I have seen that God caused the sun of empire to shine in the mansion of the Turks, and turned the heavenly spheres around their dominion, and named them Turk, and gave them sovereignty, and made them kings of the age, and placed the reins of the people of the time in their hands.
Al-Kashgari
It was the emergence of the Turks that reawakened the slumbering spirit of jihad. They had first appeared on the Byzantine horizon as early as the sixth century when they sent ambassadors to Constantinople to seek alliance against the Persian Empire. To the Byzantines they were just one of an endless succession of peoples beating a path to the great city; their homeland was beyond the Black Sea and stretched as far as China. They were pagan steppe dwellers of the rolling grasslands of Central Asia, from whose epicenter shock waves of nomadic raiders poured out at periodic intervals to ravage the settled peoples beyond. They have left us their word ordu – “horde” – as a memory of this process, like a faint hoofprint in the sand.
Byzantium suffered the repeated depredations of these Turkic nomads long before it knew the name. The earliest Turks to impact on settled Greek speakers were probably the Huns, who surged across the Christian world in the fourth century; they were followed in turn by the Bulgars, each successive wave inexplicable as a plague of locusts devastating the land. The Byzantines attributed these visitations to God’s punishment for Christian sin. Like their cousins the Mongols, the Turkic peoples lived in the saddle between the great earth and the greater sky and they worshiped both through the intermediary of shamans. Restless, mobile, and tribal, they lived by herding flocks and raiding their neighbors. Booty was a raison d’être, cities their enemy. Their use of the composite bow and the mobile tactics of horse warfare gave them a military superiority over settled peoples that the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun saw as the key process of history. “Sedentary people have become used to laziness and ease,” he wrote. “They find full assurance of safety in the walls that surround them, and the fortifications that protect them. The Bedouins have no gates and walls. They always carry weapons. They watch carefully all sides of the road. They take hurried naps only … when they are in the saddle. They pay attention to every faint barking and noise. Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs, and courage their nature.” It was a theme that would soon re-echo in both the Christian and the Islamic worlds.
The clash of Islam and Christianity: Muslims and crusaders
Repeated convulsions in the heart of Asia continued to propel these Turkish tribes westward; by the ninth century they were in touch with the Muslim populations of Iran and Iraq. The caliph of Baghdad recognized their fighting qualities and recruited them into his armies as military slaves; by the end of the tenth century Islam was firmly established among the Turks on the frontier zone, yet they maintained their racial identity and language and were soon to usurp power from their masters. By the middle of the eleventh century a Turkish dynasty, the Seljuks, had emerged as sultans in Baghdad, and by its end the Islamic world, from Central Asia to Egypt, was largely ruled by Turks.
The speed of their rise in the Islamic world, far from being resented, came to be widely held as a providential miracle, brought about by God “to revive the dying breath of Islam and restore the unity of Muslims.” It coincided with the presence of an unorthodox Shia dynasty in Egypt, so that the Turkish Seljuks, who had chosen to conform to the orthodox Sunni tradition, were able to gain legitimacy as true gazis – warriors of the Faith waging jihad against the infidel and unorthodox Islam. The spirit of militant Islam suited the Turkish fighting spirit perfectly; the desire for plunder was legitimized by pious service to Allah. Under Turkish influence, Islam regained the zeal of the early Arab conquests and reopened holy war against its Christian foes on a significant scale. Though Saladin himself was a Kurd, he and his successors led armies whose ethos was Turkish. “God be praised,” wrote Al-Rawandi in the thirteenth century, “the support of Islam is strong … In the lands of the Arabs, the Persians, the Romans and the Russians, the sword is in the hands of the Turks and the fear of their swords is rooted in men’s hearts.”
It was not long before the war that had smoldered quietly for centuries between Christians and Muslims along the southern frontiers of Anatolia flared back into life under this new impetus. The Seljuks in Baghdad were troubled by unruly nomadic tribesmen – the Turkmen – whose desire for plunder was a discordant note in the Islamic heartlands. They encouraged these tribal fighters to turn their energy west on Byzantium – the kingdom of Rum. By the middle of the eleventh century marauding gazi warriors were raiding Christian Anatolia in the name of holy war so frequently that it became essential for the emperor in Constantinople to take decisive action.
In March 1071, the emperor Romanus IV Diogenes set out personally to the east to repair this situation. In August he met not the Turkmen, but a Seljuk army led by its brilliant commander Sultan Alp Arslan, “the heroic lion,” at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. It was a curious affair. The sultan was unwilling to fight. His key objective was not war against Christians but the destruction of the detested Shiite regime in Egypt. He proposed a truce, which Romanus refused. The ensuing battle was a shattering Muslim victory, decided by classic nomad ambush tactics and the defection of Byzantine mercenary troops. Romanus survived to kiss the ground in front of the conquering sultan, who planted a foot on his bent neck in a symbolic show of triumph and submission. It was to prove a tipping point in world history – and a disaster for Constantinople.
For the Byzantines the Battle of Manzikert was “the Terrible Day,” a defeat of seismic proportions that was to haunt their future. The effects were catastrophic, though not immediately understood in Constantinople itself. The Turkmen poured into Anatolia unopposed; where they had previously raided and retired again, they now stayed, pushing farther and farther west into the lion’s head of Anatolia. After the hot deserts of Iran and Iraq, the high rolling plateau was a landscape that suited these nomads from central Asia with their yurts and two-humped camels. With them came both the structure of Orthodox Sunni religion and more fervent Islamic strands: Sufis, dervishes, wandering holy men who preached both jihad and a mystical reverence for saints that appealed to the Christian peoples. Within twenty years of Manzikert the Turks had reached the Mediterranean coasts. They were largely unresisted by a mixed Christian population, some of whom converted to Islam, while others were only too glad to be rid of taxation and persecution from Constantinople. Islam held Christians to be “People of the Book”; as such they were afforded protection under the law and freedom of worship. Schismatic Christian sects even gave Turkish rule a positive welcome: “on account of its justice and good government, they prefer to live under its administration” wrote Michael the Syrian, “the Turks, having no idea of the sacred mysteries … were in no way accustomed to inquire into professions of faith or to persecute anyone on their account, in contrast to the Greeks,” he went on, “a wicked and heretical people.” Internal quarrels in the Byzantine state encouraged the Turks; they were soon invited to help in the civil wars that were fragmenting Byzantium. The conquest of Asia Minor happened so easily and with so little resistance that by the time another Byzantine army was defeated in 1176, the possibility of driving back the incomers had gone forever. Manzikert was irreversible. By the 1220s Western writers were already referring to Anatolia as Turchia. Byzantium had lost its resources of food and manpower for good. And at almost the same moment a matching catastrophe overwhelmed Constantinople from a more unexpected quarter – the Christian West.
The matter of the Crusades had been conceived as a project to check the militant advance of Turkish Islam. It was against the Seljuks, “an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God,” that Pope Urban II preached his fateful sermon at Clermont in 1095 “to exterminate this vile race from our lands” and set in motion 350 years of crusader warfare. Despite the support of their Christian brothers in the West, this enterprise was to prove a lasting torment for the Byzantines. From 1090 onward they were visited by successive waves of marauding knights, who expected support, sustenance, and thanks from their Orthodox brethren as they blundered south across the empire toward Jerusalem. Contact brought mutual incomprehension and distrust. Each side had the opportunity to observe closely differences in customs and forms of worship. The Greeks came to see their heavily mailed Western brethren as little more than uncouth barbarian adventurers; their mission a hypocritical exercise in imperial conquest disguised as piety: “they are indomitable in pride, cruel in character … and inspired by an inveterate hatred of the Empire,” complained Nicetas Chroniates. In truth the Byzantines often preferred their settled Muslim neighbors, proximity with whom had bred a certain familiarity and respect over the centuries following the initial burst of holy war: “we must live in common as brothers, although we differ in customs, manners and religion,” a patriarch in Constantinople once wrote to a caliph in Baghdad. The crusaders, for their part, saw the Byzantines as depraved heretics who were dangerously oriental in outlook. Seljuk and Turkish soldiers regularly fought for the Byzantines; the crusaders were also appalled to discover that the city dedicated to the Virgin contained a mosque. “Constantinople is arrogant in her wealth, treacherous in her practices, corrupt in her faith,” declared the crusader Odo de Deuil. More ominously, the wealth of Constantinople and its fabulous treasury of gem-studded relics left the crusaders open-mouthed. An oblique note of jealousy crept into the reports sent back to the small towns of Normandy and the Rhine: “since the beginning of the world,” wrote the marshal of Champagne, “never was so much riches seen collected in a single city.” It was a vivid temptation.
Military, political, and commercial pressure from the west had been building on the Byzantine Empire for a long time, but by the end of the twelfth century it had taken on a very visible shape in Constantinople. A large Italian trading community had been established in the city – the Venetians and Genoese were accorded special privileges and benefited accordingly. The profiteering, materialistic Italians were not popular: the Genoese had their own colony at Galata, a walled town across the Horn; the Venetian colony was considered “so insolent in its wealth and prosperity as to hold the imperial power in scorn.” Waves of xenophobia swept the populace; in 1171 Galata was attacked and destroyed by the Greeks. In 1183 the entire Italian community was massacred under the eye of the Byzantine general Andronikos “the Terrible.”
In 1204 this history of mutual suspicion and violence returned to haunt Constantinople in a catastrophe for which the Greeks have never fully forgiven the Catholic West. In one of the most bizarre events in the history of Christendom, the Fourth Crusade, embarked on Venetian ships and nominally bound for Egypt, was diverted to attack the city. The architect of this operation was Enrico Dandolo, the apparently blind, eighty-year-old Venetian doge, a man of infinite guile, who personally led the expedition. Sweeping up a convenient pretender to the imperial throne, the huge fleet sailed up the Marmara in June 1203; the crusaders themselves were perhaps startled to see Constantinople, a city of great Christian significance, forming on the port bow rather than the shores of Egypt. Having smashed their way through the chain that protected the Golden Horn, the Venetian ships rode up onto the foreshore and attempted to breach the sea walls; when the attack faltered, the octogenarian doge leaped down onto the beach with the flag of St. Mark in his hand and exhorted the Venetians to show their valor. The walls were stormed and the pretender, Alexios, duly enthroned.
The following April, after a winter of murky internal intrigue during which the crusaders became increasingly restive, Constantinople was comprehensively sacked. An appalling massacre ensued and huge portions of the city were destroyed by fire: “more houses were burned than there are to be found in the three greatest cities of the Kingdom of France,” declared the French knight Geoffrey de Villehardouin. The city’s great heritage of art was vandalized and St. Sophia profaned and ransacked: “they brought horses and mules into the Church,” wrote the chronicler Nicetas, “the better to carry off the holy vessels and the engraved silver and gold that they had torn from the throne and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran them through with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.” The Venetians made off with a great trove of statuary, relics, and precious objects to adorn their own church of St. Mark, including the four bronze horses that had stood in the Hippodrome since the time of Constantine the Great. Constantinople was left a smoking ruin. “Oh city, city, eye of all cities,” howled the chronicler Nicetas, “you have drunk to the dregs the cup of the anger of the Lord.” It was a typical Byzantine response; but whether the agent of this disaster was human or divine, the consequences were the same: Constantinople was reduced to a shadow of its former greatness. For nearly sixty years the city became the “Latin Empire of Constantinople,” ruled by the count of Flanders and his successors. The Byzantine empire was dismembered into a scattered collection of Frankish states and Italian colonies, while a large part of the population fled to Greece. The Byzantines established a kingdom in exile at Nicaea in Anatolia and were relatively successful in barring further Turkish incursions. When they recaptured Constantinople in 1261, they found the city’s infrastructure close to ruin and its dominions shrunk to a few dispersed fragments. As they tried to restore their fortunes and to face new dangers from the West, the Byzantines again turned their back on Islamic Anatolia, and paid an ever-deepening price.
Anatolia continued to be convulsed by seismic population shifts farther east. Two years after the sack of Constantinople, a tribal leader called Temuchin succeeded in uniting the feuding nomads of inner Mongolia into an organized war band and received the title Genghis Khan – the Universal Ruler. The long-haired, sky-worshiping Mongols descended on the Islamic world with terrifying ferocity. As chaos enveloped Persia, a further tidal wave of displaced people streamed west into Anatolia. The continent was a melting pot of ethnic destinies: Greek, Turkish, Iranian, Armenian, Afghani, Georgian. When the Mongols defeated its most coherent principality, that of the Seljuks of Rum, in 1243, Anatolia collapsed into a mosaic of small kingdoms. The wandering Turkish tribes had nowhere farther west to migrate; there were no infidel neighbors left to provide legitimate Islamic conquests. Where they met the sea, some acquired fleets and raided Byzantine coastal territories. Others fought among themselves. Anatolia was chaotic, fragmented, and dangerous – a wild west of raiders, plunderers, and religious visionaries, inspired by a combustible mixture of mystical Sufism and orthodox Sunnism. The Turkmen still rode the long horizons in their deep embroidered saddles, seeking plunder and perpetual motion in the gazi tradition, but now only one insignificant kingdom, the tribe of Osman, still touched the infidel lands of Byzantium in northwestern Anatolia.
No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making. Legend tells that Osman was always destined for greatness. One night he fell asleep and had a dream, in which he saw Constantinople, which, “situated at the junction of two seas and two continents, seemed like a diamond mounted between two sapphires and two emeralds, and appeared thus to form the precious stone of the ring of a vast dominion which embraced the entire world.” Osman took upon himself the mantle of the gazis, which his tribe was poised to exploit. Luck and quick-wittedness in equal measure were to transform the realm of Osman from a tiny principality to the world power of the dream.
The domain of Osman, in northwestern Anatolia, directly confronted the Byzantine defensive perimeter that guarded Constantinople. Facing unconquered infidel land, it became a magnet for gazis, adventurers, and land-hungry refugees who wanted to try their luck under his command. Osman ruled as a tribal leader in touch with his people. At the same time the Ottomans had a unique opportunity to study the neighboring Byzantine state and to imitate its structures. The tribe learned literally “on the hoof,” absorbing technologies, protocols, and tactics at an extraordinary rate. In 1302 Osman won a first victory over the Byzantines that brought prestige and recruits to his cause. Pushing forward against the crumbling imperial defenses, he managed to isolate the city of Bursa; lacking the technology for sieges, it took a patient seven years of blockade before his son Orhan captured the city in 1326 and secured a capital for his small kingdom. In 1329 Orhan defeated the emperor Andronikos III at Pelekanos, ending all Byzantine attempts to support its remaining Anatolian cities. They fell in quick succession – Nicaea in 1331, Nicomedia in 1337, Scutari the following year. Muslim warriors were now able to ride their horses to the sea’s edge on their own lands and look out across the Bosphorus at Europe. On the far side they could make out Constantinople: the marching line of its sea walls, the enormous dome of St. Sophia, imperial banners fluttering from turrets and palaces.
As they advanced, the conquerors smoothed the Greek place-names of captured cities to the vowel harmonies of Turkish. Smyrna became Izmir; Nicaea – home of the Nicene Creed – Iznik; Brusa shifted consonants into Bursa. Constantinople, though the Ottomans would continue to refer to it officially by the Arabic name Kostantiniyye, evolved in everyday Turkish into Istanbul by a mutation that is still unclear. The word may be a simple corruption of Constantinople, or it could be derived quite differently. Greek speakers would refer to Constantinople familiarly as polis, the city. A man going there would say he was going “eis tin polin” – “into the city” – which could have been interpreted by Turkish ears as Istanbul.
The tombs of Osman and Orhan at Bursa
The speed of the Ottoman advance seemed as providential as that of the Arabs seven centuries earlier. When the great Arab traveler Ibn Battutah visited Orhan’s principality in 1331, he was impressed by the restless energy of the place: “It is said that he has never stayed for a whole month in any one town. He fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege.” The early Ottomans styled themselves as gazis; they wrapped the title of warriors of the Faith around them like the green flag of Islam. Soon they were sultans too. In 1337 Orhan set up an inscription in Bursa, styling himself “Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Gazis, Gazi, son of the Gazi, marquis of the horizons, hero of the world.” It was indeed a new heroic age of Muslim conquest, and it quickened the pulse of militant Islam. “The Gazi is the sword of God,” wrote the chronicler Ahmeti around 1400, “he is the protector and refuge of the believers. If he becomes a martyr in the ways of God, do not believe that he has died – he lives in beatitude with Allah, he has eternal life.” The conquests aroused wild expectations among the free-riding nomadic raiders and the dervish mystics in tattered cloaks who traveled with them across the dusty roads of Anatolia. The air was thick with prophecy and heroic song. They remembered the Hadith about conquering Constantinople and the legends of the Red Apple. When the emperor John Cantacuzenos invited Orhan’s war band across the Dardanelles in the 1350s to help in the interminable civil wars of the Byzantine state, Muslims set foot in Europe for the first time since 717. When an earthquake wrecked the walls of Gallipoli in 1354, the Ottomans promptly declared it to be a sign from God to the Muslims and occupied the town. A steady stream of fighters and holy men followed them into Europe. In 1359 an Islamic army appeared outside the city walls for the first time in 650 years. A note of millennial prophecy crept into the atmosphere. “Why have the Gazis appeared at the last?” asked Ahmeti. “Because the best always comes at the end. Just as the definitive prophet Muhammad came after the others, just as the Koran came down from heaven after the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospels, so also the Gazis appeared in the world at the last.” The capture of Constantinople must have seemed a dream on the edge of possibility.
The speed of the Ottoman advance seemed nothing short of miraculous – as if ordained by God. By geography, custom, and luck, the Ottomans were best placed to prosper from the disintegration of the Byzantine state. The early sultans, living close to their men and to nature, were attentive to circumstance and possibility in the shifting political environment around them. Where the Byzantines were hidebound by a thousand years of ceremony and tradition, the Ottomans were quick-witted, flexible, and open. The laws of Islam required mercy to conquered peoples, and the Ottomans ruled their subjects with a light hand that seemed frequently preferable to European feudalism. No attempt was made to convert Christians, who formed the bulk of the population, to Islam – in fact it was largely thought undesirable by a dynasty with a taste for empire. Under sharia law it was not possible to tax Muslims as heavily as infidels, though in any case their burden was not heavy. The peasants of the Balkans welcomed release from the weightier yoke of feudal servitude. At the same time the Ottomans had built-in dynastic advantages for themselves. Unlike other Turkish principalities, the early sultans never divided the succession of the kingdom; nor did they designate a successor. All sons were groomed to rule, but only one could take the throne – a method that seemed brutally designed to ensure the survival of the fittest. Most startling of all for Westerners, they paid no attention to succession through marriage. Where the Byzantine emperors, like all the ruling houses of Europe, went to exhaustive lengths to secure dynastic marriages and legitimate succession through approved bloodlines, the Ottomans hardly bothered. A sultan’s father would naturally be the previous sultan, but his mother might be a concubine or a slave, possibly not a born Muslim, and from one of a dozen subject peoples. This genetic inclusiveness was to provide the Ottomans with extraordinary resources.
Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army. The enthusiastic bands of gazi warriors were too undisciplined to fulfill the now growing ambitions of the Ottoman sultans; besieging well-defended cities required patience, methodology, and a particular set of craft skills. Toward the end of the fourteenth century Sultan Murat I formed a new military force, comprised of slaves captured from the Balkan states. A levy of Christian youths was taken at regular intervals, converted to Islam, and taught Turkish. Removed from their families, these new recruits owed their loyalty only to the sultan. They were his private force: the “slaves of the Gate.” They were organized into infantry units, the Yeni Cheri or Janissaries, and the cavalry, which together comprised the first professional paid army in Europe since the time of the Romans. It was to play a critical role in the development of the Ottoman state. This was a custom drawn straight out of the Ottomans’ own history: the Turks themselves had been enrolled as military slaves at the frontiers of the Islamic world. It had been their passport to advancement. But to Christians watching the process from afar, it evoked rigid horror: with different images of slavery, the prospect of turning captured Christian children against Christians was fiendish and inhuman. It was to form a powerful ingredient in the myth of the Savage Turk.
This notion of “the Turk” was seized on early in the West. It was largely a European construct, a term matched to Western identities that was hardly used by the Ottomans. They considered it derogatory. Instead, they chose titles that were neither ethnic nor territorial and reflected both their nomadic heritage, unconfined by fixed territories, and its multiethnic composition. Identity was primarily religious: the Ottoman sultans came to describe themselves in increasingly ornate terms as Lords of Islam, their empire as the Refuge of the Faith or the Defended Lands, their people as either Muslims or Ottomans. The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.
The double-headed eagle of the House of Palaiologos
The rising arc of the Ottomans was mirrored by a corresponding and unhalted decline in the fortunes of Byzantium. The factors that went to make the years after 1300 “the calamitous century” in Europe played out in the eastern empire too. Fragmentation, civil war, population decline, and impoverishment stalked Constantinople. There were telling symbolic moments. In 1284, the emperor Andronikos took the suicidal decision to abolish the imperial navy. The workless sailors defected to the Ottomans and helped them build a fleet. Sometime around 1325 the emperors of the House of Palaiologos adopted the double-headed eagle as their emblem; it did not, as has sometimes been supposed, represent a mighty empire that looked both east and west, but rather symbolized a division of authority between two quarrelsome emperors of the same family. The eagle was prophetic. The years 1341 to 1371 were wracked by a ruinous sequence of civil wars, invasion of imperial territory by both the Ottomans and the powerful Serbian state, religious controversy, and plague. Constantinople was the first European city to experience the Black Death: rats that scurried up the gangplanks in the Black Sea port of Kaffa jumped ship there in 1347. The population shrank to little more than 100,000. A series of earthquakes devastated Constantinople – the dome of St. Sophia collapsed in 1346 – and the city “of pure gold” became increasingly destitute and forlorn, its inhabitants prone to religious pessimism. Travelers to the city remarked on the melancholy appearance of the place. Ibn Battutah saw not a city, but thirteen villages separated by fields. When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited, he found even the emperor’s palace “in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot,” before adding with true Christian charity, “which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.” The city was shrinking inside its walls like an old man in the clothes of his youth, and its emperors were paupers in their own house. At the coronation of the emperor John VI Cantacuzenos in 1347, observers noticed that the crown jewels were made of glass, the banqueting plates of clay and pewter. The golden dishes had been sold to pay for civil war; the jewels pawned to the Venetians – they were in the treasury of St. Mark’s.
In this confusion, the Ottoman advance into Europe continued unchecked. In 1362 they virtually encircled Constantinople from the rear when they took the city of Adrianople – Edirne in Turkish – 140 miles to the west, and moved their imperial capital into Europe. When they shattered the Serbs in battle in 1371, the emperor John was isolated from all Christian support and had little option but to become a vassal of the sultans, contributing troops on demand and seeking permission for imperial appointments. The advance of the Ottomans seemed unstoppable: by the end of the fourteenth century their terrain stretched from the Danube to the Euphrates. “Turkish or heathen expansion is like the sea,” wrote the Serbian, Michael “the Janissary,” “it never has peace but always rolls … until you smash a snake’s head it is always worse.” The pope issued a bull proclaiming crusade against the Ottomans in 1366, and in vain threatened excommunication against the trading states of Italy and the Adriatic for supplying them with arms. The next fifty years were to see three Crusades against the infidel, all led by the Hungarians, the most threatened state in Eastern Europe. They were to be the swan song of a united Christendom. Each one ended in punishing defeat, the causes of which were not hard to find. Europe was divided, poverty-stricken, wracked by its own internal disputes, weakened by the Black Death. The armies themselves were lumbering, quarrelsome, ill-disciplined, and tactically inept, in comparison with the mobile and well-organized Ottomans, unified around a common cause. The few Europeans who saw them up close could not but profess a sneaking admiration for “Ottoman order.” The French traveler Bertrandon de la Brocquière observed in the 1430s:
They are diligent, willingly rise early, and live on little … they are indifferent as to where they sleep, and usually lie on the ground … their horses are good, cost little in food, gallop well and for a long time … their obedience to their superiors is boundless … when the signal is given, those who are to lead march quietly off, followed by the others with the same silence … ten thousand Turks on such an occasion will make less noise than 100 men in the Christian armies … I must own that in my various experiences I have always found the Turks to be frank and loyal, and when it was necessary to show courage, they have never failed to do so.
Against this background the start of the fifteenth century looked bleak for Constantinople. Siege by the Ottomans had become a recurring feature of life. When the emperor Manuel broke his oath of vassalage in 1394, Sultan Bayezit subjected the city to a series of assaults, only called off when Bayezit was himself defeated in battle by the Turkic Mongol Timur – the Tamburlaine of Marlowe’s play – in 1402. Thereafter the emperors sought increasingly desperate help from the West – Manuel even came to England in 1400 – while pursuing a policy of diplomatic intrigue and support for pretenders to the Ottoman throne. Sultan Murat II besieged Constantinople in 1422 for encouraging pretenders, but the city still held out. The Ottomans had neither the fleet to close off the city nor the technology to storm its massive land walls quickly, and Manuel, by now an old man but still one of the most astute of all diplomats, managed to conjure up another claimant to the Ottoman throne to threaten civil war. The siege was lifted, but Constantinople was hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It seemed only a matter of time before the Ottomans came for the city again and in force. It was only the fear of a concerted European Crusade that restrained them.
The tugra, the imperial cipher, of Orhan, the first sultan to take a city by siege