Mehemmed II, faithful to his warlike ideas, finally died in 1481 on his way to a campaign directed against unidentified enemies who could have been the Mamluks. His death was followed by a civil war between his sons, Bayazid and Djem. The former emerged victorious and Djem took refuge with the Knights Hospitallers at Rhodes. Later, he was taken to western Europe, where several Christian powers were eager to use him as an instrument in their last effort to divide the Ottoman state. He died in Naples in February 1495. Up to that date the duty of holy war was neglected, because Bayazid II did not take the risk of launching military operations which could involve Christian states. In 1481 Otranto was abandoned.
New ideals now replaced the ideal of the holy war. Bayazid was described by contemporary authors as being different from his father, that is, as a pious monarch loving justice and respecting the holy law (sharia), while his father had largely made use of secular or customary law (of). Bayazid was considered as being sent by God to consolidate Ottoman rule in the large territories conquered by his ancestors, and to organise them according to Islamic tradition. For these qualities, Bayazid was given the surname veli (saint) by the dervishes who supported him in his struggle against Djem, and who were later rewarded with the restoration of their vakfs. Together with the tendency towards the consolidation and organisation of the Ottoman territories, there appeared another, a desire for knowledge of the Ottoman past, or, in modern terminology, a quest for an Ottoman identity. The sultan invited authors to write the history of the Ottoman dynasty and many of them responded so that several histories of the Ottomans were composed at that time.
However, war could not be fully avoided. In 1484, the sultan took the field in a region where his grandfather and his ever-victorious father had previously failed. He conquered Kelli and Akkerman, two very important harbour cities on the Black Sea, frequented by European merchants, especially Genoese. The sultan himself was fully aware of the economic and strategic importance of his conquests, as appears from a letter addressed to the Ragusans in which he described Kelli as the key and the gate to Moldavia, Hungary and the Danubian regions, and Akkerman as the key and the gate to Poland, Russia and the land of the Tatars.
After Djem’s death, riots among the janissaries in Istanbul indicated that the army needed action. Yet, because the Turkish navy had long been inferior to that of many Christian states, Bayazid gave priority to the construction of a fleet. Venetian reports, composed with anxiety, give important information about shipbuilding as well as about the activities of Turkish corsairs in the Aegean Sea and beyond it. In 1499, a war against Venice broke out and the Ottoman navy, which included several hundred galleys, defeated its enemy on several occasions. In the first year of the war, Bayazid conquered Lepanto, situated in the Gulf of Corinth, and he immediately ordered the construction of two castles in the vicinity, Rio and Antirio, to control the entrance to the inner part of the Gulf. In the following year, he deprived the Venetians of Modon and Koron, ‘the two eyes’ of the Signoria, and in the following one the Ottomans conquered Durazzo, a port constituting the primary point of departure for travellers and caravans moving inland, along the ancient Via Egnatia, to Adrianople and Constantinople.
Bayazid’s conquests, although territorially limited, were highly important. The conquest of Kelli and Akkerman meant the last phase in the effort to close the Black Sea to westerners, while the conquest of the Venetian ports, on the outskirts of the Ottoman lands, established an economic unity and removed enemy outposts. Furthermore, the revenue of the state was increased considerably through the collection of the important customs fees paid in all these ports. It is obvious that Bayazid’s targets were exclusively ports and not the conquest of land to be distributed as timars to his soldiers. He did not try to take advantage of the serious rivalries then dividing his traditional enemies, such as Hungary, Poland or Moldavia; rather he chose to fight Venice.
The acquisition of ports certainly pleased the merchant class. During the long period of peace, from 1481 to 1495, merchants, Muslims or dhimmis, were able to do good business and, consequently, to acquire power as a class. New perspectives were opened as the Black Sea became almost an Ottoman preserve. Foreigners in general were discouraged from sailing beyond the Bosphorus, and only merchants from central Europe, visiting the Ottoman Empire, sometimes came upon the Black Sea regions in the course of their travels. The highly lucrative Black Sea trade thus passed mainly into the hands of the sultan’s subjects. The merchant class was also strengthened by the arrival of large numbers of European Jews during the second half of the fifteenth century, especially after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The Ottoman administration, knowing that the newcomers were experienced in trade and banking, with connections in Europe and north Africa, favoured their establishment, so that many Jewish communities emerged in the principal ports of the Empire. One may therefore wonder whether Bayazid’s policies were planned specifically to please the merchant class, or were even carried out under pressure of that class. An anonymous Greek author of the early sixteenth century remarked that in Bayazid’s time everybody made money and spent it. As the author was a dhimmi, we are permitted to assume that he had businessmen in mind.
Shortly after 1500 social strife began in Anatolia with the strong participation of the nomads, who revolted under a religious cover, the kiztlbash movement. That revolt has been understood as a reaction to the centralising tendency of Bayazid’s administration. However, it could also be connected with the rise of the merchant class. The nomads, when moving from one place to another, often disturbed the Anatolian land routes and sometimes controlled parts of them. They collected tolls from travellers and caravans. These activities inevitably brought them into confrontation with the merchants, who wished for a greater measure of law and order.
The new tendency emerging during Bayazid days was to be crystallised in the days of Selim I, if we judge from the words of a high dignitary and scholar, Kemal pashazade: ‘My Sultan, you dwell in a city whose benefactor is the sea. If the sea is not safe, no ships will come, and if no ship comes, Istanbul perishes.’ They are in strong contrast with the words of Murad II’s vizier, Fazlullah, or Mehemmed II’s high officials who recommended the complete destruction of the infidel. The sultan was not incited to march against enemies abroad but to protect commercial vessels, belonging to both Ottomans and infidels, coming from over the sea. The inspiration clearly came from a mercantilist and not from an imperialist milieu. Nevertheless, while Ottoman policy was orientated towards trade and navigation, the world was changing rapidly. The Portuguese, having discovered new sea routes, appeared in the Red Sea, and the first signs of the decline of the Levantine trade soon became visible. The Ottomans were then to revert once more to a policy of war and conquest.