The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (2 page)

P
ROLOGUE

O
TTOMANS
T
RIUMPHANT

‘T
HERE NEVER HAS BEEN AND NEVER WILL BE A MORE DREADFUL
happening’, wrote a monastic scribe in Crete when in June 1453 reports reached the
island that Constantinople had fallen to the Turk. His tone of horror was echoed in papal Rome and republican Venice, in Genoa, Bologna, Florence and Naples, and in the trading cities of Aragon and
Castile as the shock-wave spread across the continent. Only in England, where the imminent loss of Bordeaux to the French seemed of greater consequence, did the news arouse little concern.
Elsewhere there was consternation. Constantinople may have become depopulated, impoverished and encircled by the Turks; already it had been sacked and looted in 1204 by the knights of the Fourth
Crusade; but, in a medieval society increasingly conscious of its classical heritage, there lingered an idealized concept of Byzantium as the Christian legatee of Graeco-Roman civilization. Dismay
was heightened by a sense of guilt. Emperor Constantine XI had called for armed support against the Muslim enemy. He received only negligible aid, together with the prospect of a coming unity
between the Latin and Greek churches.

But Constantinople was doomed to fall. Only a massive relief expedition, together with diversionary assaults elsewhere around the Ottoman frontiers, might have saved it. Soon after sunrise on
Tuesday 29 May 1453 the Sultan’s troops found a way through a small gate in the unassailable walls at the Kerkoporta. By sunset what remained of the pillaged city lay in their hands.
Constantine XI Dragases, eighty-sixth Emperor of the Greeks, perished fighting in the narrow streets beneath the western walls.
After more than eleven hundred years there
would be no more Christian Emperors in the East.

When Sultan Mehmed II rode his grey into Constantinople late that Tuesday afternoon he went first to St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, taking the basilica under his protection before
ordering its conversion into a mosque. Some sixty-five hours later he returned there for the ritual Friday midday prayers. The transformation was symbolic of the Conqueror’s plans. Yet so,
too, was his insistence on ceremonially investing a learned Orthodox monk to fill the vacant Patriarchal throne. For Mehmed sought continuity; the ‘dreadful happening’ was, for him,
neither a terminal end of a world empire nor a new beginning for the Sultanate.
¹
He was to appropriate more than Christian altars for the service of
Islam. The laws of the Byzantine Emperors served as a model for the codification he initiated. Significantly, he added to his titles
Rum
Kayseri
(Roman Caesar), proclaiming himself
heir to the imperial tradition which once encompassed the shores of the Mediterranean and beyond. There had been Arab empires in the Middle East but these proved transient creations. In seeking to
restore Constantinople to its old greatness Mehmed the Conqueror affirmed his belief in the permanence of the Ottoman Empire by giving the Turks a capital city in European ‘Rumelia’
which looked out across the narrow waterway towards the Anatolian highlands, whence they had come.

Originally the Turks were nomadic horsemen from Central Asia who embraced Islam in the ninth century. Under the Seljuk leader Tugrul they captured Baghdad, home of the earliest caliphate, eleven
years before William of Normandy invaded England. The first major victory of Seljuk Turks over Christians followed in 1071, when a Byzantine army was defeated near Lake Van. Subsequently the
Seljuks established a Sultanate, with its capital at Konya, on the site of the Greek city of Iconium. This Seljuk Sultanate survived until the first years of the fourteenth century, battered by
pagan Mongol hordes. Local rulers then carved out principalities for themselves. Among them was Osman of Sö
üt, a settlement near modern Eskisehir in western
Anatolia. His dynasty became known as the ‘Osmanli’ in Turkish and ‘Othman’ in Arabic, which was corrupted into ‘Ottoman’ in the languages of western
Europe. Osman died in 1326 when his army was besieging the Byzantine city of Brusa (Bursa today), which was captured by his son and successor, Orhan. Brusa thus became the first
effective capital of an Ottoman Sultanate which survived until 1922, although the city was succeeded as capital by Adrianople (now Edirne) in about 1364 and, some ninety years later, by present-day
Istanbul.

The Ottoman Turks crossed the narrow Dardanelles into Europe in 1345 at the invitation of Emperor John V Paleologus, who sought their military aid against a usurper. So formidable were the
Turkish horsemen that they speedily made vassals of the Bulgars and Serbs, consolidating their Balkan gains by a decisive victory over the southern Slavs in June 1389 at Kossovo. As early as 1366
the rapid growth of Islamic power in south-eastern Europe had led Pope Urban V to proclaim a crusade, but the Ottoman advance seemed irresistible. The ‘Turks’—as the multiracial
subjects of the Sultan were collectively misnamed in Central and Western Europe—were soon feared as ‘wild beasts’ and ‘inhuman barbarians’, much as the
‘Norsemen’ had been in the age of the Vikings. Even before the fall of Constantinople the Ottomans had penetrated deeply into Europe, mounting devastating raids across the farmland of
southern Hungary. They were checked by János Hunyadi in Transylvania in 1442 and outside Belgrade in 1456, but seventy years later the full weight of the Ottoman armies was concentrated in
Central Europe. At Mohács, on 29 August 1526, Sultan Suleiman I inflicted a terrible defeat on the Magyars: 24,000 dead were buried on the battlefield; 2,000 prisoners were massacred;
thousands more were carried back as slaves to Constantinople.

Suleiman the Magnificent, tenth Ottoman Sultan and the fourth to take up residence in the conquered city, is historically the best known of all Turkey’s rulers. His reign—from 1520
to 1566, the longest of any Sultan—marks the apogee of the Ottoman Empire. He was a splendid show-pageant prince, like his near contemporaries in the West, Henry VIII of England and Francis I
of France (who formed an anti-Habsburg alliance with the Sultan). The Turks remember Suleiman primarily as a lawgiver who was also a poet and scholar and a patron of the arts; fittingly, his
permanent monument is the Suleimaniye mosque complex which Mirman Sinan, the finest of Ottoman architects, built on the hillside looking out across
the Golden Horn. Above all,
Suleiman was a
ghazi
warrior, a soldier victorious on the Tigris as well as on the Danube, the conqueror of Belgrade, Buda and Rhodes. He ruled directly over much of southern Russia, over
Transylvania, Hungary and the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and most of modern Iraq, Kuwait and the western shore of the Gulf. He was protector of Jerusalem and the Muslim holy
places in modern Saudi Arabia and the overlord of Aden, the Yemen and all the North African coast from the Nile delta to the foothills of the Atlas Mountains.

Suleiman was more than a secular potentate. As
de facto
Caliph, he possessed a spiritual primacy among Muslim princes. He may also have been
de jure
Caliph; for the Caliphate,
first held by the rulers of Baghdad and re-established in Egypt, had long been in eclipse. When Suleiman’s father, Sultan Selim I, captured Cairo in 1517 the last Abbasid Caliph became an
Ottoman pensionary, and he is said to have transferred the shadow dignity to his new sovereign.
²
This may well have been mere legend; no Sultan claimed
the caliphate
de jure
until the Ottoman Empire was in decline. But Suleiman and his heirs certainly possessed authority in the Muslim world; the Sherif of Mecca had sent Selim the keys of
Medina and Mecca, placing the Holy Cities—and the pilgrim routes serving them—under his protection. On the other hand, the Sultans’ religious authority was never acknowledged by
zealous Shi’ites in Persia and Mesopotamia. Their divinely guided leaders claimed descent from Ali ibn Ab’Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law (whose shrine is in the modern
Iraqi city of Najaf).

The Ottoman Empire was, in origin, a military institution dedicated to fulfilling the sacred obligation of extending the ‘Abode of Islam’ by conquering the lands of the unbelievers.
Even before the fall of Constantinople the warrior Sultans had begun to bolster their personal despotism by developing a system under which selected Christian-born slaves, converted to Islam,
became an imperial bodyguard. From within this priviliged caste the Sultans came to find most of their ministers (viziers) and military commanders (
agas
). Suleiman I completed the work of
Mehmed II in modifying this machine, geared for continous frontier war, into an imperial administration run by personal slaves through what were, in effect, armies of occupation.

‘Whoever assaults the Turk must be prepared to meet his united forces . . . because those near the ruler’s person, being all slaves and dependent, it will be
more difficult to corrupt them.’ This grudging admiration for Ottoman rule in Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, written shortly before Suleiman’s accession, points shrewdly to the
basic source of strength in the imperial autocracy.
³
It could not function without total reliance on ‘those near the ruler’s person’.
For the efficient administration of his empire a strong Sultan could turn confidently to the
divan-i hümayun
(a council of ministers, and a court of law) and especially to his chief
minister, the Grand Vizier, who was generally the most privileged of imperial slaves. But within this centralized state, the Sultan also had to depend on the loyalty of each governor
(
beylerbey
or, later,
vali
) whom he appointed to a province (
beylerbik
or vilayet). Beneath the governor would be several beys, heads of each county (
sanjak
) in the
province. Rank was shown by the title of Pasha accorded to governors and symbolized by the bestowal of ceremonial horsetails: one to a bey; two to a governor; three to the Grand Vizier; four to the
Sultan himself.