus. When Orhan’s youngest son Halil, still only a child, was captured by Genoese pirates in 1357, the new emperor became involved in delicate negotiations to engineer his ransom and release, thus bringing the Byzantines some respite: the next two years saw little advance on the Ottoman frontier. John Palaeologus, aspiring to unite Byzantine and Ottoman territories, married his daughter Irene to Halil – in the hope that Halil would succeed his father as, under the Ottoman system where each son theoretically had an equal chance of succeeding, he might have done. But the plan came to nothing, for it was Halil’s older brother Murad who took their father’s place.
Peaceful coexistence between Orhan and John Palaeologus was to prove a mirage. Orhan had intended his eldest son, Süleyman Pasha, to succeed him but Süleyman died in 1357, shortly after Halil’s capture, as the result of a fall from his horse; his steed was buried next to him in Bolayır, where their graves can still be seen.53 Murad was sent to take Süleyman’s place as commander-in-chief on the Thracian frontier and with the help of local commanders he achieved further victories, so that when Orhan died in 1362 the Ottomans had occupied much of southern Thrace and were in possession of the important Byzantine city of Didymoteicho to the south of Edirne. As the frontier moved west, so did the seat of the sultan and his court – from Yenişehir to Bursa to Didymoteicho, and then to Edirne, captured sometime in the 1360s. The lands of Karesi on the northern Aegean coast of Anatolia were under Ottoman control at Orhan’s death, and his domains reached as far east as Ankara (the capital of modern Turkey), captured from a rival Turcoman dynasty by Süleyman Pasha. In an inscription in the Alaeddin Mosque in Ankara54 dating from the year of his death, Orhan is identified for the first time as ‘Sultan’, signifying Ottoman claims to absolute power. Other emirs of western Anatolia took up the challenge and soon adopted this title themselves: Germiyan and Karaman in 1368–9, Aydın in 1374, Saruhan in 1376 and Mentese in 1377.55
The rapid expansion of the Ottoman domains under Orhan is clearly legible in the architecture of his time. The stamp of the new regime was firmest in the major cities of İznik and Bursa but some thirty mosques in the small towns and villages of north-west Anatolia also bear his name. In the cities he constructed the mosques, bath-houses, theological colleges, public kitchens, bridges, tombs, and dervish lodges that identified them as Islamic and Ottoman. Orhan also commemorated his father’s conquests by building mosques and other structures necessary for Muslim life in places Osman had conquered, and many of the buildings of his time bear the names of other figures – warriors and holy men alike – who were prominent in the success of the Ottomans. Süleyman Pasha is remembered in mosques, theological colleges and baths in the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia and others mark his conquests in Thrace, including the former church of Hagia Sophia in Vize (Bizye), which he converted into a mosque.56 Such a change of function upon Ottoman conquest was typical, especially when a town had not surrendered but had been taken by force. The resettlement of Turkish populations in the wake of the frontier warriors slowly brought prosperity to Thrace once more. The weight of the Byzantine feudal regime had long since alienated many of the indigenous Christians from the provincial aristocracy and from their masters in Constantinople, a state of affairs exacerbated by the great destruction wrought during the civil war of the early 1340s.
The Byzantine emperors at Constantinople still hoped that western Christendom would rescue them from the Ottomans who, it was clear from their expansion into Thrace, did not intend any permanent accommodation. Yet whenever an appeal for western aid was made, the same conditions were attached to the response – the Orthodox Byzantines must abandon their schismatic ways and accept the Church of Rome. What help did reach Constantinople was dictated by the political, diplomatic and commercial concerns of individual states. In 1364 John Palaeologus turned to the fellow Orthodox state of Serbia, a potential ally which was by now also threatened by Ottoman expansion; but Serbia had lost its former vitality following the death of its king Stephen Dušan in 1355, as his successors competed for power. Next John travelled to Hungary to seek the help of King Louis, but to no avail. The only hopeful sign was the recovery of the key Thracian port of Gelibolu by a Latin naval force in 1366 as the first strike in a modest crusade in support of the beleaguered Byzantines. A Byzantine embassy to Rome was followed in 1369 by the Emperor himself, who in his desperation promised to accept the Latin rite as the price of papal assistance; but the emptiness of papal assurances was soon revealed, for no help was forthcoming.
Byzantium was not alone in its fear of Ottoman encroachment in the Balkans. Following the conquest of Edirne in the 1360s the various successors to Stephen Dušan’s Serbia felt Ottoman pressure on their southern and eastern frontiers. Realizing the consequences if the Ottomans were not halted, some among these petty rulers united to field an army, but the battle of Çirmen on the Maritsa river west of Edirne in 1371 was a disaster for the Serbian lords: defeated, they became Ottoman vassals as did the three rulers of Bulgaria who fought alongside them, and all obstacles to the advance of the Ottomans into Macedonia were removed.
The expansion of the frontier was shared with quasi-independent fighters who had thrown in their lot with the Ottomans. Four such Muslim families were particularly prominent during the Ottoman conquest of Rumeli (the name they used for the Balkan peninsula): these were the Evrenosoğulları,* the Mihaloğulları, the Turahanoğulları, and the Malkoçoğulları. The first two of these families were Christian warriors in north-west Anatolia who had crossed to Thrace as the Ottoman frontier advanced and converted to Islam, while the Malkoç dynasty, properly known as Malković, were of Christian, Serb origin; the origins of the Turahanoğulları remain obscure.57
Of these families the Evrenosoğulları achieved the greatest renown. Gazi Evrenos was said to have been a former ally of the house of Karesi, and to have crossed the Dardanelles with Orhan’s son Süleyman.58 From 1361, when he captured the town for the Ottomans, he had his base at Komotini, then on the Serbian frontier, and was responsible for erecting some of the earliest Ottoman buildings in Rumeli. As the frontier advanced Gazi Evrenos moved his seat westward, lastly to Giannitsa, which he founded, and where he died and was buried in 1417.59
Sultan Murad remained in Rumeli following Orhan’s death in 1362 until in 1373 he crossed the Dardanelles to campaign in Anatolia, accompanied by John V Palaeologus, who had recently become his vassal. Murad’s son Savcı and John’s son Andronicus chose this moment to rebel against their fathers who swiftly returned home, John to Constantinople and Murad to Rumeli. Murad had Savcı and his fellow rebels killed; Andronicus surrendered and at Murad’s insistence was imprisoned and blinded. Little else is known of Savcı: the Ottoman chronicle tradition did not countenance Ottoman princes who contested parental authority – especially those who did so in alliance with a Christian prince.
The real loser, at least for a time, was John Palaeologus’ younger son Manuel. He had been designated his father’s successor soon after the revolt of Andronicus, but when the strife between John and Andronicus was eventually resolved in 1381 the succession was altered in favour of Andronicus’ son, another John. Manuel fled to Thessalonica, a Macedonian city of great significance in the Byzantine world as an intellectual and artistic centre, and there set up an independent court. This was quite contrary to Ottoman interests, and his disquiet at Manuel’s military activities against the Ottoman advance in this part of Macedonia prompted Murad to action. His commander Kara (‘Black’) Halil Hayreddin Çandarlı took Serres and other cities in southern Macedonia and in 1387, after a four-year siege, Manuel left Thessalonica and the city accepted Ottoman sovereignty – although it was not until seven years after this formal subjugation that the Ottomans, having been engaged elsewhere, removed the native Byzantine functionaries and were able to occupy the city and its hinterland and impose their administration. Soon after the fall of Thessalonica Manuel accepted that he must become an Ottoman vassal. He was punished by John V for his abandonment of the city by being exiled to the north Aegean island of Lemnos where he may have spent the next three years. In 1390 his father summoned him to Constantinople against Andronicus’ son John who claimed the throne as John VII – Andronicus had died in 1385 – but Manuel persuaded his nephew to go to Genoa to seek help against the Ottomans. Returning home in 1390 John VII was expelled from Constantinople and fled to the Sultan; when John V died in 1391, Manuel succeeded him to the Byzantine throne as Manuel II Palaeologus.60
Kara Halil Hayreddin Çandarlı was a scion of an Anatolian Muslim dynasty which subsequently furnished the Ottomans with a number of eminent statesmen. His mosque, dating from 1385, is the oldest recorded Ottoman monument in Serres.61 The various offices held by Kara Halil Hayreddin are evidence of the way the Ottoman state was evolving from its nomadic origins to become based on a core of secure territory behind the fluid frontier: Murad’s reign is as significant for its administrative developments as for the extent of his conquests. Kara Halil Hayreddin held the post of kadı (judge) in İznik and Bursa and then became Murad’s first chief justice and also his chief minister, in addition to his military command. This joint supervision over army and administration made him, in effect, the first grand vezir of the Ottoman state.62
In preparation for the siege of Thessalonica Murad transferred large numbers of troops to Rumeli, where those not engaged in the blockade of Manuel’s stronghold operated against other petty lords of this politically-fragmented region. They pushed into Epirus and Albania, and in 1386 took the city of Niš from the Serbian prince Lazar, giving the Ottomans access to the Morava river valley, which led north-west towards Belgrade and the heart of central Europe and westwards into Bosnia and to Dubrovnik (Ragusa) on the Adriatic coast. Soon afterwards, Murad’s Bulgarian vassals declared their independence of Ottoman suzerainty. Among them was John III Shishman, ruler from Veliko Tŭrnovo of the largest share of the divided medieval Bulgarian kingdom, and Murad’s brother-in-law. Early in 1388 an army under Çandarlı Ali Pasha, son of Kara Halil Hayreddin, marched through the snowy Balkan passes and many of the towns of John Shishman’s northern Bulgarian domains surrendered at his advance; they were returned to Shishman, but he was left in no doubt that he was Murad’s vassal. However, further Ottoman incursions into Serbia in 1388 met defeat in battle at Bileća, north-east of Dubrovnik, at the hands of an alliance of Bosnian princes.63
Murad seems to have assumed that Lazar of Serbia had been involved in the Ottoman defeat at Bileća, and in 1389 he invaded Serbia, apparently with the intention of punishing him before continuing onward into Bosnia.64 On 15 June Murad’s army met Lazar’s at Kosovo Polje, the ‘Field of Blackbirds’, near the town of Priština. The Ottoman force numbered some 25,000 men, the combined Serbian–Kosovan–Bosnian army roughly 16,000. When the battle ended eight hours later, the Ottomans were victorious but both sovereigns were dead. At some point during the fighting Murad had become isolated from the body of his army and one of Lazar’s commanders approached him, pretending that he was defecting to the Ottomans. Instead, he stabbed the Sultan dead. Lazar was soon captured and decapitated in Murad’s tent.65
When news of Murad’s death reached Europe, King Charles VI of France thanked God in Notre-Dame.66 But hope that this might also be the demise of the Ottomans was mere wishful thinking: Murad’s son Bayezid took command on his father’s death, and ensured his succession by having his brother Yakub killed in the first recorded fratricide in the history of the Ottoman dynasty; it is unclear whether Yakub was murdered while the battle still raged, or some months later.67 Serbia became an Ottoman vassal, obliged to pay tribute and supply troops, with Lazar’s son Stephen at its head. Bosnia remained independent, as did Kosovo, under its lord Vuk Branković, until 1392.
Although Kosovo Polje cost the Ottomans their sultan, the price paid by Serbia was far greater. Bayezid’s victory signalled the end of the independent Serbian kingdom, and confirmed the permanence of the Ottoman presence in the Balkans. Today, more than 600 years later, the battle of Kosovo Polje still figures vividly in the Serbian national consciousness as a defining historical moment. Epic poems recited down the ages dramatized and immortalized the memory of the defeat of a Christian king by a Muslim sultan in a Christian heartland. Such epics fuelled the emotions of the Christian Serbian population of the region in the terrible wars of the late twentieth century: they saw an opportunity to remove from their midst the Muslim population still, even after so many centuries, seen by many as alien. And the Muslim population as readily responds to assert its right to remain.
* The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar of some 354 days; each month begins when a new moon is first sighted. Day one of this calendar is 15 or 16 July 622 CE, the first day of the lunar year in which the Prophet Muhammad journeyed from Mecca to Medina after losing the support of his clan in a leadership struggle.
* The suffix ‘-oğulları’ means ‘sons of’ in Turkish; the often interchangeable ‘-oğlu’ means ‘son of ’.