Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923

Highlights

Page 264

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.

Page 302

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.

Page 387

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.

Page 497

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 besieging İzmit. 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.

Note: Beginning of the end

Page 501

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.

Note: Not every raiding tribe is capable of making the transition.

Page 526

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.

Note: But the fiction of irreconcilable enmity between the two religions is perpetuated by naive reading of contemporary writing. We take the image they’re trying to project at face value. Of course the pious ottomans would never make an alliance with the Christian’s

Page 557

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

Page 616

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.

Page 837

When they came to write the story of Bayezid’s defeat at Ankara, the chroniclers sought explanations for the disaster which had befallen the Ottomans. The fifteenth-century chronicler Aşıkpaşazade held Bayezid responsible for the defeat, branding him a debauchee – a view with which the Sultan’s contemporaries concurred26 – and blaming his Serbian wife for encouraging him to drink; he also criticized Bayezid’s vezir Çandarlı Ali Pasha for consorting with holy men whose religious credentials were suspect.27 Tamerlane’s victory was sufficiently humiliating, but for later generations, the greatest cause for regret was the struggle that ensued among the sons of Bayezid as they vied to succeed him. With Prince Musa and possibly also Prince Mustafa in Tamerlane’s hands following the battle at Ankara, Süleyman, Mehmed and İsa acted immediately to find allies to support their individual claims to the throne. Another son, Prince Yusuf, took refuge in Constantinople, converted to Christianity and was baptized Demetrius.28 For the next twenty years civil war brought turmoil and suffering on an unprecedented scale to the Ottoman state.

Note: Yes it was the alcohol what done it

Page 922

Cüneyd was appointed governor of Nikopol on the Danube, site of Sultan Bayezid’s victory against the Crusaders in 1396.42 The appointment of former rebels to posts in the service of the state was a leitmotif of Ottoman administrative practice from these early times. The Ottomans found it more politic to conciliate defeated local lords – and, later, overly independent state servants – with a share in the rewards of government than to kill them and risk fomenting further unrest among their partisans.

---