130

The Ottomans or Osmanlis

Late seventh century to 1342/late thirteenth century to 1924

Original nucleus in north-western Anatolia, subsequently rulers of an empire embracing all Anatolia, the Balkans and the Arab lands from Iraq to Algeria and southwards to Eritrea

The beginnings of the Ottomans are shrouded in legend, and few firm historical facts are known before 1300. Numismatic evidence now seems to show that Ertoghrul actually existed, but the name ‘Uthmān or ‘Othmān, which gave its designation to the dynasty, may well be an adaptation to the prestigious name of the third Rightly-Guided Caliph (see above, no. 1) from an originally Turkish name like Atman. According to one tradition, the family stemmed from the Qayi clan of the Oghuz and led a nomadic group in Asia Minor. Whatever their exact origins, they were clearly part of the prolonged wave of Turkmens who came in from the east and gradually pushed the Byzantines back. The Ottomans had been loosely attached to the Seljuq sultans of Konya, but the appearance in Anatolia of the Mongol Il Khānids and the consequent decline of the Seljuqs during the later thirteenth century probably impelled various Turkmen groups to move westwards into the remaining lands in north-western Asia Minor of the Byzantines, who had been desperately weakened by the Latin occupation of Constantinople. An older view, embodying the views of the Austrian scholar Paul Wittek, was that the Ottomans, whose lands were in the classical Bithynia (the later Ottoman province of Hüdavendigâr (Khudāwendigār)), acquired a particular dynamism from their role there as frontier ghāzīs, so that this superior élan and zeal for the spreading of the Islamic faith enabled them eventually to triumph over all the other beyliks of Anatolia and to put an end to the Byzantine empire. But the Ottomans seem rather to have been just the most successful of several beyliks of Turkmen origin established in western Anatolia and involved in the intricate politics of the region, inspired more by secular love of plunder than by Islamic fervour.

At all events, they were able to expand against the Greeks and Italians of the Aegean and Marmara seas region, and from a base at Gelibolu or Gallipoli, captured in 755/1354, the Ottomans began the conquest of south-eastern Europe, taking advantage of the disunity of the Balkan Slavs and the religious emnities there of Orthodox and Catholics. Soon they had overrun a large part of the Balkans, and these conquests were eventually formed into the province of Rūmeli or Rumelia. Indicative of the Ottomans’ new concentration on Europe rather than on Asia was the removal of their capital from Bursa to Edirne or Adrianople in 767/1366. Militarily, they came to depend less and less on their Türkmen followers, whose religious sympathies were often heterodox. There arose a feudal cavalry element which was allotted estates off which to live, but most important in creating an image for Christian Europe of Ottoman ferocity and invincibility were the Janissaries (Yeñi Cheri ‘New Troops’), who were recruited from the children of the subject Christian population of the Balkans, converted to Islam and trained as an élite military force. In 796/1394, Bāyazīd I secured from the fainéant‘ Abbāsid caliph in Cairo, al-Mutawakkil I (see above, no. 3, 3), the title of Sultan of RüBm, thereby formally making himself heir to the Seljuqs in Anatolia; but his Asiatic empire was suddenly shattered by the onslaught of Tīmūr and his Turco-Mongol forces, who defeated the sultan at Ankara in 805/1402. Tīmūr restored many of the beyliks recently swallowed up by Bāyazīd, and it was some decades before the Ottoman empire in Anatolia was reconstituted, the Qaramānids (see above, no. 124) being the last major rival to be absorbed; meanwhile, Muḥammad II the Conqueror had finally captured Constantinople in 857/1453.

The sixteenth century was the golden age of the empire. In 922–3/1516–17, Salīm I the Grim conquered Syria and Egypt from the decadent rule of the Mamlūks; after the victory of Mohács in 932/1526, Sulaymān the Magnificent brought most of Hungary under Turkish rule for over a century and a half; footholds were secured in southern Italy, and corsair principalities established in Tunis and Algiers. On the eastern borders, the Shī‘ī ṣafawids, bitter rivals of the Ottomans (see below, no. 148), were defeated at Chāldirān in north-western Azerbaijan in 920/1514 and Azerbaijan itself invaded; in the Indian Ocean, Turkish naval forces operated from South Arabian bases against the incoming Portuguese.

The Ottomans ruled over a multi-ethnic empire, and at the peak of their strength they maintained an attitude of detached tolerance towards the millets or religious and ethnic minorities within their lands, so that Jews, for instance, resorted thither from persecution in Christian Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula. It was only towards the end of the seventeenth century that the tide began to turn definitely against the Turks in eastern Europe. They had failed to take much advantage of the European powers’ preoccupation with the Thirty Years’ War, and their only major success at this time was the capture of Crete from Venice. Yet the Ottomans were only just repulsed from Vienna in 1094/1683, and the losses of Hungary and Transylvania still left them in control of the Slav, Greek, Albanian and Rumanian parts of the Balkans. European political and diplomatic divisions and jealousies masked the Ottomans’ decline and preserved their empire for two more centuries, at a time when European technical skills had by then given them a clear military and naval superiority. The sultans endeavoured tentatively to modernise their forces, but it was not until 1241 /1826 that Maḥmūd II was able to break the power of the Janissaries, by now an undisciplined force hostile to all military reform. Economically, the Turkish and Arab lands began to suffer from the competition of western manufactured goods and superior commercial techniques; indigenous production declined, internal sources of revenue decreased and, in the nineteenth century, as the sultans contracted expensive European-type tastes, the empire at times tottered on the edge of bankruptcy.

Russian expansionism was an especial threat, for by the end of the eighteenth century the Russians had subdued the Ottomans’ allies, the Crimean Tatars (see below, no. 135, 1), so that the Black Sea was no longer a Turkish lake, and the Tsars were anxious to gain control of Istanbul and the Straits, thus acquiring access to the Mediterranean. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, the commander Muḥammad ‘ Alī became governor and virtually autonomous ruler in Egypt (see above, no. 34); the Greeks revolted and by 1829 had their independence recognised; and Algeria was lost to the French. The growth of nationalist and ethnic sentiment engendered by the French Revolution and its aftermath led the Balkan peoples to rebel against Turkish rule, and, by the end of the Second Balkan War of 1912–13, Turkey in Europe was reduced to its present region of eastern Thrace. Turkey’s ill-advised participation in the First World War on the side of the Central Powers caused the loss of the Arab provinces, so that the terms of the Treaty of Sévres (1920) brought about a major redrawing of boundaries in the Near East. Also, European powers were tempted to make claims on what was genuinely ethnic Turkish territory, and a Greco-Turkish War was provoked. All these events brought about a reaction of Turkish national feeling, one aspect of which was a weariness with the Ottoman ruling house, by now largely dominated by the European powers’ control in Istanbul; the dynasty was increasingly felt by those Turkish Nationalists who rallied in Ankara, away from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital, as a bar to progress and as inextricably bound up with the reverses and humiliations of the previous two centuries. Under the stimulus of the Nationalist leader Muṣṭafā Kemāl (the later Atatürk ‘Father of the Turkish nation’), first the Ottoman sultanate was abolished in 1922 and then, in 1924, the caliphate was ended and the last Ottoman,‘ Abd al-Majīd II, deposed and exiled.

Lane-Poole, 186–97; Khalīl Ed’hem, 320–30; Zambaur, 160–1 and Table O.

EI² ‘‘ Othmānli. 1. Political and dynastic history’ (C. E. Bosworth, E. A. Zachariadou and J. H. Kramers*).

A. D. Alderson, The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty, Oxford 1956.

Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600, London 1973.

M. A. Cook (ed.), A History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge 1976.

S. J. and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Cambridge 1976–7.

R. Mantran (ed.), Histoire de l‘empire Ottoman, Paris 1989.